Tara Cardinal has quite a story to share. And now she has a novel too. They’re not quite the same thing — but they have a lot in common.

Her, for instance. The actress/writer/director pours everything she is into her stories, and once a person knows them both, the interplay between them is obvious. Passion is a way of life for Tara, and she instills in her projects and the people around her a thirst for it.

This is not the sum of her though. Tara does all her own stunts AND swordplay, she added directing to her resume on the fly, learned how to write the score, edited the film, and interested Uwe Boll into co-producing the movie The Legend of the Red Reaper with her. Then she hit upon an idea to write a story prequel to the movie she’d written and created.  She sketched it out, discovered Alex Bledsoe wandering the same Sword & Sorcery super-aisle, and the rest is history. (Alex offers a bit of a better description of how it all worked out over on his site.)

Alex just so happened to have recently worked with RBE on Writing Fantasy Heroes, and so introductions were made, and the work began. It wasn’t long before the manuscript was going through edit exchanges, the art was being penciled & inked, and both interior and cover layout was being described, revised, and delivered.

But wait! There’s even more to the story. Tara’s passion isn’t for writing, directing, even acting. It’s for empowering children and young women in pursuit of her dream of making the world a better, happier place. The martial artist and swordswoman is also a humanitarian, psychologist, and child advocate. From the age of 12, Tara has always been about defending, assisting, and benefiting children survivors of abuse, illness, and disaster.

Best of all, Tara’s rolled all that passion, all that experience, and all those goals into a Sword & Sorcery novel that delivers the sword-swinging, monster-slaying, ancient god-defying, and good ol’ fun we Black Gaters (hmm, sounds like a football team name to me!) expect — and she’s done that while also delivering Aella, a young woman protagonist who struggles with identity, destiny, belonging, and confidence simultaneous with racial, familial, and sexual tensions.

Aella is not your everyday chain-mail bikini warrior — she’s the heroine every young woman experiencing her own struggles with identity, belonging, confidence, and belief can look up to and emulate.