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Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

So… I’m a nerd. I know, surprising, right? What might actually be surprising, though, is that I’ve never actually played a game of Dungeons & Dragons. I mean, I’ve had a couple of home-brewed one-shots many years ago, but I’m never actually played a proper campaign, with a regular crew. That changed this year. I started with a friend, who was part of another group, who then created a splinter group for a different game. I am part of that splinter group, starting a new campaign at ground zero.

Can I just say, I am loving it. It’s a very excellent way to explore character and motivation, as well as world-building and story-telling. If you struggle with any of these, consider starting a D&D campaign. Let’s explore what’s going on in my game, because I’m too enamoured with it currently not to share.

First, because I’m relatively new to the whole thing, I started out basic. The character I chose is closest to myself in both appearance and temperament, which is to say I am playing a human fighter. She’s wildly idealistic, believing her strength and talents should be used to protect those who cannot protect themselves. She is the embodiment of my favourite quote from The Lord of the Rings, as articulated by my favourite captain of Gondor, Faramir.

I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.

Which, incidentally, I intend to have tattooed to my person one of these days.

Unlike the devastating stories of early childhood trauma that seems to be the norm for player characters, Tabynthia’s childhood was happy. She grew up in a tiny village, who, like Sparta raises fighters. Unlike Sparta, however, this society is kind and open, and are directly responsible for instilling her belief that it is her duty in this life to defend the defenseless and protect the innocent.

Everyone, regardless of race or ability has a place in this village, provided they adhere to the tenants of life there (on of Taby’s best friends is a half-orc, whose father orcish father fell in love with one of the fighters when she was out in the world, and followed her, eventually joining the village, earning a living as a smith). Only those who are able are raised as warriors, and sent out into the world to make their mark and earn coin and when their adventuring is done, assuming they live, they return home to help raise and train the next generation of defenders.

The manner in which they make their coin matters, and upon their death, they must face the judgement of their ancestors, making a full accounting of their deeds in life. Only the worthy are permitted to join the ancestors in their eternal festivities. Everyone else is sent back to right their wrongs, or to try again and become worthy. Taby was loved by bother her parents, both of whom  are still alive. Her mother trained her in the fighting arts, and her grandmother, a great hero of her time, coached her in ethics growing up. Her father simply proudly doted. She is out in the world now as a young adult, attempting to make the world better for her being there.

That’s my character. I mean in game.

D&D, for everyone! Except the first guy. Not him.

This is a very fun dynamic in game to play. It makes for some really interesting choices for the character; a narrative choice. Does Taby permit the horrors of the world make of her a cold, hardened warrior, or does she make the very deliberate choice to lean even harder into the kindness and belief in goodness that stands at the core of her upbringing? Will she maintain the belief in herself instilled in her by a family that loved and supported her, or will she fall into the trap of having her self of self erode away, leaving her in despair regarding her own abilities? Save the fortune or misfortune of the roll of the dice, everything about a character is a deliberate choice on the part of the player.

It’s a great way to examine character choices in narrative, for those of us who are writers. It’s also an interesting way to examine our choice in the real world. I know for a fact that I’ve often turned to thoughts of my character when I’ve been personally struggling. What would Tabynthia do? She’s become a source of inspiration for me… which is weird, since I made her up. But it’s true.

This is also the first time I’ve played in a world that isn’t of my own creation. This is a very new experience for me. I have never written fan fiction, and I haven’t partnered with another author to create a story together. So this is something that I approached with considerable trepidation. It can be really tough creating in a world that has constraints you did not yourself create, and so might have trouble keeping your character or actions within the bounds of those constraints.

This is a good thing, I think; an excellent exercise for writer. I have read a few writers who break their own world rules without any valid justification (“because the narrative demands it” is not sufficient). I’ve also read a lot of characters that are able to magically do something that doesn’t make sense for their characters to be able to do. Practice not being able to do these things, as is offered by D&D, can help here I think.

Incidentally, though I’ve not dabbled in it, fan fiction can also help with this, as it is someone else’s world and, if done correctly, rules. It can also break the world, but let’s not talk about that too much.

I have to say, the DM running my particular game is quite forgiving when it comes to permitting me to create the whole damned culture which gave us Tabynthia. This small collection of villages in northern Faerûn doesn’t exist explicitly in the books I was given to help me get a handle on the game. But I was allowed to have Tabynthia come from there all the same. He’s also extremely patient in talking me through what my character can do, so I can make informed choices in any interaction. So, depending on your DM, you may have a lot more leeway to exercise your imagination while still being mostly true to the game. Though I still grimace at his evil little chuckles.

How it feels any time the dice favour me. Image by Lixxe from Pixabay

This game also helps put you right in the shoes of your protagonist (and every player is the protagonist in their version of the story), so for anyone who struggles to see an alternate perspective, or having a character act differently from themselves in their fiction, this is a great way to exercise that particular muscle.

In order to do that, though, you must be willing to emphasize the role-playing aspect of this game. I have been letting my buried once-theatre kid have a ball with this character. It might take a bit for someone not used to inhabiting a role in this way to be able to do it, and perhaps a little longer to be comfortable doing it in a group setting, but it is well worth it; not just because it’s really fun, but also because it’s really good for seeing through another’s eyes. In writing and in life, this can only be a good thing.

Dungeons & Dragons is not just a great way to gather and play, but it can be a really serious exercise in good writing, in writing practice, and, like most fiction, dissecting the real world in which we live, and the actions of those in it in a more hands-on way than reading often permits (unless you’re like me, in which case you get so into a book you’re practically living it).

If you haven’t tried your hand at it yet, this is your sign to give it a go. Finding a good crew with a good DM can often be a challenge (hoy boy, have I heard some horror stories), but it’s well worth it if they can be found.

When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and sometimes painting. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and sometimes relaxing. Her most recent titles include Daughters of Britain, Skylark and Human. The Timbercreek Incident is free to read on Wattpad.

Epic Horror is one of the most ambitious kinds of horror stories to tell. Horror is a genre that relies a great deal on tension and can often be strengthened by intimacy of character or situation. In other words, relatively small stakes. Maintaining a level of tension and mounting dread over the course of a…

Given how much ‘world building’ you’ve done and are continuing to do, would you ever consider allowing other authors to use these constructs to build their own stories? I can imagine it would be difficult but there are other series out there where the author has created a ‘world’ and other authors use that as a platform for their books.

By way of example – Eric Flint’s 1632 book started a huge spin off, so too has John Ringo’s Black Tide Rising zombie stories.

It could potentially allow you to help collaborate with other authors, expand the ‘universe’ and derive a potential additional revenue stream.

Whenever things get rough, Roxanne escapes to other worlds. She possesses a talent that no one else believes exists. Except her granddaughter Marissa, who exhibits the same talent.

Roxanne wants to train Marissa to live with her talent, but the rest of the family wants to stop her. They fear Marissa will end up like Roxanne: difficult, unreachable, distant. Worse, they fear Marissa will not survive Roxanne’s training—or her love.

“Worlds Enough…And Time” is free on this site for one week only. If you just want a copy of this story, download it on any e-book site or by clicking here. Enjoy!

Worlds Enough…And Time Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“Watch,” Marissa says.

She brings her small hand to her temple, then extends her arm. She tilts her head sideways, black curls falling against her neck, and stares at something I can’t see. Finally she twists her fingers ever so slightly, and a window opens in the sky.

It’s a tiny window, the size of a hand mirror, and it looks like a photograph floating on the summer breeze. The window blots out part of a birch tree, but not the lake beyond.

A floating miracle, adrift in a sea of air.

I crouch to Marissa height, barely over three feet, and stare into the window. All I can see are waves, like heat waves that appear on a highway on a sunny day.

Marissa giggles, clenches her fist, and the window disappears. All that remains are the birch trees, the dandelion fluff decorating the air, and the chill breeze off the lake.

The emptiness startles me.

My heart is pounding and my own fingers clench. I want to grab her, shake her, demand that she do it again.

Instead, I close my eyes, trying to control my own trembling. Marissa laughs, the sound farther away. She’s probably running off, but I don’t care.

Her father will find her. Bastard. He said nothing of this. He should have known how interested I’d be.

A son owes his mother. He always owes his mother.

And he should never forget that.

***

I was Marissa’s age when I first had the feeling, the sensation of worlds dividing, multiplying, changing around me. I had snuck into the attic. The air smelled of dust and mildew, the floor simple pine boards, the boxes slowly rotting in the summer damp.

My mother’s wedding dress hung in a metal wardrobe, the latch rusted open. I pulled the door, saw the white dress yellowing with age and inattention, the black cocktail gown beside it, and a blue silk evening gown with a plunging neckline and room for a bustle.

Only I didn’t know what a bustle was or a cocktail dress or an evening gown. I brushed against the blue silk, part of it trailing to the dirty metal floor of the wardrobe, and saw the dress as it had once been: hanging off a voluptuous woman, accenting her narrow waist, her high breasts, and adding to her already ample behind. The diamonds around her neck winked in the gaslight, and she smiled, her skin unlined and pale against the blackness of her hair. In the background, music played—a waltz—and couples twirled on a polished dance floor, none of the women as beautiful as the one before me, the one in the dress, the one who made the dress live.

