Austin Worley's Blog: Writing, Reading, and Living with Austin Worley, page 2

Final Week for Preorders of Hanging at Crosbhothar

We’re in the home stretch: Hanging at Crosbhothar is out on Halloween!

You’ve still got a few days to preorder the Kindle edition, and paperbacks will be available either on Halloween or in the first few days of November. Because this novelette is a reprint, I can’t schedule the release, so things are more up in the air with the paperbacks.

Corpses hung from the ancient maple like leaves…

Brutal. Valiant. Monstrous. Heroic. Folk say many things about Eoghan One-Ear, but Knight-Mother Arlise Dun has seen for herself what the rebel-turned-bandit leaves in his wake: butchered innocents and burned-out villages.

After half a decade of faithful service with the Order of Watchers, Arlise knows all the faces of evil, and she knows this evil is more than a man. The distinct whiff of demonic influence surrounds these atrocities. Yet no demon seems to dwell inside the man himself.

If she’s to uncover the bandit lord’s true nature and deliver justice for those lynched at Crosbhothar, Arlise will need to contend with a carnomancer, a band of fanatical reavers, and her own thirst for vengeance.

Refined for release as a standalone novelette, Hanging at Crosbhothar is a dark heroic fantasy tale of approximately 10,000 words.

If you’re interested, check it out on Amazon:

Five Drabbles Accepted for Hawthorn & Ash, Vol. 7

On Monday, I received some fantastic news: five of my fantasy drabbles have been accepted for publication in the latest volume of Iron Faerie Publishing’s Hawthorn & Ash flash fiction series, Mistletoe and Vine!

Arlise Dun, who features in all of these drabbles in some way

These stories of exactly one hundred words are as follows:

Shiver (Dark Fantasy)A Mouthful of Water (Sword & Sorcery)Born of the Moons (Dark Fantasy)On the Roadside (Dark Fantasy)Sacrifice (Romantic Fantasy)

All of them are set in Anura, and all of them feature Arlise, but she isn’t the main character in all five. “Born of the Moons” sees cameo in a minor somewhat antagonistic role, while she’s the unconscious subject of the core conflict in “On the Roadside”. Nevertheless, these five stories form a sort of overarching narrative from her time as the shield bearer and mistress of a Prince in the Colonia to a wandering adventurer in the Sea of Sands, her first missions as a Watcher, and ultimately her happy ending with Earc.

These drabbles were a joy to write. Even if the harsh word limit made them a challenge, it was a challenge I relished the entire time. A hundred words leaves little room for plot or setting or characterization, so you have to make what you have count. Based on the feedback so far, it seems like I succeeded. “Sacrifice” and “A Mouthful of Water” in particular might rank among the best stories I’ve ever written. I can’t wait to show them to the world!

I don’t have a release date yet, but since the anthology doesn’t close until December 31st, it seems safe to say we’re looking at sometime in 2026. Keep your eyes on this blog for updates!

“Hanging at Crosbhothar” Preorders and Release Date

Preorders for the standalone rerelease of Hanging at Crosbhothar are now live on Amazon!

Cover by Rachel Bowdler

Corpses hung from the ancient maple like leaves…

Brutal. Valiant. Monstrous. Heroic. Folk say many things about Eoghan One-Ear, but Knight-Mother Arlise Dun has seen for herself what the rebel-turned-bandit leaves in his wake: butchered innocents and burned-out villages.

After half a decade of faithful service with the Order of Watchers, Arlise knows all the faces of evil, and she knows this evil is more than a man. The distinct whiff of demonic influence surrounds these atrocities. Yet no demon seems to dwell inside the man himself.

If she’s to uncover the bandit lord’s true nature and deliver justice for those lynched at Crosbhothar, Arlise will need to contend with a carnomancer, a band of fanatical reavers, and her own thirst for vengeance.

Refined for release as a standalone novelette, Hanging at Crosbhothar is a dark heroic fantasy tale of approximately 10,000 words.

Hanging at Crosbhothar will be out on Halloween, October 31st!

Now, the Halloween release date is for the Kindle. Because this novelette has been published before, I can’t set a scheduled release for the paperback edition. I’ll have to launch it manually, and it could be a few days after I click the button before it’s available. Nevertheless, paperbacks should be available within the first week of November.

