Guest Post

Since the publication of The Duchess of the
Shallows (http://peccable.com/duchess/),
we’ve been asked a lot of questions. One of the most interesting is why two gay
men would choose to create a heterosexual female hero. The truth is, we didn’t
create Duchess; she found us.

            Duchess
started out as nothing more than the flicker of an idea: a thief living in a
fog-shrouded and rumor-haunted city. We settled on her name – and thus her
gender – before almost anything else. She started with a couple disadvantages:
she was poor, her family was dead, and our story began just as she was being
kicked out of her home for the last eight years. And then we realized that fate
had one more difficult card to deal our heroine: being female in a culture that
favors males.

            One
example of this social inequity is seen 
in Duchess’ interactions with Ivan Gallius, a low-born smuggler who
agrees to pay off the debt of  the
widowed Lady Agalia Eusbius, in return for her hand in marriage. In Rodaas,
this means the lady must take this man as her lord and master, an arrangement
with far too many parallels in human history. Duchess resented the unenviable
position into which Agalia was forced, and we learned just how strong and
determined she was not to follow suit. The more we delved into the story, the
more it became clear that this inequity would not discourage Duchess but
embolden her…and educate us. We didn’t take the perspective of “Duchess
is a woman and this what a woman would do.” Instead, Duchess took it upon
herself on more than one occasion to tell us. It was simply not in her
to go gentle into that good night.

            And
she turned out to be one of our many teachers. We learned that in Rodaas there
are many have-nots: immigrants like the Domae, tolerated but never permitted
the full privileges of society. The beggars who make a daily sojourn to Temple
District to plead a living from their betters. The ganymedes, male sexual
objects in a society that normally reserves such treatment for women. These
people all had stories to tell, lessons to teach, and each had the full
capacity to be a hero. And we were delighted to meet them.

            We’re
now hard at work on the The Fall of Ventaris, which continues the tale
of the redoubtable Duchess, and we’re pleased to report she’s still handing out
lessons. Of course, in that process we also learn about ourselves, the
challenges we face and what it means to be an outsider. So we’re glad Duchess
found us, and hopeful that she’ll continue to show us what it means to be who
she is…and who we are.

A game is played in the
fog-shrouded city of Rodaas, and every citizen, from the nameless of the
Shallows to the noblest of the Garden, is a player or a pawn. And no one is as
he appears.



Not Minette, brothel-keeper and obsessive
collector of secrets. Not Uncle Cornelius, fearsome chief of the gang of brutes
and murderers known as the Red. Not the cults of Death, Wisdom, and
Illumination, eternally scheming and plotting along the Godswalk.



And certainly not the orphaned bread girl known as
Duchess.



Yet armed with nothing more than her wits, her
good friend Lysander and a brass mark of dubious origin Duchess will dare to
play that game for the most coveted of prizes: initiation into a secret society
of thieves, spies and rumormongers who stand supreme in a city where corruption
and lies are common coin.