She turned, saw me, eyes widening, and shrieked that my filthy hand was ruining her dress. Her skin, warm and soft, brushed mine, and dislodged my fingers.

Then she faded as if she had never been.

The dress hung in the wardrobe, forgotten against the black and the rusting wall.

My hand had fallen to my side, the skin still tingling from her touch.

I told my mother and she had laughed. “Miracles in the attic,” she said with enough contempt that even I, child that I was, realized she thought I made the entire thing up.

***

Darren slams open my kitchen door. He drags Marissa by the hand, pulls her inside, and takes her upstairs. I sip my coffee, warming my hands against the mug, and lean against the kitchen counter.

Outside, the breeze has become a gale. The birch trees sway and bend as if they are dancing to a music only they can hear. The sky has grown dark with an oncoming storm.

“Jesus, Mom,” Darren says from behind me. “She fell into the lake. She could’ve drowned.”

“She can swim.” I don’t turn around. I know Marissa can swim because I’m the one who took her to swimming lessons before she could walk. She would giggle and paddle toward me, dipping her head in the water like a baby seal.

“And if she’d been knocked unconscious? What then?”

Then she would have drowned. But I don’t say that.

“You were supposed to be watching her.” He steps into my line of sight, his face mottled with anger just like his father’s used to do.

“I did watch her.” My voice is amazingly level, considering how odd I feel. “I watched her create a hole in the sky.”

***

At four, you’re too young for theories. You simply know that things are not exactly what they seem.

I could never get the lady with the dress to come back. I visited the attic day after day, touched dress after dress and saw nothing except dust motes and the occasional moth.

But the air was alive up there, and I had a sensation that if I touched the right thing at the right moment, I could see worlds I hadn’t even imagined. Not just visages of the past, but possibilities of the future, permutations of the present, times that exist outside of ours.

In some of those places, my mother believed me, nurtured my talent, told me of hers. In most of those places, I believed the world was a much better, much friendlier place.

***

Darren takes Marissa home. The supervised visit is over. I am told I should not see her again.

I am left in my small house eighty miles from nowhere, one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes only yards from my front door. Nowadays, motorboats and airplanes break the stillness with startling regularity, but when I moved here more than thirty years ago, silence was the norm.

I needed silence to concentrate, the glitter of the sun on the lake water to focus, the sparkle of deep winter snow to catch and hold my eye.

Sometimes I could slip—find an already existing window and start to step through it, like I first did in my mother’s attic—but I could never create my own.

I learned that in 1970 when Darren’s father left me.

***

By then, the theory I couldn’t form at four had become a full-blown dissertation, complete with footnotes and bibliography. I saw each conversation as my orals—a chance to convince the people around me that we were in one timeline out of millions, each linked by events, separated by choices in response to those events, and tied to each other by a single touchable moment.

My theory had pieces of Alice’s Adventures through the Looking Glass mixed with some C.S. Lewis and twisted by a touch of Ray Bradbury.

Years later, I would add more pages—chaos theory, string theory, the theory of everything—as well as musings on time by scientists from Dirac to Einstein.

But those scientific principles were in the future. In 1970, I was exploring inner space, trying to expand my mind, thinking the adventure came from within, not from without. My guru was Timothy Leary, my expansion of choice LSD, my trips cosmic, significant, and oh so wrong.

It was a sign of the time that Darrell—Darren’s father—who couldn’t take my constant drug use, my discussions of the limitlessness of the universe, my willingness to sit at the feet of anyone who believed in the existence of alternate worlds left me alone, pregnant, and broke—and no one blamed him for what happened next.

They blamed me.

***

The shrink has her own theory. She still tells me about it, even though I heard it in court when Darren got the judgment against me, forbidding me to see my own granddaughter for more than two hours, and never ever unsupervised.

The shrink thinks I make up alternate worlds because I do not like this one.

No matter how many books I bring her, no matter how much my aunt testifies to the Talents within our family, the shrink persists in her belief.

“Roxanne,” she says to me when I complain about Darren’s hasty departure, “you have to face what you do. You cannot constantly escape to other worlds.”

What the shrink does not understand is that I did not escape that afternoon by the lake. I wanted to, but I couldn’t reach the window. I couldn’t even see what was inside.

I was there the entire time.

I was there, just like I was supposed to be.

***

There will be a new hearing. Some legal assistant arrives at my house with court papers. My son has decided to exclude me from my granddaughter’s life forever.

I hesitate before I call my attorney. I cannot sound hysterical. I cannot let him know what I will lose.

I walk through my small house, touch the antiques that have once opened the past for me and do no longer. The desk I found at a flea market outside of Boston, which took me to a dark gray afternoon with a filthy harbor out the window, and a man writing a letter with a quill pen. The letter began Dearest, She has learned of us. I must end—

Then he saw me, started, and the pen scrawled awkwardly along the page. He shouted, pushed, and I fell backwards, out of wonderland, and back to the flea market where a dozen people stared at me as if I had lost my mind.

By then, I knew: Only two trips are allowed through a window into another time—a trip there and a trip back. After that, the window closes.

Still, I buy the objects that open worlds for me: the desk; a book of poems written in Latin (once held by a sobbing priest who screamed when he saw me); a glass serving bowl that in a not-too-distant past had held salad and matching glass tongs (lost to time). The woman who had been mixing the salad in the bowl had seen me and smiled, thinking I was one of her guests, until she saw my attire—blue jeans, a Cal Tech sweatshirt, bare feet. Then she frowned and spoke to me in a language I did not understand. Someone nearby grabbed my arm and shoved me backwards—and that window closed, like all the others before them.

I can find windows—existing windows—but I cannot create them.

Not like Marissa.

Marissa, who holds universes in one tiny little hand.

***

Perhaps doctors are right. Perhaps newborns should not ingest mind-altering chemicals in their mother’s milk.

Over the phone, my mother called Darren’s screams colic, but when those screams didn’t end, the neighbors called the police. They took him away from me, claiming he was malnourished, claiming he was addicted, claiming he would be brain-damaged forever.

He programs computers now, graduated from the top of his class at Harvard, lives a mundane life with a wife who refuses to meet me and the most beautiful child in the world.

The doctors were wrong: he is not damaged. At least not visibly. But he has a paranoia I recognize from my hippie days, a tendency to believe the worst of everyone around him, a rebellion against authority that must have come through the milk as well.

That the authority he rebels against is me is something I have trouble dealing with. I freely admit that, even though the shrink believes I do not—I cannot—understand.

***

I remember the first time we met. He was eighteen. He had used his powerful mind to track me down.

I believe he remembered me from those first few months—inside that complex mind of his were images of me—and I had a hunch that he too had peered into alternate worlds and saw how happy we would have been if only I had done things right.

We had eight years. I was clean and pretending to be unimaginative. My visits to antique stores were infrequent and I tried to stay away from estate sales, garage sales, and public auctions so that I couldn’t touch the past.

I tried very hard to be normal, to hide my secret life.

We would talk about everything from politics to aliens, from the things we could touch to the things we could only imagine, to the importance of belief and the willingness all humans have to understand something beyond themselves.

We would talk, then.

And he would listen.

***

Finally, I call the lawyer.

He is my age, expensive, and world-weary, with a high tolerance for alternate lifestyles, even though he hasn’t lived one himself in nearly thirty-five years.

He takes my call: he has gotten the papers. He expected to hear from me.

I am slightly annoyed that he did not call first.

I sit on my screened-in porch and stare at the lake as we speak. Sunlight glitters on the water, making diamonds, making tiny untouchable windows that might—if we’re lucky—open alternate worlds.

Sometimes I am distracted, but my lawyer is used to that.

Today it seems to irritate him.

“I asked, Roxanne, if you were supposed to be keeping an eye on her,” he snaps, his voice metallic through the phone.

“The visits are supervised. I’m never the only one watching her.” I rock back in my chair, looking at the lake from a different angle.

The prisms of light flicker, but do not move.

“Don’t you remember the fight we had to get Marissa out to the lake house in the first place?” he asks. “Don’t you remember the discussion with the judge, your promise—in writing, Roxanne—that you would never take your eyes off her?”

“I blinked,” I say. A blink of an eye: the lid closes, then opens. It takes only a moment, or perhaps an entire night. The amount of time passing depends on your definition of time. If a moment is a blink of an eye, and a blink is the closing of the lids, followed by the opening of the lids, then I looked away for only a moment.

“It says here you left her.” I can hear papers rattling through the earpiece. “It says you went inside and made coffee.”

“Darren was already going to her. I knew she’d be fine.” Then I whisper: “She swims, you know.”

“I know.” He sounds so exasperated.

The swim classes convinced the first judge that I cared. I was the one who drove Marissa there, the one who held her in the water, the one who listened to her coach, swam with her, helped her learn to use those tiny limbs.

I was the only one thinking ahead—knowing, fearing, if she fell through a window into another world there was no guarantee she would land on ground. She might find herself a pond or a pool or a too-full tub. She might need to know how to hold her breath before she moved backwards, into the world she had just left.

Of course, I never explained it quite that way. Lawyers, judges, logical minds—they never entirely understand. So I said simply, convincingly, apparently, that swimming is a survival skill as important as walking and it’s always better for children to learn early, particularly if they’re going to be around lakes.

