Please Welcome Connie Jasperson, Contributor to Swords, Sorcery, and Self-Rescuing Damsels

First of all, thank you, Shelley, for giving me this opportunity to talk about food and how it fits into the fantasy universe. After all, even fantasy characters must eat to live. But what are the foods available to them? I usually try to keep it simple so that food becomes a component of world-building.

In 2018, Lee French asked me to write a story for an anthology called Swords, Sorcery, & Self-Rescuing Damsels. In my heart, I knew it had to be set in the Tower of Bones world of Neveyah, and I wanted my heroine to be as complex and inventive as women are in reality. I had wanted to do a story featuring the minotaur soldiers of the Bull God, and this provided an opportunity to show them as human.

My protagonist is a slave, a woman whose tongue was cut out in her childhood. She uses a hand language to speak to the other slaves. In the Bull God’s world of Serende, all boys are taken to the priests at age fifteen and remade into minotaurs. Many don’t survive the remaking. Many minotaurs are left mute in the process, so all people of Serende are bi-lingual and use the hand language to communicate.

More:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2021/05...