If the cover or blurb has caught your attention, you can preorder Hanging at Crosbhothar right here:

I’m really happy with how the new standalones have turned out. Hopefully you will be, too!

Update: September 2025

Doesn’t feel like it outside, but fall has arrived, and so have some milestones for me as a writer!

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Same as it has been all summer, most of my attention this month went to the rewrite of “Dusk and Dawn at Laufenden”. The final clash between Arlise and the huscarls took a lot of work. All the choreography took some finesse to balance, and it’s a real challenge to mimic the confusion of a chaotic melee in the dark without the result confusing the reader. Nevertheless, I finally managed to tie a bow on this scene of the story on the 16th!

It’s been a long time coming. About two months from start to finish. When I started Scene 3, the rewrite sat around 4000 words. Now? It’s 7600. This means the scene is just a few hundred words shorter than “One Bitter Note”. It also means the rewrite is definitely a novelette.

Since then, I’ve been taking a breather to attend to some other matters and outline the new Scene Four. Aside from elevating the text itself, the main reason for this rewrite was to hammer in the horror of what Arlise decided to do at Laufenden. And that’s what this final scene will be all about: forcing her–and the reader–to come face to face with the consequences of her ruthless order, to doubt whether the ends she achieved justified the means she used to achieve them, and to wonder if there’s any redemption for what she’s done. While the original did this to some extent, I want to drive those elements home and craft a bleaker end that isn’t so rushed because of an external deadline.

All of this means that while the general flow of the scene will remain the same until near the end, the exact events will be different, and I want them lined out so I don’t have to think out how each beat connects to the others while writing the actual draft. Ideally, I’ll be able to start next week and finish before October 22nd!

I’ll explain why that date’s important a little later…

Obviously, “Dusk and Dawn at Laufenden” didn’t take all of September. I also wrote two more drabbles, “On the Roadside” and “The Goatskin Codex”.

The first is another dark fantasy tale set in Anura. Like with “Born of the Moons”, Arlise isn’t the main character, but she does appear as a nameless Watch-Sister the main character finds wounded and unconscious on the side of the road. This one’s all about the triumph of kindness and compassion over self-interest, and definitely the most optimistic of the drabbles so far.

The other is cosmic horror. In fact, it’s the first cosmic horror story I’ve ever written. I’ve worked some bits and bobs into other stuff like “He Who Sows”, and I’ve written a lot of weird westerns or dark fantasy with strong elements from various horror subgenres, but I hadn’t taken the plunge into full-fledged horror … until now. “The Goatskin Codex” is also my first flirtation with the Cthulhu Mythos.

For all those firsts, I think it turned out well. Building tension and a sense of horror in just a hundred words was a real challenge, but the nucleus of this one lent itself to a drabble. It’s all about the disastrous effects an encounter with the titular book has on the unnamed narrator and the psyche. Classic stuff, but with my own twist on those themes.

Everyone who’s read it so far has given it high marks, so I’ve already sent it off to the Nightmare on Story Street horror microfiction contest, which is set to close at the end of September. The top five entries win prize money and publication, so fingers crossed!

Otherwise, I also ended up writing my longest poem ever as a personal project, a gift for a woman who’s become very dear to me. It’s a chōka and comes in at forty-three lines (or two hundred words). The speed at which those lines flowed out surprised me, but I guess it goes to show the depths of emotion involved. I’m not sure whether it’ll ever see the light of day (in the sense of actual publication) because it’s just so intensely personal, but it may be the best of my poetry in any form.

Finally, I secured letters of release for all three novelettes from Farthest Star. The old versions are down, and mine will be out soon. In fact, I just clicked submit on preorders for the Kindle edition of Hanging at Crosbhothar. Expect a formal announcement post once they’re live sometime in the next few days!

As you can probably tell, I’ve been on a cosmic horror binge ahead of the spooky season. Mostly, I’ve just been going back over Lovecraft “greatest hits” I haven’t reread in a while. First up was At the Mountains of Madness, then The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Whisperer in Darkness, and “The Haunter of the Dark”. The latter is probably my favorite.