Back then, that had been a point for me.

“But that’s not the point now,” my lawyer says. “The point is that you should have gone after her. You should have saved her, not Darren. He sees it as one more sign of your growing irresponsibility.”

“I’m not irresponsible,” I say.

“Your granddaughter nearly drowns and you make coffee?”

“She didn’t nearly drown.” I have to struggle to keep my voice level. “She can swim.”

“I’m going to be honest with you, Roxanne,” he says to me, and I hate the tone. It is the same tone Darren uses with me now — an I-will-speak-slowly-because-you-will-never-understand tone. “You’ve blown this. Even if we do go back to court, the best you can hope for is supervised visits in a neutral place—like Social Services. You’ll never get to see her at your house, and certainly not at Darren’s. Maybe it’s best if you let Marissa go. Your record with children is poor. Wait until she’s an adult, like you did with Darren. Wait until the two of you can talk.”

I did not wait until Darren was an adult. He was taken from me, and no one would tell me where he went. He found me.

And for a brief time, I was his alternate world.

“No,” I say. “I have to see her.”

“Why, Roxanne?” he asks. “And don’t give me the grandmother-granddaughter crap. I don’t buy it. Other people aren’t real to you.”

“There are things in life that only I can teach her, only I can show her.”

“Yeah,” my lawyer says. “Which is precisely what your son is afraid of.”

***

He was too old when he came to me, my son, my Darren. His mind had already formed around precepts someone else had taught him—that solid objects existed only in one space-time, that this world was the only one (except for Heaven and Hell—which Darren himself called mythical concepts—he had taken his disbelief one step further than even the world around him had taught him).

Although I tried to tell him about our family’s talents—my aunt’s ability to know what had happened in someone else’s past, my mother’s sudden inklings of what was to come, my own ability to reach into already existing windows—he did not believe me. He laughed, calling our talents superstitious nonsense which could be explained logically, he was sure.

Later, he called my beliefs fantasies, and even later, drug-induced hallucinations.

By then, he had married.

By then, his mind had been poisoned, by his wife.

***

After that day near the lake, I have thought a lot about Marissa and how she fits into this world. She is one of the window-creators. If she touches an object, she doesn’t find the window, as I do. She makes it.

Like the woman in the dress (a great-grandmother, I later learned), like the man at the desk, like the priest with his poetry, my granddaughter has the ability to open moments in time.

I suspect she also has the ability to close them.

I have searched for this my entire life—something I cannot explain to my lawyer, who sees my actions as negligence—and something my shrink willfully misunderstands. My granddaughter is special, but only people who understand her special ability will help her develop it.

She needs me, even more than I need her.

***

It takes planning, of course. And silence. I speak to no one, confide in no one, write to no one.

I act alone.

I let my lawyer pursue our defense in court, even though his heart is not in it. Neither is mine. Supervised visits in Social Services will do neither me nor Marissa any good.

I let my shrink enroll me in more rehabilitation programs, even though I am still clean, and have been for nearly twelve years now.

Of course, I do not tell her that I plan to be gone before the first program starts.

Darren’s house is in a modern neighborhood with large lots and houses that the media calls McMansions. His is a 6,000-square-foot monstrosity with an indoor and an outdoor pool, a four-car garage, a guesthouse, and a state-of-the-art security system.

The system funnels into the guesthouse and the garage as well as the house.

People forget that I was once a beloved member of the family—or at least a tolerated one. I have keys. I have codes.

I can—and have—slipped in and out unnoticed.

Marissa’s bedroom is in the south wing, on the second floor. She has a suite with a playroom, a bedroom, and a second bedroom for guests or the nanny that Darren keeps threatening to hire. The south wing has a door at its far end that leads into the apartment above the garage.

It is so simple to enter the garage by the side door, shut off the alarm before it even blares, climb the stairs to the apartment, and then cross into the house. So simple that I worry I will get caught whenever I do it.

This night it is even simpler. I wait until everyone is asleep. I have a flashlight that I only use in the non-windowed parts of the hallway, but I really don’t need it.

I know this place as well as I know my own—the worlds we travel between, the lives that get lived within these little boxes, in these quiet walls.

Marissa’s suite is filled with nightlights. I close and lock the main door, then slip into her bedroom. She is asleep on her side, her hands tucked under her head as if she were praying. Her curls float behind her.

My hand hovers near her temple, wishing I could pull the window from it with a touch of my fingers. But I dare not try.

Instead, I cradle her against me, coax her awake. She blinks sleepily at me and smiles—to his credit, Darren has never said anything negative about me to her—and settles into the crook of my arm.

“Remember?” I whisper. “Remember showing me how you can make pictures in the sky?”

She nods.

“Can you do it now?” I ask.

She nods again.

“Watch,” she whispers.

She brings her small hand to her temple, then extends her arm. She tilts her head sideways, black curls falling against her neck, and stares at something I can’t see. Finally she twists her fingers ever so slightly, and a window opens right in front of us, a window filled with light.

I look through it, but cannot see clearly, just like before.

I reach out my hand, but Marissa shakes her head. “Papa says not to touch.”

Damn him. Darren knows—and believes—his daughter, but denies the talent to me.

Damn him.

Still, I smile at her. “Grownups can touch,” I say.

I touch the edge and the window widens. I still cannot see through the light.

Marissa puts her thumb in her mouth, a little girl now, in a world she does not understand.

I would comfort her, but I do not. She needs to remember this. She needs to remember it like I remember the attic, as the defining moment, the beginning of her understanding of the nature of the universe.

She will explore, on her own, her abilities, if she only remembers how I behave.

I am nervous, but I can’t let her see that.

My heart pounds. I ease my body away from hers, then kiss her forehead. She looks at me with wide, frightened eyes.

I place both hands into the light. It is warm there, and I catch the scent of daffodils.

“Remember,” I say, and tumble through.

She reaches out a hand to stop me—and instead, closes the window.

Just as I expected.

***

A blink of an eye—

—and suddenly, I am sitting beside a row of daffodils, planted against a headstone. The cemetery is carefully mowed, the trees are large—birches—and beyond, you can catch a glimpse of one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes.

Sunlight glimmers off the water, creating prisms of light, little windows into yet even more worlds.

I am not willing to travel beyond this spot. I am comfortable here. It is quiet, and I always do best in the quiet.

The air is alive, filled with visages of the past, possibilities of the future, and permutations of the present.

I know this world is a much better, much friendlier place.

 

Worlds Enough…And Time

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Svetap/Dreamstime, Naphotos/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

 

Mod R is out today, so you are in my semi-capable hands. This is a slice of life post.

When I was a child, time seemed to move in a straight forward way, like floating down the stream of a slow, gentle river in a little boat. Then I became an adult, and the passage of time stopped being a steady ride. Sometimes it’s a rapid current, and I don’t know what’s going on, and the boat is falling apart. Sometimes the river turns into a swamp, and I’m going in circles, rowing as fast as I can and getting nowhere. Sometimes I just give up and drift. But then there are times when I open my eyes and notice that the sky is a beautiful blue, the water is clear, and the weeping willows are bending gracefully over the banks.

April had managed to pack all of those moments into 4 weeks. It’s always a very busy month for us. Gordon and both of our daughters were all born in April. This year, there was a book tour on top of it, followed by Gordon getting sick, and then a storm that ripped the decorative shutters off our house and damaged the stucco. Through all of it, we have been working on the book, which is a mammoth at 173,000 words and still isn’t done.

The river has been clogged with debris of Not Done for a while. Boxes of books haven’t been mailed, admin tasks haven’t been attended to, phone calls haven’t been returned, and important errands haven’t been run. I haven’t unpacked. I normally unpack within 24 hours of coming home.

::stares at the suitcases::

I swear I will unpack today.

We did accomplish some things. I have gone to my medical appointments. They had given me a heart monitor out of abundance of caution, and I am delighted to report that I am allergic to whatever kind of glue is on it. I broke out in hives, and the itching was ridiculous. The monitor fell off after 5 days and I actually did a little dance of happiness. I also dragged Gordon to have an eye exam, and his new glasses have arrived. I need to drag him out again to pick them up.

We went out for a dinner with friends and then again to celebrate the birthdays. We have left the house so many times in April, it has to be a record of some kind.

We signed and mailed off 2,600 bookplates for a special book box.

We heroically cut the grass in the backyard, because we finally got rain and in the true Texas fashion, the weeds had gotten thigh-high in a space of a week. Gordon ordered a dumpster for a spring cleaning, and I am ridiculously excited, because I can clean out the back yard. It accumulates old planters, random items like rusted thingie that was used at some point to turn the shutters, and other weird stuff, and I swear that refuse keeps reproducing somehow.

Someone emailed about the mammoth I made during the Q&A. Here she is.

I made her with Premier Parfait Plush for Kid 2. The pattern is available on Etsy from KnotsandSnuggles. Their mammoth has a wider head and less curly hair, but I really liked the curls. There is no trick – they happen naturally if you pull up a longer yarn loop.

I haven’t finished the Book Tour Shawl. I am saving it for the summer trip to Columbus Book Fair.

The next project is this shawl, Frühlingserwachen. I’d love to know what that translates to.

