Story of the Writing of Moonstone
I’ve been reading fantasy since I was a little girl. I grew up on Ursula K. LeGuin, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Anne McCaffrey, among many others. Some of my favorites as an adult have been C.J. Cherryh, Guy Gavriel Kay, T. Kingfisher, Neon Yang and Neil Gaiman. In particular, I’ve always loved stories of complex constellations of women: Tenar’s priestess enclave in LeGuin’s Earthsea was a favorite, as were C.J. Cherryh’s spacefaring lionesses, and the servants of Rian in Kay’s A Song for Arbonne. That fascination, in certain ways, lies at the heart of the Moonstone Covenant. That, and my great love for New York City, which is a multicultural archipelago city (even if it doesn’t have gondolas—I had to go to Venice to find those).
The Moonstone Covenant was actually born in my imagination years ago. I created some of the main characters and began to write about them, but I was in rabbinical school and busy with other things. Then, a long time later, I was living with my wife and daughter in New York City during the pandemic. Our apartment was crowded, there was nowhere else to go, and while poking around on my computer, I found the story of Moonstone. The story itself wasn’t anything to write home about, but I loved the setting and the characters. I decided they deserved a better story, and so I sat down and began to type. The story enchanted me from the beginning. I got so caught up in in that I’d write night after night till midnight or one o’clock, even though I had to get up at six, because I needed to see what happened next.
When I was writing, I had a few touchstones, places I knew the story would go. But aside from that basic storyline, I found that plotting in advance didn’t work well. My characters had the answers. When I got stuck on a particular plot point, I’d close my eyes and imagine the characters in the chapter and the time and place, and watch what they did, and the next piece of the story would come, and then I wrote that down.
I’ve come to love my four protagonists: Annlynn, the brave and headstrong warrior librarian with a legal mind, Istehar, the refugee mystic from a forest tribe who talks to trees, books, and occasionally houses, Olloise the brilliant and depressive apothecary who's dealing with PTSD, and Vasmine, the former concubine of a prince, who's beautiful, cultured, strategic, magical, and dangerous. As I created their present, I also found myself creating their past, sometimes jumping back in time to tell the story of how they all met. In my long-ago story they were friends, but I realized as soon as I started writing that they were all married, and figuring out how their relationship worked became an important piece of the plot. I imagined their opponents, and their allies. And I discovered the complex depths their archipelago city centered on a great Library, with a governing archprince, a Council, and thirteen districts each run by a different royal family, ethnic group, and culture.
The city, Moonstone, forbids magic, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Our characters set out to solve a double murder, and they end up unraveling the city's power structures and its professed historical facts. That theme—that truth can be hidden and yet is still lying in plain sight when one begins to look—has animated much of my work throughout my life.
When I began looking for a press, the press I’d been working with on other book projects—Ayin Press—asked if they could publish The Moonstone Covenant as their first fantasy novel. I’m so grateful to the whole staff of Ayin Press, and to everyone who’s given me support along the way, and I’m so excited to see where this book goes next. My daughter, who’s fifteen and a terrific writer, thinks this whole endeavor is very exciting—and so do I! Grateful to her and to my wife for being there to discuss plot, magical objects, and Moonstone fashion.
I hope you’ll love spending time in this world as much as I do.
—Jill Hammer