I also tore through the last volume of Lovecraftiana, which was a mixed bag, but I really enjoyed the poetry and the short story “House of the Holy” by PN Harrison, whose West Texas setting and apparent connections to Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone” got me thinking about creating my own clutch of Mythos stories out in a fictional panhandle county of Oklahoma. Kinda like what Ramsay Campbell did with his Severn Valley as a backdrop for Mythos stories in England.

Speaking of Ramsay Campbell, I’m currently reading Far Away & Never, a collection of tales about his sword & sorcery hero Ryre. An enjoyable assortment so far, and Campbell’s background as a horror author shines through in his diabolical monsters. They’re so well suited for S&S!

I also decided to pick up a paperback of Campbell’s The Inhabitant of the Lake & Other Unwelcome Tenants, a collection of much of his Mythos fiction. I’m curious how it compares to Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith. Apparently, this edition is also illustrated, which I’m looking forward to even more.

Finally, I’ve also picked up the latest issues of Savage Realms Monthly. Hopefully I can finish it off before the end of my subscription to Kindle Unlimited.

Outside of writing and reading, things are a little rougher. Earlier this month, I noticed a small bump behind my back molar on the upper left and went in to have it examined. Turns out that bump is one corner of my wisdom tooth! Neither my dentist nor the oral surgeon who saw me last year expected them to drop, but…surprise!

Fortunately, I was able to get an extraction scheduled with the same surgeon who did the last one so well, and because we’ll be taking a panoramic X-ray beforehand, we’ll also be able to take out the other wisdom tooth on the upper right if it looks like it’ll be a problem as well. My dentist didn’t check the right, but it feels like it might’ve dropped as well, even if it’s not as far along.

So that’s the significance of October 22nd; I’ll probably be out of commission for a week or so, just focusing on recovery.

If I’m lucky, by the time I write my next update for you all, that recovery will be just about over, I’ll have finished “Dusk and Dawn at Laufenden”, and we’ll be celebrating the release of Hanging at Crosbhothar. Until then, take care. I’ll see you all in October!

Update: August 2025

August seems like it arrived a week ago, and now it’s just…gone! But a lot happened in between.

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Just like July, most of this month went to the rewrite of “Dusk and Dawn at Laufenden”.

Scene Three has been one roadblock after another. The new version of setting Laufenden ablaze wasn’t too bad, but the transition gave me a ton of grief. Arlise, a mercenary sorcerer, and a few chosen warriors are detached, so once their overheated arrows catch the cabin roofs on fire, they had to rejoin her company before I could get into the battle itself. Eventually, I worked out something I was satisfied with, but it was a struggle.

The actual battle brought its own challenges. Darkness has fallen, one of the moons is about to set, and the inferno devouring Laufenden leaves the soldiers and civilians who stream out silhouetted. There wasn’t much detail to work with at all. Ultimately, I decided to blend what visuals there were with other sensory detail and the reasoning behind the fateful decision Arlise makes when faced with the choice of letting the Usurper break out or striking a decisive blow to end the civil war at the cost of innocent lives.

All that remains is to cover the final clash between her and mounted huscarls defending the Usurper. Each battle scene comes with its own difficulties, but there should be far fewer here. This one is up-close, in-your-face action. The main character can actually see who and what she’s fighting, so there’s room for a lot of visceral detail. Even better, the scene isn’t extensive. If I’m lucky, I should be able to finish this beat–and the whole scene–next week.

From there, it’ll be on to the fourth and final scene. Initially, I thought working in the emotional impact of walking through the aftermath would be the most difficult part of the entire rewrite, but at least she can see stuff at sunrise. With what could be the most difficult beat I’ve ever written out of the way, I’m hopeful I’ll be able to move faster and finish the whole rewrite by the end of September. Of course, I’ve said this before, haven’t I? First it was June, then July, then August.

At minimum, I want to be done before we’re too deep into October so I can dedicate more attention to the launch of Hanging at Crosbhothar and pre-orders of The Gale at Quiet Cove and The Skull in the Tree. To this end, I’m considering bumping back the release dates of all three. Not a lot; I’d like to have the former out on or a little before Halloween, and the other two at the end of November and December.

I’ll be in touch with Farthest Star to remove their edition once the first contract ends in September. Then it’ll be time for one final review, and the standalone novelettes will head off for publication!

