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Author’s Notes: The Keening Cup
On Tuesday, January 3, 2023, I published The Keening Cup to Wattpad.
I wrote this story in response to a Reedsy Writing Prompt:
“Your character always makes the same promise: to change. Will they finally make it happen this time?”
This story takes place in Pondaroak in the Aevalorn Parishes, with Elina Hogsbreath at the Swindle & Swine.
Keening is the act of wailing in grief over a dead person. Wailing women figure prominently in Celtic mythology and certainly have a place in the Swindle.
I borrowed the concept of a banshee - a spirit that heralds the death of a family member - and tied it to a blackthorn wood cup.
Blackthorn trees are common throughout the British Isles and are viewed in Wicca tradition as being a trickster shrub; some Celtic lore assigns negative, sinister properties to the tree. This is the second time I wrote in a blackthorn to symbolize a sinister space or item; the first time was in The Murkwode Reaving.
I introduced a vain, attention-grubbing halfling, Horwich Cobbleberry, who uses a cursed cup to garner attention from fellow townsfolk. Horwich (Horry, he’s an attention whore, get it?), promises Elina every year that he’ll stop using the cup, and it’s a promise that he makes every year.
Horwich isn’t too difficult to imagine as an individual. People who brashly tempt fate, thinking they’ll never be harmed? Or without the foresight to see how others might be harmed by their own actions? Horwich isn’t too complicated and is probably someone we’d find in a bar on New Year’s Eve.
A part of the story is the idea of New Year celebrations. What if you could know if you were to die in the next year? Would you want to know? Would you dare to know? That’s kind of the crux of the story, where Horry is playing a double-dog dare every year.
The story’s theme is about irrational brashness that can lead to despair. Why do we tempt fate? Why do we risk knowing something we’d be better off not knowing? What’s the allure of celebrating people who are reckless with our own safety? Like, stepping into a car knowing the guy driving is intoxicated. Why do we encourage it, and why are we so accepting of their risk?
I start the story at the ending, where Elina’s digging a hole to bury the cursed cup. I thought that would make a good wrap on the story after I sent Horwich bounding into the forest.
When Elina enters her kitchen, she reviews a list of hallucinogenic herbs and psychoactive plants (belladonna, mandrake, sumac, poke root), and the astute reader gets the impression that she’s preparing reagents to create a hallucinatory effect. One of my advance readers actually burst out loud laughing after reading what I was up to in the story.
So Elina appears to be sabotaging Cobbleberry’s big moment, but she’s not sociopathic. Hopefully, I project to the reader that she’s just kind of done with the promises and wants to end the cup’s influence in her inn, once and for all. She doesn’t want to hurt Horwich, but he’s got to be taught a lesson so the yearly ritual can be brought to an end.
In my attempt to show Elina really cares about him, she reminds Horwich where to find a bullaun and to help himself. In another Celtic tradition, a bullaun is a cure or curse stone where its waters are magical.
So, is the Keening Cup really enchanted? What the banshee real or just a hallucination? I think that’s part of the story's charm where I really don’t need to say - the reader can make up their own mind.
I’ll tell you the idea of a cursed cup buried out back the Swindle & Swine is very appealing. I wonder what else is buried out there? Sounds like the stuff of a new story.
As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking around. :)
R
5 Things I Avoid as a Fantasy Author
I have opinions.
This is one of my “get off my lawn” rants, so it carries a tone. I’ll apologize in advance.
Readers who follow my writing might notice that I tend to avoid certain tropes.
I avoid them because I find their presence in the fantasy genre as boneheaded, redundant, and dull.
Here at the five things that I try to avoid in my stories.
DRAGONS
Dragon tears, dragon blood, dragon venom, dragon people, dragon genes, dragon teeth, dragon gems, dragon wings, eyes of a dragon, dragon riders, blah blah blah.
