Tonya ('Toni' to her friends) and I met in 1982, when she was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and I was in graduate school there. We were both members of UNC's science fiction club, soon to be named "Chimera." Chimera was a closeknit group of campus SF fans, and we did all the usual fannish things--meetings, parties, outings to SF movie premiers, and so on. Fandom was not so mainstream then, nor was there an Internet to provide lonely fans with an instant community. College clubs like Chimera were the bedrock of fandom in those days.
I finished grad school in 1983. Toni took a degree in journalism not long after, but we both ended up staying in Chapel Hill to work. Toni's fiance, Greg Cook, was in graduate school at UNC by then (he's now Professor of Physics at Wake Forest University). I was working in the UNC library system and writing in my spare time. Toni was also working at UNC. She'd begun a fantasy novel but wanted help figuring out certain plot problems. We discussed it together and eventually decided to collaborate. The result was an unpublished novel, THE HELION PENDANT, about a young queen beset on two fronts by two invading armies.
PENDANT was a good, if standard kind of fantasy tale, but from the outset Toni and I were committed to using Strong Female Characters (SFCs). Even in the mid 1980s this was not all that common. Certain writers, usually labeled 'feminist' to warn off less enlightened male readers, used SFCs, but the paperback racks were still full of Conan-esque brawny heroes and carbon-copy Gandalf type wizards. Toni and I certainly didn't invent the SFC, but I don't think we ever wrote a story without one.
A Strong Female Character is not just Conan-with-Breasts, whacking monsters and besting foes in her chain mail bikini. Being a pair of intellectual geeks ourselves, we preferred characters who use their brain, not just their thews; who were courageous in spite of their fears, and who were humanistic even if they weren't human. In other words, real people in fantastic situations. We tried to hold our male protagonists to the same standard.
For myself, I've always had a weakness for Very Dangerous Females (VDFs), at least in fiction. Why should male villains get all the fun? Rest assured, writing good villains is fun.
We sent THE HELION PENDANT to a few publishers and met with polite indifference. After exhausting the top five or six paperback publishers of the day, I consulted the bible of aspiring writers, WRITER'S MARKET. There I learned that TSR, primarily a publisher of role playing games, had gotten into the book business.
Starting in 1984, TSR had issued a series of paperback novels set in their Dragonlance gaming universe. These were the Chronicles: DRAGONS OF AUTUMN TWILIGHT, DRAGONS OF WINTER NIGHT, and DRAGONS OF SPRING DAWNING, written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. The first books were closely linked to campaigns designed for the Dragonlance role playing game, but were written in such a way they could read by those who didn't know or play the RPG. The books were marketed in an unusual way--they were sold in game and toy stores alongside RPG modules. I don't know if this was a deliberate stratagem by TSR, or a stroke of luck, but the original trilogy of Dragonlance novels were enormous sellers, and still sell well today. A second trilogy followed with gratifying success, and the company found itself in the novel publishing business.
(Not everyone was pleased with the success of Dragonlance. Some old-line SF and fantasy fans disparaged the books as "gaming fiction" and "tie-in novels," linking them to products like movie novelizations. It didn't matter. Readers loved them. Lots and lots of readers.)
Toni and I sent HELION to TSR. The editor at that time was Jean Black. She couldn't use HELION, but she liked our style and asked if we could write a novel with D&D-ish overtones and situations? "Dungeons and Dragons" was TSR's bread and butter game line, so a story using D&D terms or mechanics was apropos.
Could we? Heck yeah! In sort order we thrashed out an outline for what became RED SANDS.
The term "red lands" comes from ancient Egypt. The Egyptians referred to the desert bordering the Nile valley east and west as the red lands, as opposed to the fertile "black land" of the river's flood plain. Red lands became Red Sands, and we had our title.
I am a fan of the works of L. Sprague de Camp (1907-2000), and admired his light but erudite style. Re-reading RED SANDS today, I detect a strong de Campian flavor in the plot and dialogue.
RED SANDS tells the story of a band of prisoners who escape the dungeons of the mighty Sultan of Fazir. (In spite of TSR's subtitle on the book cover, RED SANDS is not set in Arabia, or any other real place. It takes place in a medieval, pseudo-Near East, just as many fantasy novels are set in a medieval, pseudo-Europe.) The prisoners are strangers to each other to start with; a nomad woman, a young Western nobleman, the priest of a new and intrusive cult, a common thief, and a female shape-shifter. They make common cause to escape, and spend the rest of the book fleeing from the Sultan's vengeance. Magic and mayhem ensues in every chapter.
There are two SFCs in the book, the nomad woman Jadira, and the pseudo African shape-shifter Uramettu. Jadira falls in love with the young nobleman, Marix, but she's the linchpin of the group and not a damsel in distress. In an early draft, Jadira's character was male, called Jadir, and Marix was a blonde captive named Marixa. This was too conventional, so were swapped their genders. This worked out well and made RED SANDS a much better book. At the end of my days with TSR's successor company, Wizards of the Coast, I had to do a similar gender switch of two characters, with less success.
The fugitives encounter a race of intelligent bat-creatures, the pip'strelli. The name comes from the Italian word for bat, pipistrello.
The cover painting was by an excellent artist, Clyde Caldwell. The editors at TSR asked us to suggest scenes from the book as possible cover illustrations. (Not all publishers do this--kudos to TSR.) There's plenty of action in the story, but our preferred suggestion was the one Clyde used, an old-fashioned movie poster style montage of the main characters. He created a luminous painting so iconic that for years TSR used a glass matte of it as a centerpiece in their booths at conventions and trade fairs.
Toni and I at the 1989
American Booksellers' Association
trade fare. Note the Caldwell
RED SANDS poster.
Jadira is in the center, hand on sword. Left of her is Uramettu. Above the shape-shifter is the priest Tamakh. On the other side of the relentless sun is Marix with bow drawn. The cutpurse Nabul and a flying pip'strelli complete the montage. Caldwell liked to work with live models. Fellow TSR artist Jeff Easley was the model for Tamakh. Lacking an African-American model for Uramettu, he re-used the face of the woman depicted as Jadira.
RED SANDS was well received and reasonably popular. Long out of print, it turns up on Internet reading sites with generally favorable reviews. My favorite one line review of any of my books can be found on goodreads.com: "Gay for this book." In 1988 it was nominated by TSR for a World Fantasy Award, but did not win.
TSR Books, as a distinct imprint apart from Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and other TSR product lines, continued on a few more years. They published some noteworthy stuff, such as Sharyn McCrumb's comic mystery BIMBOS OF THE DEATH SUN, which won an Edgar Award in 1988 as best paperback original. In 1992 they would issue one of my oddest efforts, the anti-fantasy SF novel THORN AND NEEDLE. But that's a later entry.
RED SANDS has my name misspelled on the title page as "Paul B. Thompsom."
RED SANDS was dedicated to Toni's cousin, Kenneth Dale Carter, who died too young in 1986.
Next: A sample chapter from RED SANDS
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