With my book, tentatively named The Voices of the Plains, I want to craft a novel where the crisp, if slightly bad boy English fantasy hero is utterly removed. I want to put the heroics in the hands of a young girl and follow her into adulthood.

Let us call her Odina.

I have given Odina urges, given her doubts, and certainly bloodied her. Yet beneath that blood is not some lily white damsel in distress. It’s a dark-skinned, pointy eared tribeswoman at the receiving end of those gallant charges the poets of old so often liked to write about. I want her to feel as horrified as I do in the world, a victim of change beyond her control, the voice of a people clinging to the memories and glories of what once was…before the knights and the gunpowder came to take it all away. In essence, I want to take the time and opportunity to shift the very nature of discussion and focus in fantasy from the white, hetero-normative superman and twist it to something outside the classic box, to tear that framework down and focus upon the "other"--the characters which are, in most works, the side characters, the supports, the manic pixie dream girls of fiction. For inspiration, I have drawn heavily from Native American tales, hoping to breathe the rich culture of the plains tribes into the vibrant world of fantasy.

Who am I to do this? My name is Chris Galford and I am a writer. What’s more, I’m the author of a three book fantasy series: "The Haunted Shadows." My daytime highlight has been largely to work as a journalist, but I’ve also spent years as a freelance editor. Samples of my shorter speculative fiction have been featured in Raven International Publishing’s "A Bleak New World" Anthology, Evil Girlfriend Media and Lorelei Signal magazine, as well as received honorable mention in the e-zine Allegory and the Writers of the Future contest.