About These Editions:
Author’s Note
Stephen King once wrote that writing was like telepathy. For me, when it’s really cooking, writing is like being a medium. I cease to exist and fall into the page, becoming someone else for a time. In the case of this novel, and the ones that follow it, first published with the sole Jenna Solitaire byline, that was certainly the case.
When the idea of the Jenna Solitaire story came to me, I originally intended to package the series. I had no intention of writing the books. Alas, after a few different writers tried to capture the voice, I lost patience. More specifically, I sat down one night, fell into the page, wrote the prologue and first chapter, and it was decided that I was going to be Jenna’s voice.
Of course, the central conceit of the series, that Jenna Solitaire was both the author and the main character, writing about her adventures in near-real time, was somewhat challenging. There could be no signings or publicity events that required Jenna’s presence. She did have a MySpace page (can you imagine?) and signed bookplates were arranged through the wonderful people at the Mysterious Galaxy bookstore. I practiced that signature quite a bit to get it consistent.
Jenna interacted with her fans via the web and email, which was often difficult because of one serious problem: people believed Jenna was real, that her story was real. I found myself having to answer very difficult, often deeply personal questions about other people’s lives as Jenna Solitaire, and ultimately ended up getting a lawyer to help me craft some language to use in my answers to many of them. Honestly, I don’t think we anticipated those challenges, nor do I think it could (or should) be done today.
Yet in so many ways, I understood those who wrote to Jenna, because she was real to me, too. A voice in my head that wouldn’t go away.
And she’s still there today, which is why these books are being republished. The original four books were written on a crash schedule, and some of the changes requested at the editorial and even chain bookstore level, went against some of what I thought was fundamental to Jenna’s story. Knowing what I know now, I would have written some key points differently. Yet we soldiered on and did the first four books in about a year, if memory serves. And in all the years since, I’ve never been able to quiet Jenna’s voice—she’s been with me all this time, patiently waiting for two things. First, for me to republish the original four books: Keeper of the Winds, Keeper of the Waters, Keeper of the Flames, and Keeper of the Earth. Second, to continue her story after those books were done because her story does go on, and not in the way readers of the original books might imagine.
For a long time, I did my best to maintain the fiction that Jenna Solitaire was a real person, out there in the world somewhere. But when it became clear that the original publisher didn’t want to continue the series, I outed myself. And not very many people caught on or said anything. Perhaps it was because they wanted to maintain the fiction, too. Or perhaps because people move on, especially when it comes to defunct book series. And there’s an argument to be made that I should’ve moved on, too. For many years, I did, until Kevin Anderson and I talked about the possibility of doing these titles through WordFire Press.
My original intention was to revise all four books, to account not only for changes in time, but also in the stories themselves. While Books 1 and 3 – Keeper of the Winds and Keeper of the Earth – would have needed what I would call a manageable amount of change, Keeper of the Waters and Keeper of the Earth (Books 2 and 4) would have needed very substantial revision for what I’d had in mind. I know a number of authors that are able to go back and revise their work, often quite significantly, years later. Unfortunately for me, the more I looked at these manuscripts, the more obvious it became that such an overhaul would be extremely difficult, if not impossible for me to do. Books are like tapestries, and if you pull one thread, pretty soon, the whole damn thing unravels. I would have ended up essentially writing new books. This fact, combined with my feeling that the overall original story was pretty decent, has led me to a different conclusion. These volumes will be published pretty much as they originally were, with some new cover art, and the hopes that Jenna’s fans will want to take the journey one more time . . . before finding out what happens next.
So, whether you’ve read the books before, and I’ve enticed you back into this fictional world that has been on my mind for a long, long time, or you’re new and decided to give this a whirl, I hope you find a story you enjoy. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get out of the way, and let the real writer of these tales take over.
Jenna, if you don’t mind . . . the page is yours.
—Russell Davis
Summer 2019