February Update

Time for another fan update. Because real writers do that, or so I’ve read.

Last time I mentioned a short story about a magic sword with a bad personality. Well, I got bored with that. I was trying to write it from the perspective of the sword, which sounded very cool in my head, but, well, it didn’t work out.

I did, in fact, write a short story called Lucas the Jewish Vampire, which I thought was hilarious, but it will probably not be as funny when I go back to revise it. (In it, I learned that vampires are afraid of rabbis… who knew?)

I also wrote a very short story about a harpy named Margway, who was a side character in my NaNoWriMo novel Kubak Outpost. The short story is the chapter I had envisioned to introduce her character long before I had decided on the Kubak story. In it, we find out she had lost her son in a tragic accident, and her husband died in battle (mainly from grief over losing their son), and then she was driven out of her home eyrie, so now she wanders the land, bitter and alone, looking for her true purpose in life. As it turned out, none of that was relevant to the Kubak story. But I thought the harpy race has been sorely under-represented in fantasy literature.

Speaking of Kubak Outpost, I think I have decided that instead of splitting it into two different novellas, I will attempt (later) to patch it all up into one novel. I think I just need to move some of the elements from the second half up closer to the beginning.

Before revisiting Kubak, though, I began a new fantasy novel, part of my finish-two-more-novels-before-November master plan. It was going to be set in a world with big floating creatures that served as transportation between mountain cities, but as I outlined and re-outlined and re-re-outlined the story (something I don’t normally do, incidentally), the flying stuff didn’t come into play at all, so now it’s just set in a regular old medieval city, where the Elahi aristocracy breed and train their Buhite servants, sort of like dog breeders. What could possibly be more uplifting than a story about the human capacity to fully degrade and de-humanize another species?

Oh, and I installed WordPress on my site, so I won’t be using Tumblr anymore. Now you can see my witty Twitter updates and my witty blog posts in the same place!