Pattern and Image by FraeuleinGerdaEU

This is a very interesting pattern that looks deceptively complex, but is actually pretty straight forward. My issue right now is that I don’t quite have the right yarn for it.

I can hear you laughing, but hear me out.

This shawl takes at least 1,200 yards. I wanted to do one of Wendy Wonders gradients with it, but realized that what I have tops out at 800 and matching to it will be difficult. I’m trying to figure out how to approach this. Should I do each section in a different color? Do I want cotton or something like Blue Heroin with lurex for this or do I want wool? Fingering or DK? Should I stick to the gradient but do the narrow cross sections in a different color or would that look ugly?

I am conflicted.

Well, I need to be at work in 8 minutes, so I have to end this lovely picnic and climb back into my metaphorical boat.

This is my reminder to myself and to anyone who needs it today: the book will get finished, the chores will get finished, the planet will keep spinning. In a rush to get everything done and to catch up, let’s not forget to enjoy the river.

The post Slice of Life Monday first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Ai Jiang! Her poetry and short stories include “We Smoke Pollution,” winner of the 2023 Ignyte Award for Best in Speculative Poetry, and “Give Me English,” a Nebula and Locus Award finalist for Best Short Story. She is also the author of the Bram Stoker and Nebula Award–winning horror novella Linghun and the science fantasy novel An Empire in the Clouds (coming in September). Her next book, A River From the Sky, comes […]

The post Women in SF&F Month: Ai Jiang first appeared on Fantasy Cafe.

Other LitStack Spots We’ve also added a few other titles to our TBR stack, including…

The post Spotlight on “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You” by Julian Delgado Lopera appeared first on LitStack.

The Coen Brothers are among the finest filmmakers of my lifetime. Joel and younger brother Ethan started with Blood Simple in 1984, writing, directing, and producing together for the next few decades. And they produced some of the era’s best films. Dark comedies like Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, and Intolerable Cruelty. The Big Lebowski is a prolific meme generator. And O Brother, Where Art Thou is a masterful ‘modern’ retelling of The Odyssey.

They raised the Noir stakes from Blood Simple, making The Man Who Wasn’t There (a black-and-white film in 2001? That’s bold). And the chilling No Country for Old Men.

Miller’s Crossing – heavily influenced by Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key – is one of my Top Five Hardboiled films of all time,

Joel worked as an assistant film editor (back in the days when they literally cut and spliced together reels of film) for 1981’s Evil Dead. That was the first movie which Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell made (that’s a post subject some day). A friendship formed between Joel and Sam, and the ‘two camps’ would intertwine.

The Coens made a ‘fake trailer’ for Blood Simple, and Campbell – who is not in the movie – played the murder victim. The Coens’ next film was Crimewave (written with, and directed by, Raimi), and they wrote the lead for Campbell. He wasn’t remotely a star yet, and the studio wanted ‘a name’ and vetoed the choice. The brothers and Raimi created an entirely new part – Renaldo ‘The Heel’ – to get Bruce in the movie.

And to tie all this together, Bruce and Sam played parts in my vote for the most underrated Coen Brothers film, The Hudsucker Proxy. It’s simply brilliant. You could call it a screwball comedy, with satire, and oddly, some fantasy mixed in.

It BOMBED at the box office, finishing 174 (domestic) for the year. And #176 was Red Rock West, which is one of the best Noirs you’ve never seen. There’s no accounting for taste.

Beyond the story basics, this is gonna be a spoiler-free essay. You should explore the movie yourself.

Between Bull Durham, and The Hudsucker Proxy, Tim Robbins had become well-respected in 1992 for The Player (box office #67), and Bob Roberts (#129). These were insightful satires. The Player elevates by being a terrific movie in which it’s hard to find someone to root for. That is not easy to pull off. (I know, by default it’s gotta be Gretta Sacchi. But I found her tiresome).

In 1994, Robbins played bumpkin Norvell Barnes, hitting the big city in 1958, fresh out of the Muncie School of Business. He gets a job in the mail room of Hudsucker Industries, just as a change is occurring on the top floor. And at ground level as well.

Paul Newman is the crusty, cigar-smoking, sleazy, right-hand man, and he’s an absolute delight. One of my favorite performances of his. He has a scheme that involves elevating Barnes to President of the company, and he supports his bizarre product idea.

With the working name Extruded Plastic Dingus, there’s a montage of the different design, development, promotion, and production phases of this new item ‘You know, for kids.’

There’s a lot of hoopla for a simple product. The satire is highlighted by the Advertising secretary reading War & Peace, and then Anna Kerinina, while the ad men toss out slogan after slogan.

It’s all done in a visual fifties corporate style, and it’s fun to watch. The Coens were clever and intentionally thoughtful. The burst of color they use for the Dingus after these bland scenes is more evidence of their skill and ability to make enduring films.

Then, it’s THE montage, with the dingus, and the kids. Sam Raimi directed this, and he has a cameo alongside John Cameron, another of The Evil Dead crew. I think that Raimi is one of the truly excellent filmmakers of this era (like the Coens), and this is a masterful montage.

Watch the facial expressions, the way the scene moves forward visually with the music (there’s no dialogue). The plot explodes in this montage, without using any words. Don’t scroll on your phone – really watch this. Even the price stickers going back up is clever. This movie is full of ‘smart funny’ elements; you pick up on more things, the more you watch it.

Such as, keep an eye on the changes in Robbin’s character as it goes along. It’s shown visually, bit by bit. It presages one of the episodes in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The Coen Brothers are really good at telling a story.

There’s a lot of movie left, and I’ll leave the rest of the story to your viewing. A fantastical element becomes a key part, and it’s always struck me as a bit jarring, but it sticks together.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is Amy Archer (who never fails to mention she’s won a Pulitzer Prize), a fast-talking newspaper reporter. John Mahoney (Frasier) is her editor, and Bruce Campbell is a fellow reporter. The Coens put together a terrific cast – folks even in single scenes. It’s got Charles Durning and Bill Cobbs, and look for Peter Gallagher, Steve Buscemi, Anna Nicole Smith, John Goodman (maybe listen for him), and Richard Schiff.

And if you are a fan of The Wire, you are gonna love EVERY scene Jim True-Frost is in. He’s delightful. Seriously.

While box office revenues are certainly a valid way to assess a movie’s success or failure, it’s certainly not the sole determinant of a movie’s worth. On a $25 million budget, Hudsucker only brought in $2.8 million, and it had no international release. It barely made back one-tenth of its budget.

The Coens’ next two movies would be Fargo, and The Big Lebowski. The boys continued to be popular but not commercially successful (Fargo, #75, Lebowski #98). Even O Brother, Where Art Thou, which was a financial hit, still was only the #58 movie of 2001.

But movie fans can rattle off movie after movie, when asked what they like by the Coens. The box office isn’t the measure of the Coen Brothers’ quality. They made smart, or funny, or dark, or satirical, or thoughtful – usually a mix of at least two of those qualities – movies. I have a friend who thought Intolerable Cruelty was just okay. I think it’s hilarious. And we both think the Coens remade True Grit as well as anyone could have. You just need to watch a few of their movies to appreciate them.

I drifted away from their stuff starting with Burn After Reading, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is the last thing I saw (and Hail Caesar! fell flat for me). But a half dozen-ish of them are among the best movies I’ve seen. The Coens were THAT good. If you only saw The Hudsucker Proxy, and Miller’s Crossing, your life would have been blessed. Though O Brother, Where Art Thou is great in so many ways – especially for this Greek mythology geek.

The Hudsucker Proxy isn’t the same kind of cult classic which Firefly, or even The Big Lebowski, is. But people who know, love this one. And many of us rank it higher than the better-known Coens movies. Regardless, this is a treat to watch, and it doesn’t grow stale with additional viewings.

You can watch The Hudsucker Proxy for free, on Tubi. This world is a dumpster fire. We all have things we watch, or listen to, to help us deal with it. To step away from all the crap. If you wanna sit down and watch something funny and thoughtful, this is the movie for you.

Some previous entries on things to watch:

Let’s Go to the Movies: 1996
Firefly – The Animated Reboot
What I’ve Been Watching – February 2026 (The Night Manager, SS-GB, Best Medicine)
What I’ve Been Watching – October 2026 (Return to Paradise, Lynley, Expend4bles, and more)
What I’ve Been Watching – August 2025 (Ballard, Resident Alien, Twisted Metal, and more)
What I’ve Been Watching – May 2025 (County Line, The Bondsman, Bosch: Legacy)
What I’ve Been Watching – October 2024 (What We Do in the Shadows, The Bay, Murder in a Small Town)
What I’m Watching – November 2023 (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, A Haunting in Venice)
What I’m Watching – April 2023 (Florida Man, Picard – season three, The Mandalorian)
The Pale Blue Eye, and The Glass Onion: Knives Out
Tony Hillerman’s Dark Winds
The Rings of Power (Series I wrote on this show – all links at this one post)
What I’m Watching – December 2022 (Frontier, Leverage: Redemption)
What I’m Watching – November 2022 (Tulsa King, Andor, Fire Country, and more)
What I’m Watching – September 2022 (Galavant, Firefly, She-Hulk, and more)
What I’m Watching- April 2022 (Outer Range, Halo, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans, and more)
When USA Network was Kicking Major Butt (Monk, Psych, Burn Notice)
You Should be Streaming These Shows (Corba Kai, The Expanse, Bosch, and more)
What I’m BritBoxing – December 2021 (Death in Paradise, Shakespeare & Hathaway, The Blake Mysteries, and more)
To Boldly Go – Star Treking – (Various Star Trek incarnations)
What I’ve Been Watching – August 2021 (Monk, The Tomorrow War, In Plain Sight, and more)
What I’m Watching – June 2021 (Get Shorty, Con Man, Thunder in Paradise, and more)
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
What I’ve Been Watching – June 2021 (Relic Hunter, Burn Notice, Space Force, and more)
Appaloosa
Psych of the Dead
The Mandalorian
What I’m Watching: 2020 – Part Two (My Name is Bruce, Sword of Sherwood Forest, Isle of Fury, and more)
What I’m Watching 2020: Part One (The Adventures of Brisco County Jr, Poirot, Burn Notice, and more)
Philip Marlowe: Private Eye
Leverage
Nero Wolfe – The Lost Pilot
David Suchet’s ‘Poirot’
Sherlock Holmes (over two dozen TV shows and movies)

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, and founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).