“Dusk and Dawn at Laufenden” didn’t consume all of August; I also wrote another drabble! “Born of the Moons” is a little dark fantasy yarn focused on a werewolf’s transformation. Like “One Bitter Note”, it’s not told from Arlise’s POV. However, she does cameo near the end. I feel like this one is excellent. About even with “A Mouthful of Water”. There’s a little less story, and the setting is less defined, but the horror of an incurable werewolf curse comes across in all its awful detail.

Now, I just need two more drabbles to round out the five. The sole idea I’ve had since “Born of the Moons” feels like it would be better as flash fiction. Nevertheless, I’m sure I’ll find a few sooner or later.

Finally, some awesome news arrived last week: Burial Books sent me an acceptance for “One Bitter Note”! Their sword & sorcery anthology doesn’t have a title or cover at the moment, but I’m excited to have a seat at the table. At the moment, we’re looking at a release sometime Fall 2026. I’ll be sure to share more details as I learn them!

Aside from continuing to churn my way through issues of Savage Realms Monthly, I also dug out my Kindle edition of Grub Line Rider by Louis L’Amour. It’s been an entertaining read so far. Obviously, it’s not the same as the sword & sorcery I’ve been immersed in all summer, but the collected stories share a lot of that pulp DNA. I particularly liked the start of “Black Rock Coffin Makers”; it’s incredibly dynamic, and I’d love to experiment with a similar dynamism in my own work.

Today, I ordered an old Solomon Kane collection originally published by Baen back in 1995. Most of it’s stuff I’ve read before, but it includes a fragments Robert E. Howard left behind that were finished by Ramsey Campbell. I’ve heard some good stuff about them, but this is the sole collection I’ve ever found that includes them, so I’m excited to get my hands on this one!

My astronomy drought continues, with the same trap as July. Most of the month, it was too hot and humid to make for comfortable stargazing. And in the last week, where it’s been cool and comfortable, we’ve been clouded over. It’s maddening!

Here’s hoping for some clear skies in September.

Football’s back in season, so I’m trying out a dynasty as OSU in CFB 26. Oregon gave me fits, but I’m undefeated so far. I don’t expect that to hold true in real life, but there were some flashes of greatness in our game with last night with UT Martin. If only Hejney hadn’t broken a bone in his foot! Sometimes, it seems like bad luck haunts us everywhere. But, hey, at least our losing streak is over!

Hopefully when I type up next month’s post, I’ll be able to tell you I’m all done with the rewritten “Dusk and Dawn at Laufenden”!

“One Bitter Note” Accepted for Publication by Burial Books!

Some fantastic news arrived over the weekend: Burial Books has accepted “One Bitter Note” for their upcoming sword & sorcery anthology!

“One Bitter Note” is best described as “The Tell-Tale Heart” meets the legend of the Pied Piper. Ever since about 2017, I’ve been trying to write a Pied Piper-inspired story featuring Arlise. Most of these efforts fit the classic fantasy mystery model I started out with and never made it more than a scene or two. Something about them just didn’t click for me.

Finally, at the end of last summer, I decided to try a totally new approach. What if I turned the story on its head? What if the story featured Arlise but didn’t follow Arlise? What if it had a villain protagonist in the form of the Piper?

From there, it all started to fit. Setting the story in the aftermath instead of during the events themselves allowed me to avoid a mere retelling and cultivate an atmosphere of mystery, paranoia, and guilt really reminiscent of “The Tell-Tale Heart”. There’s little action in this one. Instead, it’s all about the ebb and flow of tension as our mad minstrel Hunold feels out the woman who’s sat down across the cookfire from him.

There are also some fantastic weird, eldritch elements. If you like those, I think you’ll be in for a real treat.

Unfortunately, we could be waiting a while. This anthology is still in the very early stages; Burial Books doesn’t even have a title yet, let alone a cover, and they’re telling me we’re shooting for release sometime in Fall 2026.

Nevertheless, I’m really excited about this one, and I’ll be sure to share more when I know more. Keep your eyes on this blog for updates on “One Bitter Note”!

“Seven Diamonds for Soqqith” Out Now in Tales of Talmenor, Volume 2

After about three years behind a paywall, my fantasy short story “Seven Diamonds for Soqqith” is finally available for general readers in paperback and ebook editions of Tales of Talmenor, Volume 2!

