Warrior
(previously issued as Doppelganger)
When a witch is born, a doppelganger is created. For the witch to master her powers, the twin must be killed. But what happens when the doppelganger survives?
Mirage, a bounty hunter, lives by her wits and lethal fighting skills. She always gets her mark. But her new mission will take her into the shadowy world of witches, where her strength may be no match against magic.
Miryo is a witch who has just failed her initiation test. She now knows that there is someone in the world who looks like her, who is her: Mirage. To control her powers and become a full witch, Miryo has only one choice: to hunt the hunter and destroy her.
Read an excerpt from the novel
Novel News
Cover flats have arrived for the reissues of this novel and Witch (formerly Warrior and Witch), moving them one step closer to the shelves.
Ordering
The new edition of Warrior will hit shelves on August 1st; until then, you can pre-order
it
About the Novel
Though it was not the first novel I wrote, Doppelganger was the first novel I sold. The seeds of its inspiration were two absolutely miniscule things. One was a throwaway line in the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show; if I'm remembering correctly, at one point he runs into a pair of twins and makes a crack about the "doppelganger special." The back corner of my mind that's constantly noting down ideas thought that word might make a good title. The other seed was a throwaway line in the musical Les Miserables, wherein one prostitute calls another "crazy bloody witch." The back corner of my mind latched onto the word "witch," and mused on the fact that female magic-users in fantasy are so often sorceresses or enchantresses or workaday mages, less often witches. Doppelgangers and witches: that's all I had when I started.
Those seeds got into my head when I was seventeen. They sprouted little tendrils and warred with the tendrils coming off another novel idea; the other novel won and got written first. But having successfully completed one 126,000-word manuscript, I was not so intimidated by the thought of trying another, and so I dived into the bits of Doppelganger I had built up, and ran with them until I hit the end, which came just before I turned twenty. I didn't sell it until some time and multiple revisions later, but nobody ever said breaking into publishing was easy.
I sold Doppelganger to Warner Books in December of 2004; you can read the saga here, in the "My First Novel" set of essays.
What's with the reissue?
Both books have done well enough (selling nearly forty thousand copies each!) that my publisher wants them to have continued life; the reissue is timed for two months after the release of Midnight Never Come, to attract new readers from that book. The change in title comes about because they wanted to redesign these two to more obviously form a pair, the change in cover because everyone agrees Warrior and Witch (now Witch) has the much more arresting image. Also, both spines will have the witch's symbol with a number on it, to make clear the order in which the books go.
Music
I have a tendency to listen to music while I write, and not only is this novel no exception, it dates back to the days when I was just getting into the habit. I'd post mp3s if I could, but I'd rather not have the RIAA breathing down my neck, so I'll have to settle for just listing the relevant music.
The major song for Doppelganger comes from the Cirque du Soleil show Saltimbanco. The fourth track, "Amazonia," is actually the second half of the novel, if you know what to listen for. By which I mean that one day I was lying on my bed, listening to music on headphones and trying to take a nap, and my half-asleep brain had one of those "whoa, duuuuuude" moments where the shape of the song seemed like a map of what would happen in the rest of the book. I don't know if what I thought up then is what I went with in the end (those Brilliant Ideas tend to slip away like mist as you wake up), but what I went with is still there in the music.
Though "Amazonia" definitely holds supremacy in this case -- yes, I really do mean I stuck it on repeat while I wrote and revised; I'm terrified to think how many times I've listened to it -- two other songs deserve mention.
One is "Ameno," a song by the group Era, which I heard for the first time on the radio while working on an archaeology dig in Israel, and for the second time while walking past a record store in the Old City in Jerusalem. I walked straight into the store and bought the CD on the spot, because the tune had blown me away the first time -- if for no other reason than because it was so different from the crap Gelgalatz usually played. It's a beautiful choral/techno piece, and stands in my mind for the fact that the witches sing their spells.
The final song, "The Eyes of Truth," is the second track from Enigma's album The Cross of Changes. Weirdly, I can only call it the trailer music for Doppelganger. (And I thought of it that way before it got used as trailer music for The Matrix, as I believe it did.) I can't list off specific shots or anything, but the bit near the end -- the dark and grand bit after the quiet bit, if you know the song -- is a trailer in my head.
Other Goodies
I hope to have more of a cover gallery to display over time (come on, foreign sales!), but for now you can have the cover of the original edition (also available in extra-large) and the cover for Luebbe's German edition, complete with umlaut. Or, if you just want to see more of the new one, I also have a large version of that.
You can read an excerpt online.
Once you've read the excerpt, you can also backtrack and read the original opening scene, which got cut in the process of revising the novel. With commentary, as to why I wrote it and eventually cut it.
Looking for more? Try the sequel, Witch.
