March to Other Worlds Day 28: Winterhaven by Gilbert M. Stack

Day 28 Winterhaven by Gilbert M Stack

For the 28th day of the March to Other Worlds I’d like to return to my own work and my fantasy series, Winterhaven. Depending on how you calculate it, I either began working on the world of Winterhaven when I was 12 or 21. Many of the ideas and concepts that became part of the book started very early, but a place called Winterhaven didn’t actually exist until I was a senior in college, and it didn’t become important to my plotting for a few years after that.

 

While I was in graduate school researching my dissertation in England, I wrote the first draft of the first novel, Winterhaven, and I spent the next two decades tinkering with it, eventually finishing the book and writing two sequels and planning many more. There have been times when the characters in this book were as real to me as people I actually knew.

 

In its largest sense, Winterhaven is the story of the last outpost of the Ardenesse who rallied to the call of their God, Vapin, and left their world to wage The War of Night in their current land. They have had their share of victories, defeats and betrayals, but now, centuries later the descendants of those original men and women think that the great deeds of their world are confined to the long past Age of Heroes. In Winterhaven, they begin to find out that they are very wrong and if my heroes and heroines survive the struggles of the first few books they will realize that the fate of many worlds will ultimately depend on the strength and courage of the last descendants of the Ardenesse and their Duchy of Winterhaven.

 

If you like solid military action, credible politics, and fascinating men and women struggling in a medieval fantasy world, you should take a look at Winterhaven, The First Snows, and The Blood of Torons.