If you think about it, a dragon is an apex being with no rival. Aside from others of its kind, just a clutch of dragons would decimate an ecosystem. The brood would have to spread out to find enough food to eat or gold to horde, so really, dragons shouldn’t be depicted as coexisting with nature but ravaging it. They’re an enemy of nature. If we’re to find a dragon, we should expect to find a barren countryside with all of its natural resources expended. After they’d consume everything, then they just fly right off and move to another until the fantasy world the author so diligently built is just mud and slag.
So unless the author places the dragon into a bleak wasteland where it’s consumed everything, why read the book? And even then, what’s there to write about because their species is dying. Perhaps if we zoomed-in on the moment when the last dragon inhaled its last breath so that nature could recover from the massive devastation it caused. Now there’s a good story!
The moment I start reading a fantasy book with a dragon in it, I get skeptical. I’m really tired of giant, anatomically-impossible, flying lizards with magical powers. Aren’t you?
ELVES
Groan. I’m so sick of elves.
They’re like Superman in the DC Universe.
Is there nothing that can stop them short of this super rare mineral that’s remarkably abundant on Earth?
In every respect, elves are so far superior to mankind that they should be a dominant species and enslave man (a la, “The Fey”, Kristine Rusch).
What’s this “friendship” between an evolutionary superior species and a bunch of lesser wanna-be’s? Did we see Homo Sapien and the Neandertal “get along”, go on quests together, have a pint of ale at the nearby tavern? No! Homo Sapiens came in with their larger brain and beat the smaller brains out of the neandertal if they didn’t outright fornicate with them to make them part of the “family”.
Elves are ridiculously overpowered critters. They’re so overpowered that, in the context of writing about them, their culture, art, scholarship, and instruments of war have no comparison. There are no threats, so, like Superman, you have to throw gods at them to create a conflict.
When you write about elves, you might as well be writing about demigods. In fact, in my writing, I do regard elves as demigods, and I don’t necessarily incorporate them into principal characters. The moment I introduce an elf protagonist, they’d steal the show; they have no flaws. They don’t even die appropriately. They, like, board a boat to go the east rather than just simply dying and decaying, like the rest of us.
Ugh! Elves! Really?
ROMANCE
I am so sick and tired of seeing “best selling” books capitalize on hyper-sexualized supernatural (read: werewolf or vampire) BDSM dominatrixes.
Further, why does the female protagonist, to be interesting, need to be something fantastic? Like, chosen to breed? A mistress? Part alien? Or own a “reverse harem”?
Can’t we conceive of a female protagonist with no special powers who doesn’t have an “off-the-rails” libido? Or desperate to find their one true love at the expense of living their own damned life? Who is simply a woman and a person all at the same time?
I’m also very sick of romance, as a genre, spilling into fantasy and eroding the search algorithms. If you’re going to write a romance, put it on a cruise ship with a bald captain and be done with it. Every romance everywhere should simply be on the Love Boat. Get out of my magical forests with bugbears, halflings, and unicorns; they don’t get a flip about your emotional needs.
I don’t write romance - I write fantasy! I want to escape reality, not lament about how bad my own love life is, and pine over the unobtainable.
USELESS DESCRIPTIONS
One of the biggest annoyances that I have about modern fiction is the outright need to explain things in seven pages that would take one paragraph.
I’m lookin’ at you Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin!
When you write about a meadow, you should say, “The protagonist entered a meadow,” not provide seven pages of description about the meadow since it has no bearing on the outcome of the story! It’s just filler! It’s like, how many ways can you say that the character entered a meadow? Just one! “The character entered a meadow!”
Same for food. Hey, I like to spend a few paragraphs explaining food in my work, true, but do we need a history of each meal to be offered as some rationale by the author as to why it’s being served? Do I need to know where the potatoes came from, who they were cultivated by, and how they were yanked out of the ground? No! “Baked potatoes were on the table, and they were hot.” That’s all you need to say!
What’s funny about this is that I’ve always joked that my own novels would actually be about 10 pages long. The protagonist thinks this, does that, stabs this person, celebrates, end of story. I guess this is why I write short stories. Why take seven pages to describe something? I don’t get it. And it’s boring. Stop it!