Hawwa bint Huda el-Zaidi will do anything to bring back her children, even if it means delivering a strange jewel to a desert cult. But when she discovers what the jewel will unleash, Hawwa must decide whether saving her family is worth damning the world…

Even though it’s been released in the second volume, “Seven Diamonds for Soqqith” was actually the first story I wrote in Talmenor, a fantasy RPG setting owned and created by the folks at FoxFireFiction. I found them by sheer happenstance on Upwork. They were looking for short fiction writers with experience in sword & sorcery and heroic fantasy, and what could’ve been a better fit for me?

At the time, I was working my way through the second campaign of Critical Role, perhaps the most famous actual-play RPG series out there. Fjord (played by Travis Willingham) really intrigued me as a character; he’s a half-orc warlock who stumbled into a pact with the shadowy, sinister entity Uk’otoa. Uk’otoa’s presence looms large over several arcs of the campaign, and Fjord becomes more and more disenchanted with the creature until turns his back on it entirely.

Aside from being a fantastic arc, I’m a sucker for ruins and lost cities and anything else with a trace of fantasy archaeology, which the Mighty Nein’s adventures tied to Uk’otoa had in spades. All of this was swirling around in my brain when I signed on with FoxFireFiction, so I decided to craft my own fantastical “Deal with the Devil” tale centered on a warlock and ancient secrets tucked in lost ruins.

Of course, I wanted to tell a distinct story. The ocean is great for eldritch adventures, since the ocean can hide so much, but it’s not alone there. Deserts are also vast, dangerous, and dotted with ruins in our own world. And instead of a half-orc sailor, I went with a human adventurer who retired to raise her family and went into the caravan business with members of her old party.

Alas, misfortune befell her children, and in her desperate search to raise them from the dead, Hawwa stumbled across a bizarre egg-shaped diamond. A diamond that in turn brought her into contact with the powerful draconic entity Soqqith. For centuries, he’s been bound in a magically-induced slumber deep in the deserts of Yeniden. The diamond is the last of seven keys needed to set him free. And if she delivers it to his cult, he’ll make her a mother again.

Of course, nothing is ever as easy as it seems. There are some real twists and turns in this one. If you’d like to find out all about them, click the button below to check out Tales of Talmenor, Volume 2 over on Amazon. Right now, it’s available to read for free if you’re a subscriber to Kindle Unlimited!

Tales of Talmenor, Volume 2

“The Beast of Saltern” Out Now in Tales of Talmenor, Volume 1

After years of niche availability, my fantasy tale “The Beast of Saltern” is finally available to the public via paperback and ebook editions of Tales of Talmenor, Volume 1!

Sir Owen Gibbs knows the forests of Tarith like the back of his hand. He’s faced poachers, man-eating predators, and even akor’mari. But nothing in all those years of experience has prepared him for the wickedly cunning monster stalking the coastal village of Saltern. Can Owen outwit the Beast of Saltern before it claims another victim?

“The Beast of Saltern” is actually the second story I wrote for Talmenor, a medieval-esque fantasy tabletop RPG setting owned and created by the folks at FoxFireFiction.

At the time, I was reading famous British-Indian hunter Jim Corbett’s book Man-Eaters of Kumaon, which recounts his experience hunting man-eating tigers and leopards in British India. The account of his hunt for the Thak Man-Eater was vivid, especially the bits where he described how it felt like the tiger was hunting him in turn and may have laid an ambush for him in the abandoned village of Thak, and the drama of killing her on the last night of the last hunt in his career at very close range was almost storybook.

The Thak Man-Eater’s behavior struck a chord with one of the monsters in the lore handout from FoxFireFiction, and so the nucleus of “The Beast of Saltern” was born!

Sir Owen Gibbs fits the classic “ranger” archetype familiar to anyone who knows Dungeons & Dragons. There’s a lot of Jim Corbett in him, what with his skill as a hunter and woodsman and his experience hunting dangerous predators, but he’s also a veteran and bears the scars of war. What he encounters in “The Beast of Saltern” threatens to tear those scars open and leads to a climax as thrilling as the one from that final chapter in Man-Eaters of Kumaon.

