Katharine Lumley
NA Sapphic Fantasy Meets Tarot Cards
THE WEIGHT OF A BLADE 100,000 words
Katharine Lumley is a Canadian author who grew up in Sandford, Ontario, surrounded by old books and even older antiques. She wrote her earliest stories on a typewriter and dreamed of one day becoming an author. She collected rocks as a child and almost every story she’s written has contained a magic stone.
As a teen, Katharine worked at the local library, and she carried her appreciation for books into her university career, achieving a Bachelor with Honors in English Language and Literature and a Master of Library and Information Science. Since then, she’s moved cross-country three times and has become an expert at packing boxes of books.
Katharine is a stay-at-home mom who begins and ends each day reading picture books and has surprisingly lost her voice only once. When she’s not furiously scribbling in a notebook, you can find her cross stitching, browsing yard sales for treasures, or at her local library. She currently lives in Vermont with her family.
Her writing has previously appeared in lapse: A Brock University Anthology of Creative Writing with a series of poems, and What If? with her short story “All in a Breath,” which placed second in the Stone Road Mall Fiction Contest. THE WEIGHT OF A BLADE is her debut novel inspired by Tarot, god pantheons, and that one line from The Mummy where Evie says, “He’s mortal.”
Pitch
When a prophecy declares Cailyn Cassia will become a powerful leader or a deadly one, she's unexpectedly Favored by the alluring Slaughterman and set on a path that has her questioning how far she'll go to protect the ones she loves.
Opening Lines
The council chambers were stuffy, the air close and hot with every door in the room shut. Cailyn was seated in the very back row, a cramped half-desk before her where she precariously balanced her papers, ink, and pens as she took notes.
Beside her came a soft curse; Cailyn glanced up to see Everleigh blotting ink off her page. A sketch of a gown with long, ruffled skirts was visible beneath the muddled blue.