No more… please… stop… I confess. My name is Clea Saal and I was born on this planet, though I am not certain whether or not that would have been my first choice. I was born at an early age somewhere in the Southern hemisphere, and was dragged to the other side of the equator by my parents when I was only a few years old. I have been playing equatorial ping-pong ever since.
I began writing when I was six, and, to some people’s dismay, I haven’t stopped yet. I endured twelve years of basic education –make that thirteen, I did flunk once– and then by reason of tradition, masochism, or insanity, I went on to devote several more years of my life towards obtaining a degree in English Literature. The day I finally graduated most professors in my department literally cried for joy.
I have been surrounded by books ever since I can remember. I saw them, smelled them, chewed them, tore them to pieces, scribbled on them, heard my mother reading them to me, and, as I got a little older, read them myself. In addition to that I also had quite a few books thrown at me, so becoming a writer seemed like a logical next step.
My first work of fiction was Soulless… and I freely admit it was a mess (it has since been rewritten, nut if you see one with a red cover, I would advise that you run in the opposite direction), then came Scales at a Glance, a book on music theory which has also been revised. After that came a book on self-publishing and a children’s book (the first one of those is still technically available, though it is so thoroughly outdated that it’s not even funny any more, while the second one was deemed hopeless and nixed altogether a few years ago). That brings us to the books I’ve written in the past few years.
First there is Laira, a science fiction novella that I’m still trying to figure out whether it should be counted as utopian or dystopian. Next are the revised versions of Soulless and Scales at a Glance I mentioned above. After that came The Eyes of the Dead, yet another novella (that one is a ghost story that features some sf elements), and Homo Ex Machina, a dystopian, hard sf novel about where technology may currently be leading us.
The latest additions are Horsesh*t, which combines humor with a less than optimistic take on some events of human history, and yet another sf title, Of Shards and Shadows, which combines a novella that was originally released under the title of The Shadow Walker, and a second story entitled The Shard. Yes, I know that last part sounds confusing, but as a novella The Shadow Walker was so short that releasing its sequel as a separate volume felt almost dishonest, hence the merger.
And finally there are the first three volumes of a fantasy series: Citlalli on the Edge of the Wind, Citlalli and the Shards of Light, and Citlalli and the Wall of Shadows. Those can be read as a trilogy, though they are currently in the process of being revised (and no, I can’t leave a scab alone either), and there is a fourth book in the works.
That’s it for the English side if things, though somewhere along the way I also managed to translate four of those books into Spanish. Those would be Laira (a.k.a. Laira), Scales at a Glance (that one became Escalas a simple vista), The Eyes of the Dead (or Los ojos de los muertos), and finally The Shadow Walker (El Caminante de las Sombras, which remains available under that name).
Okay, now I better shut up, and let the writing do the talking.