He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories — Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.

He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.

You can definitely ‘experience the Bobness’ at Jason Waltz’s ’24? in 42′ podcast.

Book links: Amazon, Goodreads
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael R. Fletcher lives in the endless suburban sprawl north of Toronto. He dreams of trees and seeing the stars at night and being a ninja. He is an unrepentant whiskey-swilling reprobate of the tallest order and thinks grilled cheese sandwiches are a food group.
Publisher: Michael R. Fletcher (April 13, 2026) Page count: 353 pages Formats: ebook, paperback

“Once we were the Death of Suns, the dark before the dawn. Now, we are a mirror smashed, the sharp slivers put back together wrong, the reflection splintered and distorted. We stare at ourselves, recognizing the face and yet knowing something is missing.”

That line pretty much sums up what The Lord of the Empty Mirror is doing, and what Khraen is at this point. Not a man so much as a collection of pieces arguing with each other.

I loved the original Obsidian Path trilogy, so I went in with high expectations and this didn’t disappoint. Khraen is hunting the shards of his heart but also he's against one that represents the worst (or maybe most honest) version of himself. The part that understands power, control, conquest. Which means you get two Khraens. Sort of.

One is trying to fix things and unite the world, stop a god, and maybe do a bit less mass murder along the way. The other version is much more focused on conquering everything, trusts no one, and absolutely don’t let feelings get in the way. 

Bringing in another POV, especially one tied so closely to Khraen himself, works surprisingly well. It allows to dive into one of the series’ core ideas of how memory shapes identity. Who you are, what you remember, and what you choose to become aren’t cleanly separated here. Fletcher really digs into that, and it pays off.  If you take a man, break him into pieces, and then put him back together… which version is real? The one trying to be better, or the one who remembers how effective being worse used to be?

Plot-wise, there’s always something happening and it never drags. I liked the twists, but I won't spoil them for you. 

Also, it’s properly grim. Every solution costs something awful. There’s a moment where Khraen casually weighs how many souls something is worth, and it doesn’t feel out of place. That’s the level we’re operating on.

Khraen himself is, well, still Khraen. Powerful, determined, and capable of making deeply questionable decisions with full confidence. There were a few “why would you do that” moments, but they always track. He’s not stupid, he’s just very committed to his own logic, which is sometimes worse.

The ending is going to split people. If you didn’t like how the original trilogy wrapped up, this won’t fix that. It follows the same idea and you get no neat closure or the sense that everything is finally “done.”

For me, it was perfect since it fits the series. But if you’re looking for clear answers and everything tied up nicely, you won’t get that here.

TL;DR: I loved it.

Cast in Blood Published by Harlequin on April 28, 2026

DO NOT MEDDLE IN THE AFFAIRS OF BARRANI

Kaylin has been warned to steer clear of the lords of the Barrani High Court. She’d be more than happy to oblige, but it’s a bit difficult considering she lives with ten of them, all sent to the green to gain power or die. With Kaylin’s help, they finally escaped their imprisonment. But their attempts at freedom had devastating consequences—and a price that has yet to be paid.

The first warning sign is the Consort’s invitation to visit the High Halls—a Barrani invitation, which means an immediate visit.

The second sign is less subtle: Kaylin finds Nightshade’s unresponsive body. He hovers on the edge of death, beyond saving through Kaylin’s healing power. No one can explain his state, nor why she’s powerless to save him. And if she and her Barrani friends can’t figure out a way to bring him back, he’ll be lost forever.

Yet even as Kaylin struggles to keep Nightshade from death, there is deeper magic at play, a growing threat with the potential to affect the entire Barrani race. Factions are shifting, new lines are being drawn—and Nightshade’s near assassination is only the beginning. Can Kaylin uncover the nebulous forces that threaten the balance of Barrani—and their entire world—before it’s too late?

Pages: 512 GoodreadsGenres: Fiction / Action & Adventure, Fiction / Fantasy / Action & Adventure, Fiction / Fantasy / Dragons & Mythical Creatures, Fiction / Fantasy / Epic, Fiction / Fantasy / General, Fiction / Fantasy / Paranormal, Fiction / Fantasy / Urban, Fiction / Magical Realism, Fiction / Thrillers / Supernatural, Fiction / Women
Format: eARC ISBN: 9780369774880
By: Michelle Sagara
Source: NetGalleyAlso by this author: Cast in Silence, Cast in Chaos, Cast in Flame, Cast in Honor, Cast in Flight (Chronicles of Elantra #12), Grave, Cast in Deception

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The latest installment in the Chronicles of Elantra series is a must-read for fantasy fans. With its richly layered world-building and complex character development, this series continues to stand out as one of the most compelling in the genre. While romance takes a back seat, the story is filled with deep emotional connections that give the characters real weight and depth.

Blending fantasy with elements of police procedural, deadly magic, and five distinct races, the series offers a unique and immersive reading experience. The world is intricate, the stakes are high, and each book builds meaningfully on the last. This is absolutely a series that should be read in order, as jumping in later will leave you lost in both the plot and the character dynamics.

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 628 pages
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release Date: November 11, 2025
ASIN: B0DVJNMD3C
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Bought on ebook
Rating: 4.5/5 stars

“Forty years ago, the Gather family—James, his daughter Beau, and his son Billy—vanished during a whitewater rafting trip and were presumed dead.

Five years later, Billy reappeared on the far side of the world, telling an impossible tale of a primordial valley populated by dinosaurs, aliens, Neanderthals, and androids. Little Billy became the punchline of so very many jokes, until he finally faded from the public eye.

Now, a group of graduate astronomy students follow their professor, Noah Barnes, up a mountain for what they believe is a simple stargazing trip. But they’re about to travel a lot farther than they planned …

Noah—the now grown Billy Gather—has finally figured out how to get back to the valley. Accidentally bringing his students along with him, he’s confident he can get everyone back home, safe and sound.

But the valley is a puzzle—one it turns out Noah hasn’t figured out—and they’ll need to solve it together if there’s any chance of making it out alive.”

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I bought this for ebook.

Thoughts: I enjoyed the puzzle behind this strange story. It has elements of time travel, dinosaurs, aliens, and general strangeness. It moved along at a decent pace and kept me guessing as to where the story was going.

The Gather family disappeared on a whitewater rafting trip and, five years one of the Gather family members (Billy) returned on the other side of the world. Billy had stories about a valley of dinosaurs and Neaderthals, but of course everyone assumed he was a traumatized kid. Billy changed his name to Noah, became a professor, and spent his career learning quantum physics. Now it’s time to for Noah to go back to the mysterious valley of his childhood. Unfortunately, he accidentally drags some grad students along with him. Noah was confident he could get them all home, but things have changed in the valley and now he is not so sure.

There were a few things about this story that really grabbed me and kept me turning pages. The first was the mystery of the valley and how (and why) it had changed over time. The second was the pure wonder of strange things that were found within the valley; you never really knew what you were going to find when you turned the next page.

I enjoyed the characters here. They don’t have a ton of depth to them, but they are entertaining. There is a pretty high (and swift) body count in this book, so it’s best not to get too attached to anyone. Noah/Billy is a bit of a puzzle and I found his stubbornness in admitting things had changed a bit frustrating. Although to be fair, he had been planning this return to the valley his whole life, and to have it all go so amiss had to be mind boggling.

I ended up liking how the story wrapped up. At first I wasn’t sure how aliens, dinosaurs, Neaderthals and robots were going to come together in a cohesive story but Clines made it work. He made it work in a way that was cohesive, easy to follow, and entertaining. Whenever I want something a bit weird and quirky, I pick up a Clines book and am never disappointed.

My Summary (4.5/5): Overall I really enjoyed this. This story is a bit weird and different, but I liked that it kept me guessing and really enjoyed the wonder of all the weird surprises throughout. If you are looking for an odd mystery adventure story that involves dinosaurs, Neaderthals, aliens, and robots, I would recommend. Trust me, it all works together great and will keep you on your toes. Can’t wait to see what Clines comes up with next!