If this story or any of the dozen others in Tales of Talmenor, Volume 1 has piqued your interest, click the button below to check it out on Amazon. And if you’re a Kindle Unlimited member, you can read it for free as part of your membership!

Tales of Talmenor, Volume 1

Print & Ebook Release of “The Beast of Saltern” and “Seven Diamonds for Soqqith”

I received some very good, very unexpected news last night: FoxFireFiction has released two collections of short stories and novellas set in their world of Talmenor, which include my contributions “The Beast of Saltern” and “Seven Diamonds for Soqqith”!

Previously, these two were only available on FoxFireFiction’s website, and all the stories published there become paywalled within a few weeks of their release. Now, you can finally get your hands on ebooks and paperbacks!

Even better, the ebook editions of both collections are available via Kindle Unlimited, so if your book budget is tight, you still have some options.

Talmenor is a pseudo-medieval fantasy world and TTRPG setting created and owned by FoxFireFiction. These two stories were my first experience with tie-in fiction, and I couldn’t be happier to have contributed. Both turned out wonderfully. “The Beast of Saltern”–collected in Volume 1–sees ranger-archetype Sir Owen Gibbs hunt a man-eating monstrosity plaguing the isolated village of Saltern, inspired hunter Jim Corbett’s fantastic memoirs of his own hunts in Man-Eaters of Kumaon. Meanwhile, “Seven Diamonds for Soqqith” follows the warlock-esque former adventurer Hawwa bint Huda el-Zaidi as she strives to fulfill a deal with her shadowy patron and become a mother once more. If you loved Fjord’s character arc in Campaign 2 of Critical Role, I’m sure you’ll enjoy getting to know Hawwa.

I’ll do separate, more detailed posts for each collection later this week, but for now, you can check out both of them with the buttons below:

Tales of Talmenor: Volume 1Tales of Talmenor: Volume 2

Update: July 2025

July turned out to be a surprisingly busy month!

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Most of the work this month has been on the rewrite of “Dusk and Dawn at Laufenden”.

A lot went into a new action sequence for the first scene. Originally, Arlise and her battalion cut down a group of routers from an earlier battle with little issue before riding on to Laufenden. In the new version, I decided to have those routers make a stand. It’s still incredibly one-sided, but she has her mount cut out from under her and nearly dies at the hands of a nameless halberdier. The scene has a visceral texture to it that I feel does a far better job capturing the chaos and, in some cases, random chance inherent to warfare. Not to mention creating a lot more tension.

Last week, I finished the second scene, in which Arlise and her officers debate the best course of action while a mage heals her wounds from the aforementioned fight outside of town. I’ve come a long way as a writer since 2017, and I feel like that really shines through in the new dialogue here. Far less stilted than the original, and when combined with the narration, it gives the reader deeper insight into why she decides to burn the Usurper out of Laufenden.

There’s still a lot left to do, though! Two whole scenes, in fact. Yes, two. I realized a few weeks ago that I’ve been smooshing the last two together in my head this entire time.

I’ll be starting the third this week. While it covers the actual Battle of Laufenden, I don’t think it will be quite as extensive in terms of word count as the first scene. Almost all the action takes place at range instead of up close and in your face, so there’s less detail to cover. Plus, the fact a lot of the battle blends together for her means I can afford to tell the less interesting parts rather than show them. Nevertheless, I’ll still have my work cut out for me. I’m totally overhauling the initial firing of the village, and the clash with what Arlise thinks are the Usurper’s bodyguards attempting a breakout still needs to be intense.

Meanwhile, the fourth feels like it’ll need an almost total rewrite. Not just in terms of the text itself but aspects of the plot as well. I wrote the original on a fairly tight deadline, which I only beat by a few hours thanks to time zone differences, so the ending in particular is rushed. For the new version, I want to bring home the horror Arlise unleashed with her well-intentioned orders. I want the reader to feel as sick as she does, and the end needs to hammer her sorrow, despair, and hopelessness home in a way the original didn’t. It was too hopeful. Owing to its position in the collection I’m putting together, this new version can afford to be bleak.

Of what’s left, that final scene will probably be the real troublemaker. Intense emotion and visceral detail can be hard to write well, and I’ll be flying by the seat of my pants. After all, at the level of detail I want to work in, it’ll be a serious departure from the original.