MONARCHIES
Kingdoms… cringe. I’m so sick of kings. And their doms.
Why must a monarchy govern everything? Why is there a singular guy (usually white) in charge all things? And everybody answers to him?
I mean, why not have a perfectly acceptable fantasy setting that’s ruled by a council of old women? Or how about if people shake potato bugs in a jar to make decisions? Or, looking at indigenous cultures, are there committees or groups or people who make complex decisions over lifetimes? Certainly, in a fantasy setting, we can do better than monarchies.
I really like the potato bugs in a jar governance style. I think I’ll try using that.
Anyway, there’s my rant. Thanks for reading!
R
Author’s Note: The Murkwode Reaving
On Thursday November 24, 2022, I published The Murkwode Reaving on Wattpad.
So the title is fantastical and archaic.
The Murkwode comes from the Scottish word murk combined with the old English word for wood, wode.
Tolkien already did the Mirkwood, so I couldn’t do that, and the video game, The Elder Scrolls, did Murkwood. Still, I wanted my own “murky woods.”
Reaving is a very old word that most would recognize from the Scottish word “reive”; present participle of “reave”, which is also Old English: to rob, raid, steal, plunder.
I try to pair these concepts explored in the narrative, like trespass, to try to build the larger idea: this is a story where my heroes work their way through an old wood to plunder a grave.
My goals for this project were to:
Write a 12,000-word gritty action and adventure story involving a soldier with PTSD.
Feature Bartram Humblefoot.
Relate Bartram’s Paladin ordination.
The antagonist would be Confessor Bog.
The moral would be that you can’t take anything for granted; anything important needs to be earned.
The final draft of the work landed around 16,500 words. So that worked out.
Readers of my work would recognize Confessor Bog as the antagonist in The Ballad of Skyer Dannon, but the Ballad took place 400 years before the events in this story, and Confessor Bog was burned alive. How’d there be anything left? And that’s where the wraith and wight elements of the story came from. I needed a way to explain Bog's presence, which fit nicely. Readers would also recognize the way Bog died and his vestments; I liked the cross-over.
When I started, I knew I would kill off one of the three soldiers accompanying Bartram. I first thought it’d be Rab. But after working with the second episode, I thought I could do more with Rab while he was alive and have it contribute to the moral. I made up Platt’s backstory on the fly and found that it could also work with the project's overall theme.
I try to bring faith into Bartram’s stories; this story was no exception. That and a little bit of magic addressed the PTSD issues and spoke to the larger moral.
This work probably isn’t for everybody. It contains some challenging themes surrounding PTSD, adult language, graphic gore, and medieval violence.
I think the reception’s been good; rankings after three weeks:
There are a lot of D&D elements in the work that would attract the gamer to the story.
They’d notice the Paladin’s capabilities, the Oath of the Ancients and its abilities, the monster’s capabilities, some of the spells, and the constraints explored in the combat sequences.
I think non-gamers would appreciate the story for its action and grit, and its attempt to make something bigger out of the story.
This story is about the importance of earning something.
You just can’t be a great fighter overnight, like in Rab’s case; Platt worked for five years to earn his place in society; Bartram had to earn a lasting peace by heading into the Murkwode. Nothing’s handed to you. And doing the work is hard, and it takes time; the journey will put blisters on your hands or calluses on your feet.
It was very fun to write! I’ve been wanting to do an exciting Bartram story for a while.
Why I Write Short Stories and Novellas
Generally, I write short stories (<5000 words) and novellas (10,000 - 40,000) words.
Why? A couple of reasons.
First, rewriting a novel is a disheartening slog, and I use the term ‘rewriting’ intentionally: it’s a project that never ends. It’s a toil. For some, it can consume upwards of two years, and really, novels can languish for decades and never get done.
The prospect of endlessly working on just one endless project ticks me off. I’d much rather work on something with a definitive start and a definitive end, and even if I reworked it, it’d take a month, not a year. That just makes me feel happier.
