About the Author

JS Groves lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri with xir partner and feline overlords. When not writing fiction, xie does photography, enjoys slow hiking, and is a student of various Western mystery traditions.

You can find links to all xir other work at xir webpage: jsgroves.com

About the Novel

The Prince’s Fighters has been trying to claw its way out of my heart for almost thirty years. The earliest versions of the story date back to high school; the really amazing thing about that is how much of those early drafts made it the distance. Serious work on the setting, Dathl’lyr: the Younger World, dates back to 2005. Again, the amazing thing is not how many of those first ideas have been left along the wayside, but how many have made it into drafts that will eventually see the light of day.

The Prince’s Fighters and the world of Dathl’lyr employ and explore a lot of “standard fantasy” tropes. I have elsewhere described the novel as a love-letter to the genre. At the same time, though, I spent a good fifteen years wondering if I actually had anything meaningful to contribute to the genre and medium. So I worked on the world, off and on. I started and then discarded several drafts. And, in the meantime, I worked on the Mundus Occultus stories and published the other novel that had been with me since I was sixteen, The Mark of the Wolf.

Inevitably, the vision grew over time. I have long argued that tabletop roleplaying games have suffered as the fandom shifted from being dominated by language, literature, and history nerds to being dominated by people who predominantly play video games and watch movies. I will redouble my offence by arguing that the fantasy genre as a whole has suffered similarly. The more literature I read, the more languages and history I studied, the more I wanted to ground my contribution in the roots of the genre: in Tolkien and his immediate predecessors, yes, but also in Homer and Hesiod and Herodotus. (I did get my degree in Classical Studies, after all.) I wanedt the world and culture of Dathl’lyr to be less grounded in the expected blend of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, but in the Hellenistic world and its neighbors. I wanted to ground the gods and religions of Dathl’lyr not in the D&D-esque US Protestant imaginary of polytheism, but in the polytheisms of the ancient and modern worlds.

The real breakthrough that made this novel possible came in 2018 or so, while working on one of the other stories set in the world of Dathl’lyr: The Twinblades and the Tomb of Ushra Mar, currently available only to Patreon supporters but to be published some time after the print version of The Prince’s Fighters becomes available. That breakthrough was achingly simple and mindbogglingly obvious: ditch the genre-typical sexism and homophobia. Those bigotries are a little less core to the genre now than they were when I was growing up, but the battle for the soul of fantasy is ongoing and too many works that share this ethos are pigeonholed out of the mainline and into YA and Romantacy. And so, having re-imagined Twinblades with two bisexual disasters instead of one and scrubbed out all the weird slut-shaming of early drafts, I was once again ready to tackle the story for which the world had been built.

I chose The Prince’s Fighters as my November Novel for 2021. I took my old outlines, and a few lines of prose that I loved so much that I could rewrite them without consulting any of the old drafts, and committed myself to victory. By the end of that November, Derrek had been revealed as trans and Khanaarre had a second romantic arc. By the end of that year, the draft was swiftly approaching 100,000 words. Two weeks later, I had quit my day job and was working furiously on The Prince’s Fighters whenever I wasn’t in the studio or promoting my jewelry online. Three unplanned major plots later, I finished that zero draft in September 2022 at around 190,000 words, and I have been editing ever since.

To those following the development of this novel at home (my friends, relatives, and Patreon supporters), the decision to publish The Prince’s Fighters as a free web serial likely came as a surprise, and certainly appeared to be sudden. In truth, I had been considering that course for the last year. (I have also considered, and have not yet decided against, similarly serializing The Mark of the Wolf.) Both the internet and the world of publishing has changed a lot over the course of my life, mostly for the worse, but one improvement is the de-stigmatization of self-publishing. Even under better circumstances, I don’t have much to offer the world in the face of the ongoing horrors; but I do have my stories. I know that no matter what I do, my work will be scraped and pirated by assholes, made available for free and fed to the fascist LLM machines out of cruelty and spite. Better, then, that I make it available for free, myself: those who would pay for it will pay for it; those who can’t can share it with those who can. And, hopefully, the story will find its audience.

And so, as I put the final polish on the final chapters, The Prince’s Fighters – now 208,000 words of queer fantasy epic – I am already publishing the well-polished first chapters. As I write this at the end of March, I anticipate making my final prose edits next week and spending April, May, and June doing the much less fun formatting edits and producing the interior artwork that has always been part of the vision of this story.

It is my hope that The Prince’s Fighters, a tale of adventure, ambition, love, loyalty, secrets, and redemption, will find its way into the hands and hearts of fellow fantasy-loving queers.

-JSG, March 2025