Well, ladies and gentlemen, at this point we are at the end of the latest round of essay content. From here, I plan to return to fiction starting next week!

Due to a general state of business over Thanksgiving I wound up taking last weekend off unannounced, for which I apologize. Long term readers of this blog are aware that I typically take a week off between essays and the beginning of a new project. Since I took Thanksgiving off I’m going to call that my vacation week, which means we’ll be kicking off my next fiction project on December 13th.

Before diving into that, a few housekeeping notes. After finishing The Drownway I took a slightly longer than normal break for reasons that I did not explain. I feel like I owe you, my oldest audience, an explanation for that. You see, I was cheating on you.

In late August I learned that the website Honeyfeed was running a novel writing contest that ended on September 29th. It carried a generous cash prize and the potential to earn a publishing contract, things which I confess interested me a great deal. So I spent a large chunk of that month chained to my writing desk, writing and publishing a manuscript for that contest. Alas, I did not make it through the initial round of judging. However, the entirety of The 7th Sphere is available there for your reading pleasure! If you wish to check it out I think you’ll find it enjoyable. You can find it here:

The 7th Sphere

My next project is a return to the Columbian West! It’s been a year or so since I set down any of the adventures of Roy Harper and I’ve missed him a lot.

Roy was conceived of as a set of eyes to see the world of Columbia through so I always intended to keep him on the move. One of my intentions was to never show him in the same place twice. However he is a man with a home and obligations as well, and I knew that I’d have to look at what those are like sooner or later. Towards that end I created Oakheart Manor and put it on the shelf, an idea for a tale somewhere down the line. It’s one of the earliest storylines I conceived of when thinking about the character.

Alongside that idea was the difficulty of addressing Roy’s history. I don’t want the stories to get bogged down in naval gazing but Columbia is a setting with a lot of history and I wanted to work as much of it in as I could. Anyone who’s read Roy’s previous adventures can see that. Yet I didn’t want to the novellas to move all over in the time line but instead flow one into the next. (Short stories are another matter.)

All of these ideas and needs came together to weave together into A Precious Cornerstone. It’s a story I struggled with for a while but I’m finally ready to present to you. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I enjoyed working it out. If you need to get caught up to speed on Roy’s adventures and you want to support what I do here, be sure to check out my book Have Spell, Will Travel, which collects all of Roy’s adventures up to this point in one convenient package. You can snag a copy on Amazon here:

See you next week!