Second, people wrote novels because it was the form expected by traditional publishers. As I recently wrote, modern books are electronically published, reproduced, and distributed at zero incremental cost. It doesn’t matter if my work is 300 words or 30,000 words: I can distribute both exactly the same way for free.
So who cares?
Finally, I think there’s a transition happening with consumer preferences and books. The very act of reading is changing. Few people are reading, and when they do read, they’re reading in shorter bursts of time. They’re reading on mobile electronic devices with smaller screens, like tablets and phones, where they can control the flow, typesetting, and introduction of new content. Bursts of reading activity with smaller samples, like, 2,000 words, benefit the serialization of fiction, where consumers are digesting reading as they would a series from Netflix. They’ll read one 2,000-word episode and return to the new episode later, or if they’ve time, binge 2-4 episodes at a time, not paying for an entire premium price of a novel, but instead paying for what they use/consume. I feel I’m writing in a format desired by modern consumers, perhaps at the exclusion of older consumers who prefer to own (rather than lease) thick, chunky novels at premium prices.
Generally, I write around 5,000 words a week so I can usually get through at least one book project a month. You know, there’s something comforting about starting a project and finishing it. Isn’t that what all writers really want? To play with an idea, build it out, and then move on to the next great thing?
Again, that idea just makes me happy. And if you write and bury yourself for two or more years in a writing project that just erodes your soul, I just don’t understand: why would you do that?
You don’t need to. Not anymore.
R
Dumbria
In my work, Dumbria is a two-parter.
In its first act, Dumbria appears as a slaver City State of Gaelwyn ran by a handful of wealthy corrupt families held together by religious fanaticism. That was 400 years prior to the current time wherein I base most of my stories.
Dumbria is the home of Bog the Confessor, a surprise villain in The Balland of Skyer Dannon; Bog the Confessor also makes a return appearance in The Murkwode Reaving as a wraith.
Dumbria got its wealth through slave labor, digging out the granite, limestone, and other materials used by all of the City States in Gaelwyn to construct their towers, castles, walls, and cities. Dumbrian ore, metals, and stone was the fabric from which Gaelwyn was built. They built their city right on top of a quarry that extends into the Wych, and they’d ship either upstream or downstream. Tons of money, lots of slave labor, lots of corruption.
However, somewhere between here and there, the slavers were overthrown and a more traditional form of governance was introduced, and, in its second act, Dumbria became a free City State.
I see this city as being stacked on top of each other in a used-up quarry, where most of the city exists in mineshafts and tunnels. It’s a port city, and conducts trade with other Gaelwyn City States, but it’s a shady bunch. Dumbria, to me, is a seat of villainy. Elements of its past still linger and are difficult to purge.
Auchenshuggle
Don’t you just like saying it? I do!
When I was trying to think of a name for a smaller hamlet that’d come under the sway of a wizard, this quasi-Germanic thing popped into my head. So I featured it in The Knave of Nodderton.
Auchenshuggle is the hamlet that Gammond Brandyford works to save against a wrathwizard incursion.
A protectorate of Nodderton, Auchenshuggle exists as a river trading town along the Wych with maybe 2,000 people. It’s a small town, a hamlet, ruled by the Rendaldo family for generations.
Mumling
When I was writing down Bartram’s backstory, I said that he was an officer in Mumling’s Army. That’s it - that’s how it was created.
At that time, I knew that Mumling was going to be a City State but I had no idea what the place would be out.
Over time, I’ve been able to add more depth to this city in various stories - The Grotesque of Silvanus and The Murkwode Reaving - as well as through fleshing out my own D&D campaign setting.
Mumling is a human City State of Gaelwyn with a population around 16,000. As Mumling isn’t along the Wych, I see them as agrarian farmers and deeply religious, connected to nature where Silvanus is the dominant deity. They’re very connected to nature and are also quite cognizant of man’s propensity towards greed, villainy, and corruption.
I don’t see the City States of Mumling or Nodderton as friends. I think they kind of resent each other. I may play that out in future work.
