Vivian Vande Velde

The Conjurer Princess

Ages: Teen - Adult

Publisher: HarperPrism

Status: This book is out of print and is not available,

even as an e-book. It can be found–if at all–in libraries

or used book stores.

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Book Description:

When her sister is abducted away from her own wedding, sixteen-year-old Lylene turns to magic and to a pair of thieves to rescue her.

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Where do you GET those ideas?

 

The whole thing started with a short story I wrote in 1985 called "Just Another Dragon-Slaying."  It was about a young woman named Lylene who has the magical ability to duplicate things, and she's traveling about the countryside with an enigmatic fellow who knows a lot about weapons and is more pragmatic than moral, and this of course is Weiland (probably 8 to 10 years later than the events that happen in The Changeling Prince).  In the short story, the two of them have been hired (sort of) to rid a town of a dragon (except that not everybody wants the dragon gone), so things do not go very well.  (In all of my stories that involve magic, I make sure that the magic is very limited, to make things more difficult, more interesting for my characters.  If they're too powerful, too god-like, then there's no real sense of danger.)

But "Just Another Dragon-Slaying" didn't answer certain questions:  How have two such different people ended up together?  And:  Where had Lylene gotten her magical ability (especially given that she's obviously a bit uncomfortable with it)?  These were not things I knew, so I decided to write a novel that would tell me the background for Lylene, who was the main character. 

Working backwards, I gave Lylene a problem that she needs to get help solving.  First she turns to a wizard, which is how she gets her magical ability, although not what she anticipates, and not without a price; and when that doesn't work, she decides she needs to hire a couple resourceful guys who don't mind breaking into places--Weiland and Shile.  I already had Weiland's personality from the short story and figured he was the type who would most likely work best with someone else rather than alone.

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That ended up being the book The Conjurer Princess.

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But working backwards again, I started wondering about Weiland's background:  Why is he, a brave man, so nervous around magic?  What are his regrets in life?  How had he and Shile come to be a team? 

So that's how The Changeling Prince came to be written--sort of like a jigsaw puzzle where I had the final picture (the short story) and had to fit in pieces to make me come out at that final picture.

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Normally, I don't write sequels. My excuse here is that there was a long, long time between the writing of Conjurer Princess and Changeling Prince--nine years.

One more thing I have to tell you:  I did not choose the title for The Conjurer Princess. I pointed out to the editor that Lylene wasn't a princess, but the editor thought "The Conjurer Princess" sounded better than "The Conjurer Baronness."