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 if anyone had bothered to ask for my opinion. I was born at an early age somewhere in the Southern hemisphere, although I was dragged to the other side of the equator by my parents when I was only a few years old and I have been playing equatorial ping-pong ever since. I began writing when I was six and, to some people’s annoyance, 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 toward obtaining a degree in English Literature. The day I finally graduated most professors in my department literally cried for joy.
Ever since I can remember I have been surrounded by books. 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, I read them myself… not to mention that I also had quite a few books thrown at me. So, under the circumstances, becoming a writer seemed to be a logical next step.
My first work of fiction was Soulless… and I freely admit it was a mess (don’t worry, that one has been fully rewritten, and the version you see listed here is the revised version, which was produced some ten years later. If you see one with a red cover, on the other hand, I would recommend that you run in the opposite direction). I followed that with 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and a children’s book (the first one of those is still technically available, though it is so thoroughly outdated that it’s not even funny any more, while the second one was deemed hopeless and nixed altogether when I did a spot of house-cleaning a few years ago). That brings us to the books I’ve written in the past four years or so.
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 might be leading us.
The latest additions are The Shadow Walker (yet another dystopian sf novella) and Horsesh*t which combines humor with a less than optimistic take on some events of human history. That one, I admit, I had a lot of fun writing, though it did take an awful lot of research.
Somewhere along the way I also found the time to translate four of those books into Spanish. Those would be Laira (which remained Laira), Scales at a Glance (which became Escalas a simple vista), The Eyes of the Dead (i.e. Los ojos de los muertos), and finally The Shadow Walker (El Caminante de las Sombras).
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 there is a fourth book in the works.
Okay, I’m done talking about myself… now I’ll shut up and let the writing do the talking.
Clea Saal 