I see the place as kind of gloomy, dominated by elder oak trees, where humans have erected temples to Silvanus with spooky gothic architecture.
Mumling is also close to the Murkwode, a foresty-swampy flood plain that borders the Wych on the opposite side of some goblin-infested hills to Mumling’s north.
The Murkwode is a terrifying swampland, cursed, and a rumored den of thieves and pirates.
In a D&D campaign that I’m running, the player characters are exploring the Murkwode and trying to find caves once used by a prosperous thief to horde his wealth and evade authorities.
For those who care, the Mirkwood is a Sir Walter Scott and Tolkien location; the Murkwood is found in the Elder Scrolls. Not to be outdone, I wanted my own version so, murk, as in archaic Scottish, gloomy, and wode, an old English expression for wood, hence, Murkwode.
I’ve written about their prison system as being strict and punishing, yet offering a way out for young men through faith or military service. In true Protestant tradition, punishment is all about spending time to overcoming moral failures, and Mumling’s justice system offers it.
I haven’t written about it yet, but I picture Mumling’s military as small but extremely effective and well-trained.
I see their form of government as a kind of farmer’s grange or a counsel.
I see the people of Mumling as prosperous but humble, isolated, skeptical, superstitious, and religious.
Bartram serves Mumling - not unsurprising given its proximity to the Aevalorn Parishes and their attitudes towards nature.
Aevalorn Parishes
The Aevalorn Wilds are located to the south of the active map. The Wilds is a thick, lush rhododendron forest full of monsters. It is that fear of monsters that has kept the human City States of Gaelwyn at bay.
Halflings look at Aevalorn as the cradle of their civilization; all halflings of The Land trace their lineage to one of the Parishes (consolidated tribes) of the Precursors: the founding mothers and fathers of their various tribes.
Halflings are found in southern Gaelwyn in an area referred to as Aevalorn. To halflings, Aevalorn means quiet home. It is the place of their origin.
Geographic, political, and regional differences between halflings gave rise to Parishes. Aevalorn is home to seven Parishes dominated by a lush rhododendron forest. Aymes Parish lies in the mid-point of Aevalorn.
There are seven Parishes: Valley Parish, Aymes Parish, Greenfield Parish, Tatterfoot Parish, Wetfoot Parish, Applegrove Parish, and Duninish Parish.
There are numerous hamlets that I’ve identified in my work - Pondaroak, Amberglen, Mosshollow, and Ehrendvale.
In The Pig King, I eluded to another human region to the south of the Parishes named Shae Tahrane, an older D&D campaign setting that I created in the mid-2000’s and is currently unmapped.
Trelalee
Trelalee is a bedroom hamlet to Brigantia sporting maybe 6,000 people.
It’s located in a fen, a swamp, and was once the ancestral home of goblinkind. Man liked the area’s natural resources and eventually went to war with the goblins, ousting them from the territory. All of this came to a head in Crestfall: a goblinoid/human war that took place sixteen years prior to the current time where most of my stories take place.
Trelalee is a protectorate of Brigantia. That just means that Trelalee doesn’t have a standing military of its own - just local town guards - and relies on Brigantia for protection; kind of a big deal if irate goblinkind are always nipping at your heels. It’s a nice arrangement for Brigantia as Brigantia can exert political and commercial influence over Trelalee, but not everyone thinks that’s an ideal arrangement.
In Aevalorn Tales, there’s a scene in the 14th episode where I write about Isaiah, Gammond’s handler with the Thieves Guild, looking at a painting depicting Trelalee’s rescue at Crestfall by Brigantian forces. The subtext of the scene is that Isaiah, like most in Trelalee, resents being under Brigantia’s boot and that Brigantia wields far too much influence and meddles in their affairs. Foreshadowing here, but one day, that relationship is going to come to a head.
Trelalee is the home of Fenwater Abbey and the Sisters of Siena, the Watermaidens. It’s also home to the Iron Cages - a terrible prison.