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (Ballantine paperback editions, October & November 1965). Covers by Barbara Remington

I’ve defined Heroic Fantasy (HF) as a type of fiction in which a heroic (bigger than life) figures use a combination of physical strength and edged weapons (Swords, Axes, Spears) to face bigger than life foes. The hero may be either male or female, but the focus is primarily on personal conflict between the hero and various villains.

I divide Heroic Fantasy into four categories: Sword and Sorcery, Sword and Planet, High Fantasy, and Heroic Historical. I’ve previously discussed S&S, S&P, and Heroic Historical (HH). Today let’s check out High Fantasy.

[Click the images for heroic versions.]

The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris (Ballantine Adult Fantasy #3, July 1969) Cover by Gervasio Gallardo

The emphasis in High Fantasy is on a Mythic adventure, either a quest or a large scale (often world spanning) conflict between the powers of Light and Dark. The hero is usually not bigger than life. In fact, he, or she, is often rather small and weak physically, though there is usually a tight knit band of followers or friends who help them.

The heroes are generally chosen for their role by some greater power and usually do not know how strong they really are at the beginning of the story. They grow into the role as the work progresses.

The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison (Ballantine Books, April 1967). Cover by Barbara Remington

Supernatural forces are integral to High Fantasy, and there are almost always magical items such as rings, or swords, or enchanted armor that can help or hinder the heroes in their quests. There is much less emphasis on individual physical combat than in S&S, S&P, or HH. The High Fantasy setting is a mythic world, usually an ancient Earth that is populated by elves, dwarves, dragons, goblins, or recognizable variants of these. Dragons seem particularly indispensable.

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 – 1973) established the primary tropes of High Fantasy and his Lord of the Rings trilogy is still the best example, although William Morris’s (1834 – 1896) The Wood Beyond the World (1894), E. R. Eddison’s (1882 – 1945) The Worm Ouroboros (1922) and Lord Dunsany’s (1878 – 1957) The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) preceded Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955).

The fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Annotated Hobbit (Houghton Mifflin, October 1988), The Silmarillion (Houghton Mifflin, September 1977), Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham (Science Fiction Book Club, May 1984), and The Lord of the Rings revised editions (Houghton Mifflin). Covers, top row: J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, Daniel Horne)

The sheer scale and detail of Tolkien’s Middle Earth has established him as the grandfather of the High Fantasy genre, and pretty much everything that came after owes him a debt. I don’t personally read a lot of High Fantasy and seldom write anything linked to the genre, but I have read some very good stuff in the field, including most of Tolkien’s work.

One difference between High Fantasy and the other three HF genres is the level of good versus evil that exists in them. In High Fantasy, we generally need to speak of EVIL in all caps because it is often a soul-destroying force that wants to bring darkness to the whole world. In S&S and S&P, the evil is not so all powerful, although it may be very nasty. In HH, the evil is human, as is the case in the real world.

The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany (Ballantine Adult Fantasy #2, June 1969). Cover by Robert Pepper

There are two more differences between the subgenres I’ll mention. First, S&S works best in short stories, S&P and HH in novellas or short novels, but High Fantasy needs a grand scope and lends itself to large novels and multi-book series.

Second, High Fantasy lends itself to humor better than the other types. Perhaps because of its length and its ensemble cast of characters, it provides a setting where more humor naturally occurs.

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, filmed as the HBO series Game of Thrones

So, who writes High Fantasy since Tolkien?

There’s been a bunch of it. It currently seems the most popular form of Heroic Fantasy published today and has been for a long time. George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones is a prominent example, as is Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time.

The first four novels of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson: Lord Foul’s Bane, The Illearth War, The Power That Preserves, and The Wounded Land (Del Rey paperback editions, August and September 1978, March 1979, and May 1981). Covers by Darrell K. Sweet

I haven’t read either of those but I saw the TV series based on them and enjoyed them. I haven’t read them because both are multi-volume works with each volume making a good doorstopper. I’m 65 and there’s a lot of books I want to read before I go; I don’t plan to spend a year or two of precious reading time on these kinds of series.

What have I read in the genre? I read Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy in my teens and early twenties, and greatly enjoyed them, although I didn’t have any urge to write such a series. A little later, I read Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series of six books, and I read Dennis L. McKiernan “retelling” of Tolkien’s trilogy in his own trilogy, The Iron Tower.

The final volumes in The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: The One Tree and White Gold Wielder (Del Rey, April 1982 and April 1983), and the novella Gilden-Fire (Underwood-Miller, November 1981). Covers by Darrell K. Sweet and Stephen E. Fabian

McKiernan’s work was a little too close for my tastes, and I hated the protagonist in Donaldson’s series. Thomas Covenant was a complete asshole, though I loved the world and many of the supporting characters. I read a couple in Bret Funk’s Path of Glory series. In my fifties I read the entire Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, which I would categorize as High Fantasy, although it pushes the boundaries with few edged weapons and a lot more modern setting.

Why has High Fantasy been so popular? I think there are various reasons.

The first four novels in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Scholastic paperback reprints, November 2011, 2000, September 2001, September 2002). Covers: Mary GrandPré

First, the “growth” of the hero across the books is an attractive quality to many readers, who like to see a character gain strength and competence, perhaps because it offers hope that they, too, can grow. This is the classic “Hero’s Journey,” which can happen in the other genres of HF but often doesn’t, or at least not to the same extent.

Second, although there are plenty of exceptions, High Fantasy also seems to appeal more to the average woman reader than the other types and — quite simply — women buy more books than men, a big plus for publishers. This is illustrated, in part, by the number of women writers in the genre. Patricia McKillip, Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey, Joy Chant, Margaret Weis, and J. K. Rowling are just some of the many women writers who have enriched the genre.

The concluding volumes of the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Scholastic paperback reprint, August 2004), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Arthur A. Levine Books, July 16, 2005 and July 21, 2007), and The Tales of Beedle the Bard (Paw Prints, April 9, 2009). Covers by Mary GrandPré

Because of the ensemble cast of characters in high fantasy, the lesser focus on hack and slay, and the setting details, there would also seem to be more potential good roles for women in these books.

Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was a look at the Sword & Sorcery of S. E. Lindberg. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.

The fifteenth annual Women in SF&F Month closes this week with one final guest post on Monday, which will be followed by a link list containing all this month’s articles on Wednesday. Thank you so much to last week’s guests for another excellent week of essays! Before announcing the upcoming schedule, here are last week’s essays in case you missed any of them. All guest posts from April 2026 can be found here, and last week’s guest posts were: “Writing […]

The post Women in SF&F Month: Final Week Schedule & Week in Review first appeared on Fantasy Cafe.

This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to head over to Storybundle to pick up a copy, along with ebooks by Robert T. Jeschonek, Andrea Pearson, J. Daniel Sawyer, Dean Wesley Smith, and ten more great writers. Everyone’s book is an exclusive. That’s right. Everything in the bundle is exclusive to the bundle, including my book.

The book is exclusive to the Storybundle—meaning that at the moment, you can’t get it anywhere else. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites in a few weeks. The new edition will release on July 14.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post, which first appeared on this site in slightly different form, is from January of 2015, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

Churning It Out

Toward the end of a pretty good Entertainment Weekly article about the romance side of the publishing industry, this sentence appears:

[Bella Andre]’s a naturally fast writer—on average she churns out four to six books a year—and she released the first one in June 2011.

Before we get to the reason I’m telling you about that sentence, let me say one thing that might or might not be related: There’s a slight snobby tone to EW’s romance article. What’s that all about? The magazine’s called Entertainment Weekly. It’s not The New York Times Book Review. EW sings the praises of The Walking Dead and video games, and everything in between, for heaven’s sake, but somehow romance fiction doesn’t meet the high standards of entertainment?

Sorry. I had to get that off my chest.

As I said, the article, “A Billion-Dollar Affair,” by Karen Valby, appeared in the October 24, 2014 issue, and did cover the romance industry (of the time) pretty well. (And is still available online.)

So why am I objecting to that single sentence?

I’m not, really. It’s a common sentence from any media that covers books. And I’m not even objecting to the entire sentence. Bella Andre does write fast by most writers’ standards, and she does so comfortably.

What I’m objecting to is the phrase “churned out.”

It’s become a cliché. Any writer who writes fast “churns out” material. Or she “cranks out” or “pounds out” whatever it is that she writes. Because clearly, no writer who writes fast can think about what she writes.

There are other implications in that phrase. The material “churned out” isn’t very good. Anything “churned out” is an exact copy of what has come before. It has no real value, primarily because of the speed with which the writer “churns out” the material.

In the olden days of traditional publishing, those of us who “churned out” a lot of books did so under a lot of pen names. Here’s how it worked in my case: Kristine Kathryn Rusch might, at best, put out two books per year; Kris Nelscott one every two years; and Kristine Grayson one every six months.

Most reviewers never noticed all the short stories or blog posts or nonfiction. Only a handful of people (including my agents back when I was stupid enough to hire them) knew that I wrote under other pen names as well.

While reading a midlist thriller novel in bed one night several years ago, I laughed so hard that I woke Dean up. What made me laugh? The author’s bio, which stated that the byline of the novel I was reading was a pen name for a “well-known #1 New York Times bestselling author.” Ballsy and hysterical. That writer wrote so many books that his publisher refused to publish them all under the author’s bestselling name.

