On November 16, 2022, I published Love’s Repast on Wattpad.

Ahh, Wattpad. I mean, at least it’s getting read by a few people, that’s nice. I promise I won’t bitch about Amazon Vella anymore. Okay, I’m lying. I’m likely to continue griping about it. Anyway.

This 3,000 story was written in response to a Reedsy writing prompt that read:

Having only 3,000 words to work with, I wanted to write something familiar that everyone would relate to, so this is a story about writing a love note.

In writing about love, I thought Joliver Barleywood would be the best character so I brought him out; this is his first independent, stand-alone story. Joliver Barleywood first appeared in The Ballad of Skyer Dannon.

I put Joliver in the City State of Nodderton in a secret library called the Athenaeum which is, after all, just a fancy name for a library, regrettably referring to Athens which doesn’t exist in my setting but I thought I could get away with it.

If you happen to play Dungeons & Dragons, you know that Bards, as a class, choose a Bardic College at 3rd Level, and I worked this into the story. In order to join the college in Nodderton, Joliver had to find the library where I picture a good urban adventure hunting down clues on where to find it. This hasn’t ever happened and I’ve never introduced my players to an Athenaeum in Nodderton, but it’s there now!

Joliver is joined by the principal protagonist, a young blacksmith’s apprentice named Jak Lot. The character’s name follows my usual one-syllable consonant plus a vowel structure for most in the Nodderton region. Faw Kag, from The Knave of Nodderton, or Den Cobb from this story, all follows the same naming idea.

In this story, I’ve reintroduced a Diary of Correspondence, a device that I refer to in A Goblet of Bone.

It has some tinges of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and it’s meant to; early on, though, I have Joliver say a line where he’s not going to write this love letter for Jak Lot, so we could avoid that trap. This wasn’t going to be a retelling of that story.

I actually wanted to turn this classic story on its head and deny Jak Lot his girl, perhaps shifting the reader’s perspective of the ending mid-way through. I wanted to make a convincing argument that Jak Lot wasn’t really what the woman in the story wanted.

I think, sometimes, we just need to recognize, no matter how much we want something to be, it’s probably not good for us. It’s not good for you, being something you aren’t, or for them, chasing after someone who clearly wants something else. Love’s like that: sometimes you have to admit to yourself that, yikes, this isn’t going to work - not in a million years - and I should step away from it. The party I’m enamoured with can probably do better and just let them go.

So that’s this story. The protagonist runs into a wall. Instead, Joliver offers another way to think about it. True love, the truest, is letting someone go; acts governed by selflessness. Believe me, I can recall a handful of relationships in my life where I should have had some of Joliver’s advice and just dropped it. It could have saved me a lot of time and money, and would have aligned my perception closer to reality.

I had fun with the ending because I made it kind of X-Files-ey, resulting in something fitting for a secret library, I thought.

I had fun writing it! Thanks for reading -

R