I depict Trelalee as a rainy, wet, mosquito-infested, water-logged slough, and it really is, but its surrounding farmland and topsoil are extremely important to Brigantia; Trelalee is like Brigantia’s breadbasket. You have to feed 40,000 people somehow, and they depend on the farmers of Trelalee.
My first stories took place there with Bartram, Gammond, and Jore. I like the idea of this setting and I’ll frequently return to it when I want to write about thieves, goblins, the goblin wars, or Brigantia’s political strife.
Brigantia
When I think of Brigantia as a setting, I think it is the polar opposite of Nodderton.
In fact, if you looked at the map, the City State of Brigantia is located at the start of the Wych, near the glaciers of Stonereach, and not the end, like Nodderton. Visually, we start in Brigantia and end up in Nodderton. This is by design.
Brigantia is a monarchy and a matriarchal society, also in contrast to Nodderton’s king and patriarchy.
Nodderton’s all about taxation, crime, and punishment; Brigantia’s all about service and passing inherited wealth through women to create a thriving middle class that competes politically with family houses.
Where Nodderton is all about a traditional court ruled by a single king under a monotheistic structure, Brigantia is a more enlightened, polytheistic, faction-driven, cooperative structure.
Instead of looming dark castles, Brigantia is built partially by dwarves with artistically shaped stone featuring impossible sculptures and gardens. It’s more of a place of light than darkness.
Stories centering around Brigantia tend to offer contrast to traditional fantasy settings that are more like Nodderton. However, I find it requires a lot of explanation and it bogged me down in A Goblet of Bone. In my first draft of the first act, I had to spend so much time explaining it that I felt it slowed the entire story down. I can’t shorthand Brigantia as I can Nodderton, so it’s an ongoing challenge.
I refer to Brigantia as the Jewel of Gaelwyn and “the royal city” because it’s definitely a lofty and aspirational place. I picture it as 40,000 strong and one of the largest City States. It’s a river port city and extremely powerful, with an extensive military and a strong tradition of service. I imagine it as a gateway to the Dwarven Kingdoms of Stonereach, rich with art, culture, and trade. It’s a place of contrast where dysfunctional, selfish men are outcasts who live as paupers at the heels of powerful women, and where women run families and estates, not men.
But it’s also a place of contradiction. Brigantia is a place many would want to live in Gaelwyn, but it’s dominated by a familial class system, much to the exclusion of outsiders.
Jore Brix is a character from Britania.
I’ll let you in on a secret. The name “Brigantia” comes from my childhood. I used to play a video game called Ultima 4 where there the gameplay took place in a realm named Britannia.
Nodderton
Nodderton lies to the southwestern coast of Gaelwyn and is one of the larger City States in my writing.
It sits at the mouth of the Wych and borders the sea, so it’s a very strategic location and coveted by other City States.
When I imagine Nodderton, I think of a dense 20,000 population with lumbering tall castles, an extensive market, theater, and an expansive port and waterway.
Therefore I think it to be the seat of the Merchant Guild where there are extensive rules for commerce and taxation. I think of dungeons and a classic medieval prison system. Nodderton is ruled by a king. There’s an established monarchy, a court, and all of the palace intrigue that goes along with it. In my mind, Nodderton is a classic setting for fantasy stories.
I think there are a lot of different views of Nodderton though. In The Knave of Nodderton, I introduced a character named Aut Khronig, a corrupt intelligence minister; he wasn’t very nice. But I also introduced readers to a pleasant merchant named Faw Kag in the same story, as well as hinted at Nodderton’s theater culture. And I described the Athenaeum, a secret library, in Love’s Repast. I want to think that the place has a lot of depth; that there are many surprises under the hood.
It’s not all kings, taxes, courts, trade, and gloom, but its basic backdrop is well-suited for telling serialized fiction. I don’t have to describe it too much. It’s another shorthand for telling my stories.
Who is Jore Brix?
Jore Brix is the odd man out: he is my one and only recurring Gaelwyn (human) character in Aevalorn Tales.