Or maybe the publisher never got a chance. Because I later discovered who the author in question was (and that’s why I’m not naming the book here), and discovered that the author had nearly a dozen pen names, and kept them all quiet—except for that coy little bio for at least one of them.

In the opening to Bag of Bones (first published in 1998), Stephen King writes that his main character, a bestselling novelist, kept one novel in the drawer for every novel he published, since his publisher was demanding that he publish no more than one book per year.

Think about this, people: How many other industries that have mega-selling products demand that the producer of popular, high-quality material slow down? What happened to providing the consumers with what they wanted?

When Nora Roberts started out, she was fortunate to begin with Harlequin, which could publish as many books as she produced. She stayed with Harlequin even after she moved to a bigger publisher (Bantam) for a once-per-year hardcover, which then became a once-per-year hardcover and twice-a-year mass market paper, and then became twice-a-year hardcovers and three-times-a-year mass market paper, and finally, she had a big fight with Harlequin, and started up the J.D. Robb pen name (twice per year) and her publisher (by then, Putnam) threw in the towel. The publisher finally agreed that Nora could put out a lot of books. But the publisher’s other writers couldn’t.

Nora Roberts’ speed didn’t matter to that publisher because the publisher had no expectation of quality based on the genre. As we all know, and Entertainment Weekly’s snobby tone confirms, romance is trash anyway. No one expects quality fiction from writers who crank out cookie-cutter books for women.

You think I’m kidding, right? I’m not. I’m old enough to have read the trade journals as romance got its start as a genre, as the Romance Writers of America (founded in 1980) fought for recognition from publishers, as romance readers slowly realized that they were marketing force that had a lot of clout.

Romance has a lot of respect now compared to the 1980s—and still writers see phrases like “churned out” and that slightly school-boyish tone that every Literary Critic uses when discussing romance.

It’s about love and mushy stuff. It can’t be good. It might include kissing and touching and actual irony-free emotion. Anyone can churn out that crap if they put their minds to it. But most people are sensible enough to want respectability instead of…whatever it is that these romance people have.

Oh, yeah. Money.

And readers.

Who actually like the books.

I have taken exception to that snobbish attitude for my entire career. I’ve written essay after essay about it in all kinds of journals and magazines. I’ve written some business blogs on it too.

Back when I was writing those essays, the attitude was merely annoying. Savvy writers could get past it with the judicious use of pen names, and make not just a living, but a substantial living. As in earning mid-six figures or more, simply by hiding the fact that the fast writers wrote more than one book per year.

That snobbish attitude has always been harmful to writers who wanted to make a living. But in my mind, that snobbery always went hand-in-hand with a desire to be recognized over a desire to have a full-time writing career. The writers who wanted to make a living figured out how to handle the respectability argument while “churning out” a lot of books. The writers who wanted respectability and labored over each word never left their day jobs.

Now, however, that snobbish attitude has become actively harmful to writers. Most of the ways that books sell to readers have broken down. The traditional publishing systems have lost their impact. The old-fashioned way that publishers advertised books—that one-size-fits-all method—no longer works. Bookstores don’t window titles much anymore, if a reader can find a brick-and-mortar bookstore that sells new titles within driving distance of home.

Because books are available all the time rather than for only a few months, readers pay less attention to release dates than ever before. Readers have always read a book when they felt like it, and not a moment sooner. But in the past, readers had to buy the book when they saw it, because they might never find a copy again.

So, even if readers didn’t read the book for a year or more, readers still had to buy it in that limited time window.

Not any longer. Readers can make a note of the title, realize it’s been published, and buy it days or hours or minutes before reading it. That really changes the way that the publishing industry markets books—or it should.

It hasn’t yet, entirely, anyway. But the industry is starting to get a clue.

Event books, the ones that publishers convinced the media to promote, are no longer events. The numbers to become a bestseller are much, much lower than they were in 2007.

Lists matter, but less and less as readers discover their books in other ways.

And one of the major ways that readers discover a book? E-mail alerts or notifications that scroll across the reader’s favorite online retailing site—alerts and notifications tailored to that reader.

No longer do we all get notification of the top five books on The New York Times bestseller list. Now, we get science fiction (if that’s what we read) or romance or mystery. We get notifications about our favorite author’s latest book, not the latest release from some author whose work we would never, ever, ever read.

The notifications come from bots designed by the retailers. What provokes those bots to let a reader know about an author? Publication of her latest work. The bots always send readers a note that an author they have bought before (through that retailer) has released a new book.

The reader might not buy that book immediately, but the book might go on a wish list. It might be put in reserve until the reader has the cash to order or the time to read.

Another change in the way people buy books also has to do with unlimited availability. All readers indulged in binge reading of a new-to-them author, but in the past, that binge reading was combined with treasure hunting.

Whenever I discovered a new writer whose work I liked, I’d read what was easily available, then I’d go to the library to see what it had. Libraries never had the complete oeuvre because, like bookstores, they have limited shelf space. So I’d dig through every used bookstore in every town I visited until I got each and every book by that author.

Or as close to each and every book as I could get.

Other readers did the same.

Now, readers can order every book that a favorite author has written, whether that author has written five books or hundreds. That fear writers have, the fear that readers won’t respect the work if it doesn’t take years to complete, is silly when looked at from a reader’s perspective.

Readers want to escape from their lives for a few hours. They might want to read a beautiful well-written slow-moving literary novel or they might want to read a fast-paced hard-to-believe thriller. But readers want the book when they’re ready to relax. If they liked that book, they want another by the same author. The author becomes a known quantity, and the reader wants more.

Binge-reading has become an all-consuming activity, just like binge-watching. And the best way to get noticed as a writer is to publish enough to enable your readers to binge for a weekend.

But the idea of writing a lot is the opposite of the way that most writers are trained. Writers are told to slow down, think about every word, consider every sentence. Writers are taught to forget story because story is something that hack writers do.

Hack writers can “churn” out words because words are unimportant to them.

Real writers write so slowly that they might only compose a paragraph per day.

Real writers who have day jobs and who still believe myths spouted in the 19th century.

Real 19th-century writers who are still read today, like Charles Dickens or Louisa May Alcott, got paid by the word, so they wrote a lot of words, for a lot of publications. These writers wrote fast long hand, and they “churned out” a lot of stories we no longer read.

But they also “churned out” stories that all of us still read.

That little phrase, “churned out,” holds so much disrespect. Deadly disrespect, because writers who hear that phrase—and use it themselves—won’t be able to survive in this new world.

The 21st century is not leisurely, although we have more leisure time than ever. Can you remember the name of the “important” literary novel of five years ago? Ten? Without looking it up? I didn’t think so.

Yet, I can still name the important literary novels of forty years ago, because they got all the press, and I do mean allthe press.

It’s impossible to get all of the press now. The best way to get attention is to give your readers what they want. If they like your work, they want more of it.

If they want more of it, the only person who can give them more is you.

And the only way to do that is to write a lot, whatever that means for you.

One sure way to teach yourself to write at a comfortable pace is to clean up your language. Watch every word. Make sure you’re using the right phrase—when you’re talking about writing.

Clean “churned out” from your vocabulary. Don’t say you “cranked out” a novel. Don’t apologize for writing fast. Don’t tell anyone how long it took to finish a novel.

Write and release.

The only people who judge fiction writers for how fast they write are people for whom reading isn’t something they do for enjoyment but for prestige. They want to impress others with their literary acumen.

I don’t know about you, but I want readers who get lost in the story, not readers who have already determined that I’m a hack because I don’t write at the proper speed or in the proper genre or with the proper attention to language.

Enjoy your writing. Take as much—or as little—time as you like to compose your stories.

Because how you created the story doesn’t matter. How much readers enjoy the story does. Readers don’t care if it took you one week to write that story or fifteen years. All readers want is escape.

And it’s your job to provide it.

“Churning It Out” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.

 The Geomagician by Jennifer Mandula

Mogsy’s Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Genre: Fantasy

Series: Book 1 of The Geomagician

Publisher: Del Rey (March 31, 2026)

Length: 464 pages

Author Information: Website

I confess, I went into The Geomagician expecting something lighter and fluffier with a heavier romance angle, but this is one of those rare cases where I’m glad to be wrong. Instead, the novel delivers a story with far more substance than I anticipated, blending historical inspiration with magical charm and bigger, thoughtful thematic ideas embedded in a strong narrative that kept me hooked.

The book follows Mary Anning, an aspiring geomagician who grew up fossil hunting along the English coast in the small, humble village she calls home. All her life, she’s dreamed of joining the elite Geomagical Society in London, a group of scholars who can harness magic from fossils. But as a woman, that path is firmly closed to her. For now, she has to settle for building a reputation through her remarkable finds, selling fossils to tourists and the very geomagicians who benefit from work she’ll never be credited for.

But everything changes when Mary stumbles upon a fossil bed containing an intact egg which, against all odds, hatches into a living baby pterodactyl after she channels her magic into it. All of a sudden, she has something the Geomagical Society would be desperate to have. Maybe even enough to finally offer her a place among them? She quickly reaches out to her mentor, hoping to turn the discovery into an opportunity, but when he arrives, he brings along his colleague Henry Stanton, the man who was once her first love before breaking her heart. Though Henry’s presence complicates things, Mary is determined not to let it derail her plans. And yet, as she pushes ahead to London, she finds herself caught in a tangled web of politics, rivalries, and conflicting beliefs about magic, forcing her to confront just how far she’s willing to go to claim her place.