Hopefully, I’ll be done by the end of August. Of course, who knows; I’d hoped to be done by the end of July, too!

“Dusk and Dawn at Laufenden” hasn’t taken up all of July, though. Since this call for submissions to a flash fiction/micro-fiction anthology caught my attention a while back, I’ve decided to dabble in drabbles: micro-fiction with a word count of exactly 100. It’s been an intriguing–occasionally frustrating–challenge, but this month, I’ve written two drabbles I think are good enough for publication.

The idea for the first, “A Mouthful of Water”, hit me out of the blue. One of the contributors to the latest mailing of TRIAPA (the Trigon Amateur Press Association) shared some drabbles he’d written, and reading them gave me a feel for the form that set my own creative wheels in motion. Almost immediately, I remembered a passage from Robert E. Howard’s “The Blood of the Gods” that stood out to me:

He slipped the limp bags from his shoulder, cocked his rifle and went forward to kill or be killed–not for gold, nor the love of a woman, nor an ideal, nor a dream, but for as much water as could be carried in a goatskin bag.

The idea of being forced to kill or be killed for a need as basic as water was a powerful one, a stark contrast to the causes that so often drive violent fictional conflict, and it gave me the seed for “A Mouthful of Water”. Set late in her career as a rudderless sellsword and adventurer, it showcases Arlise in a similar situation while traveling through the Sea of Sands.

Maybe this is recency bias, but I think it’s turned out to be one of my best stories.

“Shiver” is earlier, back when she was a shield-bearer and lover of the Prince of Riso. I first alluded to their doomed romance and added a little more detail in the still unfinished “In the Web of Fate”, but this is the first time I’ve shown what happened outright. I just wrote it over the weekend, so it’s a little raw. Rougher than “A Mouthful of Water”, but it still turned out well.

This anthology allows up to five drabble submissions per author, so I’ve got a few more to go. I’d like to find more brief but striking incidents from her life to serve as a basis for them, but I may use characters other than Arlise. After all, the anthology casts a broad net with fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction (but no sci-fi).

Finally, I’m all done with the novelette reprints. Covers are attached, proof copies have been reviewed, final adjustments are done, domestic and foreign prices are set. All that’s left is to click the button. I’m holding off for now, as I still need to send in my request to have Farthest Star remove their edition of these standalones, and I can’t do that for another month or two under our contract. But all the actual work is done!

Expect a flurry of posts on this blog about pre-orders once those become available.

While I had intended to grab a collection of Robert E. Howard’s westerns, the edition I’d been looking at vanished from the Kindle Store, so I decided to grab the first of three massive Elric volumes instead. I’ve been interested in Elric for a while, since he’s one of the more sorcerous S&S protagonists, but the order is a little convoluted, so this seemed like a good place to start. In particular, this volume contains the original short fiction, which is what I’ve been after the most.

Shortly afterwards, Amazon offered me three free months of Kindle Unlimited, so I’m plowing through whatever I can. First up was a collection of Steve Dilks’ stories featuring Bohun. I first encountered Dilks and Bohun in the first issue of Savage Realms Monthly, then ran into him a few more times in other venues. Bohun’s one of the more memorable modern S&S heroes I’ve read so far, and Dilks has a knack for weaving in the cosmic horror elements of sword & sorcery, so I’m glad I found the collection.

After finishing Bohun, I started catching up on back issues of Savage Realms. I’ve combed through a bunch of them before and (I think) came close to landing a story with them a couple years back, so I decided to see what they’re publishing these days. Both issues I’ve finished so far were enjoyable pulpy reads, especially “The Shadows Beneath the Stone” by Jonathan Maberry, which was the first story in Issue #29.

I’m sad to say I still haven’t been able to get out and stargaze since the lunar eclipse back in March. Spring was either storms or clouds, so was June, and the last week or two of July have been monstrously hot and humid. I miss the rain!

On the bright side, we had a lovely Fourth of July. Not too hot, no rain to ruin the fireworks, and we enjoyed a fantastic cinnamon roll poke cake, which I’ve never had before, but it was addictive. I cannot recommend it highly enough…as long as you remember to watch the sugar. So rich!

“One Bitter Note” is out making the rounds at a bunch of markets, so hopefully I’ll have some good news to share ahead of my next update in August. Until then, take care!