He’s also offered in two versions: a young version for YA (Young Adult) stories, and an older version that plays stick to Bartram.
In fact, I think the only reason why I talk about him is because he hangs around Halflings so much. He is also the only honest-to-goodness wizard in my stories.
I see him around 5’10”, thin, and dressed in medieval aristocratic clothing with knee-high boots and a long jacket with internal pockets; he wears a belt with leather pouches for spell components.
He’s a wealthy aristocrat, a privileged son of the City State of Brigantia; since his bills are paid and lives a comfortable life, he spends his time studying and teaching at Pax Arcana.
He's a falconer, like most high-town men of Brigantia.
I see him as optimistic and scholarly, intensely interested in mysteries and puzzles. In fact, I see him as a perpetual student, always learning. He made his first appearance as Bartram Humblefoot’s sidekick in the original Aevalorn Tales.
I foresee his stories being clever puzzles where I take the reader down a rabbit hole of evidence and suspicion. In YA stories, he’s a Hardy Boys/Scooby Doo kind of guy. I also see him as a part of any one of my characters’ stories, but Bartram Humblefoot in particular.
Finally, I had some wacko idea that I might make a younger version of him and write some young adult fantasy, but I really haven’t worked that out yet. That’ll evolve over time.
Oh, look! A younger version! It’s almost magic.
Who is Kindle Muckwalker?
Kindle Muckwalker is a Halfling Ranger of the Aevalorn Parishes.
He’s an outdoorsman, a hunter, a guide; a detached character who is an anathema to most Halfling archetypes because he’s not about hearth and home, or gregarious, or particularly cheerful. He’s a gruff, focused character, with a direct sense of communication, heavily accented, and is generally considered quite peculiar by most Halflings.
He’s got slick greasy straight hair to his shoulders, parted down the middle; pointed chin; I often describe him as grimy, but with no stubble though because he’s a Halfling. He relies on a shortbow for a weapon and wears a quiver of 10 arrows on his back. He's got a hunting knife at his side, secured by the leg, and by the waist. And he has a thick leather belt and leather breeches to his knees.
Stories with Kindle are about leading humans through the Aevalorn Wilds. They’re gritty adventure stories with a splash of nature wrapped in there somewhere. I see Kindle and Jayleigh Warmhollow as companions in some way - with Kindle being a mentor-like character to Jayleigh - where I can introduce more heart and mysticism into his stories.
His first appearance was in The Pig King.
Who is Joliver Barleywood?
Joliver Barleywood is a Halfling Bard of the Aevalorn Parishes. I picture him as middle-aged, fit, dressed always in a waistcoat and smoking a pipe.
Like Bartram Humblefoot, I picture this character rarely returning to the Parishes, preferring instead to be abroad and amongst Man in Gaelwyn.
This is a character who is interested in stories. I’m trying to make it a point where he’s always asking, “Tell me your tale”, or “Tell me about this or that”. He is a curator of stories; a collector of people’s experiences and dreams.
I want to write Joliver so that he exists somewhere legend and reality. He’s a wandering type, magical; he shows up in time to hear the last words of a dying man, witness an important event, or tell a story when it needs to be heard.
He’s jovial (“Joliver”), playful, teasing, and maybe a little bit snarky when he’s not performing. In D&D terms, he’s a Bard of the College of Lore, a jack of all trades, and a storyteller that holds his audience spellbound.
When I first introduced this character, he was retelling The Ballad of Skyer Dannon; Love’s Repast was his first stand-alone story.
What is a Book?
As an author, technology professional, and digital native, I think it’s beyond time to ask ourselves what a book is, and how technology has broadly transformed the business of publishing.
What we traditionally identify as a book is a certain dimension and size; something that was physical and has pages that we manually flip through to read in consecutive, sequential order; that it has a spine; it has a cover and a jacket, requiring layout designers, typographers, and visual artists.
Because books were physical, there needed to be a process to edit it and make sure it was right. Errors and omissions couldn’t be corrected in the finished product.
