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Eddie LaCrosse
The Sword-Edged Blonde Now Available
• Things That Flit
Above Angelina's Tavern In down-and-dirty Neceda you'll find the office of Eddie LaCrosse. He's a scruffy sword jockey who, for twenty-five gold pieces a day plus expenses, will handle any problem short of murder for hire. But if he takes your case, he'll see it through his own way, all the way, and will always do what he thinks is right.
An original Eddie LaCrosse short story - Read It Free!
Origin of The Sword-Edged Blonde
The Sword-Edged Blonde was directly inspired by three things:
- actor Tom Skerritt's performance as Captain Dallas in the original Alien;
- the song “Rhiannon” by Stevie Nicks;
- and Tia Sisk, the hot new teacher when I was a senior in high school.
Tia Tisk 1981 Tia Tisk 2007
Tia taught Family Living, ostensibly a girls-only class, and my friends Danny, David and I took it for that very reason: it's where the girls were. But I never looked past the front of the room. Fresh out of college, Tia radiated the kind of outdoorsy beauty that needs no accent or enhancement. Of course, I could do nothing about this infatuation except what lovelorn geeks have done for time immemorial: try to write something that would dazzle her.
These elements formed the original basis for The Sword-Edged Blonde, then called simply Rhiannon. I wrote it, and rewrote it, and rewrote it, for the next two decades. One incarnation even won an award in 1985. But the story never fully worked, and I would put the thing aside in disgust, trying to figure out how to extend the successful first third into the next two acts.
The answer came to me after re-reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Until then, every draft took the LaCrosse character on an exterior expedition to help his friend. Conrad inspired me to make it an interior journey as well, and suddenly I knew both the rest of the story, and the correct approach to writing it.
Finally, my editors at Night Shade pointed out that calling the story simply Rhiannon didn't capture the tone or the genre, so it became The Sword-Edged Blonde. Thanks, Jason and Jeremy!
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More Eddie
JUST ANNOUNCED!
Eddie LaCrosse will return in Burn Me Deadly, coming in 2009 from Tor Books. Check back for more information!