To start, I loved the world-building, which is easily one of the book’s biggest highlights. The idea that fossils can store and channel magical energy to accomplish incredible things is such a cool concept, and the story really digs into it from multiple perspectives, featuring strong tensions between science and the book’s fictional church, with different factions holding opposing beliefs about where magic comes from. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that this conflict ends up shaping a lot of what happens, and on top of that, you’ve got layers of social hierarchy, gender barriers, and shifting political viewpoints, all tied to bigger questions about power. Who gets to have it? Who controls it? Should magic belong to an elite few or be accessible to everyone? All these questions and more are woven into the plot naturally, giving the world a depth that feels lived in.

And then, of course, there’s Ajax, who completely stole the show. Honestly, I wish we’d gotten more of that little pterodactyl, along with more of the prehistoric elements in general. For a book so rooted in fossils and ancient creatures, it feels like this should have been featured more prominently, especially since the whole science and scholarship angle in addition to a woman fighting for her place in that world are one of its biggest draws. That said, this book still taps into the same appeal as series like Emily Wilde by Heather Fawcett or The Memoirs of Lady Trent by Marie Brennan, both of which feature ambitious female protagonists driven by their pursuit of knowledge and academic curiosity. I think if you are a fan of those types of stories, this one will be quite the treat.

In the end, The Geomagician ended up being a really entertaining novel and meatier than I expected, all in the best ways. It’s got a unique premise, a richly developed world, and just enough emotional weight to balance out its airier moments. If you’re in the mood for historical fantasy with a strong sense of place and an emphasis on ideas as much as plot, this one is definitely worth the read.

Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth by Jack Kirby (DC Comics,
October 1972 and February 1973). Covers by Jack Kirby

Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth, written and illustrated by Jack “King” Kirby (1917-1994), has long been an inspiration to my creative works. The tone, the setting, the characters and creatures — pure brilliance. Highly recommended.

Kamandi #16 is a fascinating issue. An ape doctor who encounters Kamandi knows of Cortexin, the chemical which stimulated evolution and intelligence in animals and turned them into parahumans. The Last Boy on Earth discovers more about the post-cataclysmic Earth, in which men have devolved to beasts, and beasts have evolved to higher intelligence.

[Click the images for Kirby-sized versions.]

Interior art from Kamandi The Last Boy on Earth #3, by Jack Kirby (DC Comics, February 1973)

Jack Kirby was such a visionary and innovator, and Kamandi is such a treasure. Every time I flip through a random issue, I’m filled with joy.

Kamandi art by Jack Kirby. Left: a look at Kamandi’s world. Right: splash page for issue #3, February 1973

Below is a panel from Fantastic Four #34, from 1965, written by Stan Lee and illustrated by Kirby. Kirby as usual peered into his crystal ball and came up with a billionaire just as evil and corrupt as any Marvel costume baddie, smacking of today’s headlines.

Gregory Gideon tried to use his money to destroy the FF, but his son got in the middle and almost died, Daddy repented and the story had a happy ending. The lust for money at any cost is the Root of all Evil.

Art from Fantastic Four #34 by Jack Kirby (Marvel Comics,  cover date January 1965)

There is an incredible array of fascinating characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, not the least of which is Medusa, a member of the Inhumans. Pictured below is a rendition of Medusa by Jack for Marvel’s line of black light posters.

Magnificent Medusa by Jack Kirby

Medusa, inspired in part by the creature of same name from Greek Mythology, has prehensile hair that can lift thousands of pounds, can extend to great lengths, and strangle an enemy with ease. The wife of Black Bolt, she is a stunning beauty whom Jack illustrated magnificently. Her first appearance was in Fantastic Four #36, but I best remember her from the Kree-Skrull War, which took place in the pages of The Avengers.

Anyone else a fan of this lesser known character, or any of the other Inhumans for that matter?

Warlock by Jim Starlin

Fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe would do well to look into the character Adam Warlock, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. His original name was “Him,” a being created by a group called Enclave to be the next step in human evolution (Fantastic Four #66-67). It was an interesting storyline, but not very significant as compared to other characters and stories being developed at that time.

It was years later, when Roy Thomas and Jim Starlin really brought the character to life as Warlock, renamed and rebirthed by the High Evolutionary. The Marvel Comics Database explains it well.

The High Evolutionary gave Warlock purpose, direction, and the vampiric Soul Gem. Soon afterward, Warlock journeyed to the planet called Counter-Earth, one of the High Evolutionary’s experiments, that had recently been contaminated. Counter-Earth had been an attempt to create a Utopian society, and it had been so till the evil Man-Beast, a renegade creation of the High Evolutionary, had corrupted it; the Man-Beast was to become Warlock’s greatest enemy.

Warlock’s later involvement versus Thanos — and that one’s obsession with the accumulation of power — gave rise to the original mini-series, The Infinity Gauntlet. While it was nice that the MCU afforded Warlock a bit role in the films, satisfying (to some degree) fans like me, it is still worth pointing out that major aspects of that spectacular MCU run were derived from content that Adam Warlock was the star of in the comic books.

Any other Adam Warlock fans in the house?

Conan the Barbarian by Jack Kirby

I’ll close with a few sketches of other Marvel characters, starting with Conan the Barbarian, by Jack Kirby. Jack was not known for many Conan illustrations, but by Crom, this one is incredible.

Thor by Jack Kirby

Although Walt Simonson wrote my favorite Thor story arc, no one, IMO, drew the thunder god better than Kirby. If you have a favorite Thor picture, feel free to mention it in the comments! Make sure to cite the artist.

The Silver Surfer by Jack Kirby

Finally, here’s a rendering of the Silver Surfer by Jack.

Jeffrey P. Talanian’s last article for Black Gate was a look at the Fifty Years of Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk. Jeffrey is the creator and publisher of the Hyperborea sword-and-sorcery and weird science-fantasy RPG from North Wind Adventures. He was the co-author, with E. Gary Gygax, of the Castle Zagyg releases, including several Yggsburgh city supplements, Castle Zagyg: The East Mark Gazetteer, and Castle Zagyg: The Upper Works. Read Gabe Gybing’s interview with Jeffrey here, and follow his latest projects on Facebook and at www.hyperborea.tv.

TODAY IS THE DAY!

We have chosen our champion, and we’re excited to announce the winner and runners-up.

First, we want to thank all SPFBO participants. We sincerely appreciate your involvement in the process. 

After getting through the batch of thirty books, we’ve picked five semi-finalists. Here they are in alphabetical order:

CARRION SAINTS by Hiyodori - In its authors words "Carrion Saints is a sapphic enemies-to-lovers romance between an immortal saint and a severed head." And that's it, in a nutshell. We highly appreciated Hiyodori's unique take on the trope, bitter-sweet ending and excellent writing. If you like character-driven conflict, this one sticks.

PILGRIM by Mitchell Lüthi - Dust, faith, politics, and people making difficult choices for reasons that make sense to them. It’s immersive without feeling like a lecture, and the amount of research into various cultures, religions and traditions must've been insane. Not fast, but worth checking out.

THE INHERITED BLADE by Jye Sorensen - it connects two storylines: one with lots of running for survival, one about inheriting unwanted responsibilities. It takes a bit to balance, but when it does, it clicks nicely. Good if you like character contrast and gradual build.

THE SINS OF STEEL AND SHADOW by Steve Pannett - Fast, scrappy, and very aware that most problems can (unfortunately) escalate into violence. Bail is a great guide through a cruel city, and the book rarely slows down long enough for you to get bored. Not deep, but reliably entertaining. Most of us will read the sequel as soon as it hits the shelves.

THE UNNAMED by M.S. Masood - It has a rich world, and skillfully pictures a slow unraveling of belief. The tension comes from watching someone realize their entire worldview might be wrong and not liking that realization one bit. Heavy at times, but well-written and engaging.

CHOICES CHOICES

At this stage, we had to decide how to evaluate one good book against another and whether it was at all possible to come to some sort of fair and objective decision. We tried to base our choice on the following criteria (listed in alphabetical order):

• Characterization
• Editing
• Personal Enjoyment
• Plotting
• World-building
• Writing Style

You can almost hear the drumroll, can't you? Or is that just the sound of SPFBO followers holding their breath?

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Without further ado (because we know you're just dying to know), the story that has danced its way into the finals is 

 

Congratulations to Hiyodori , and good luck in the finals! 

We're sending Carrion Saints to the finals with a rating of 8.0/10.

….. ah. After rereading the question I should have been more clearer, I meant to ask what is next after the Sigl Fashion articles. I apologize for the confusion what I wrote wasn’t what I meant to say!

In reply to Valentin.

I would think mending helps with bruising as that is a result of damaged blood vessels. May not remove the leaked blood that causes the discoloring but would mend the blood vessels?

Hamlet – a celebrated Shakespeare classic, filled with treachery, vengeance, and moral dilemmas.  Politics and…

The post “Hamlet” by Shakespeare | Words Become The World appeared first on LitStack.