In order to make a profit off the product of a book, it had to be economical to produce it. There had to be at least x-number of pages printed under certain constraints to make y-amount of profit. Historically, the profit motive is what filtered writers from being published at all. Publishers knew that, in order to make a profit off a book, there was a formula associated with the cost of production, requiring a minimum and a maximum number of physical pages, in specific dimensions and materials (paperback vs hardcover, for instance).
In order to sell the book, marketers knew that there was a formula that worked: a strong character-driven story with a three-act structure with lots of escalating, high-stakes action, in regards to a fantasy novel, for instance. They knew that a man had to write it; the fantasy demographic repelled female authors. They knew that the protagonist must be a human male to best identify with the reader, and in particular, a white human male. They knew it needed a splashy cover and vivid colors, and it needed to be between x-number of pages, otherwise, a segment of the market wouldn’t be interested in it.
Publishers knew how many units they needed to produce and sell in order to make a profit off the volume. Thus, they made exclusive arrangements for marketing and distributing a book. These exclusive arrangements allowed for a certain amount of time a book sat on shelves, and was calculated from the amount of loss they’d suffer if they didn’t churn the inventory quickly enough. In most cases in the latter half of the 20th century, publishers had to buy-back underperforming books from the retailer and eat their losses.
Authors of traditional books were disconnected from their readers because they had no way to speak to them at scale without the marketing muscle of the publisher.
And physical books suffered a long-tail problem: they’d need to be taken into the storeroom within eight weeks or so to make more room on physical shelves for more product, physically leaving the consumer’s sight and imagination. Only books at the forefront of the consumer’s attention and imagination are what sold; anything else in a store room or warehouse was inaccessible by the consumer.
Therefore, up to the year 2010, there was a lot of gatekeeping that went on in the publishing industry. Fantasy books were costly to produce, expensive to distribute, must meet a slew of criteria to be successful, and excluded female authors and protagonists that didn’t mirror their readers. Authors couldn’t cultivate their own marketing relationship with consumers, and books had an eight-week lifecycle at most.
Throughout the 20th century, those filters, the sheer risk of publishing a book, generated mountains - continents - of rejection letters because, if we’re to be honest, who’d want to be a publisher anyway? Tons of costs, lots of risk, and tiny profits. Publishing sucked as a business model, and retail wasn’t any better. Only scale made money; i.e., Barnes & Noble killing traditional booksellers - remember that?
So what happened in 2010?
Around 2010, a number of factors converged to destroy traditional publishing.
The Internet had created a generation of consumers prepared to consume electronic content;
Broadband - fast, inexpensive Internet access had been brought to most of the industrialized world, and used routinely by lower-middle-class consumers;
The arrival of viable tablet-based computing platforms, allowing one to reasonably hold an electronic copy of a book in facsimile to a traditional book;
Electronic distribution platforms for booksellers allowed retailers to produce print-on-demand products, build electronic products on their platform, and resell and distribute digital media at scale;
Social media allowed authors to disintermediate the publisher and talk directly to consumers, to build their brand as an individual;
The proliferation of secure, nearly costless, Internet-based payment systems enabling an author to sell directly to consumers.
These influences are ongoing and erode the power and profitability of traditional publishing. Very soon, the traditional publishing world will be reduced to just a few players for, in a world where you make < 5% on printed products, scale is everything. M&A like Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster must happen, otherwise, there is no scale, only efficient competitors, eroding each other’s market share and driving prices to the bottom; nobody will make money, and there will not be any more traditional book publishing business. It simply costs too much and there’s no money in it. If consumers don’t mind paying a premium for a book ($30/unit vs, say, $10/unit electronically), then not a problem. I’d be willing to bet, though, that sentiment will not last, no matter how people like the physical feel of a book in their hands.
So, what is a book?
Today, it a book is digital media - it’s an electronic product.
A book can be created by anyone with a computer.
Books are software. They can be edited and changed at any time, providing instant updates, and released through versioning - just like software.
Authors can grab an ISBN directly electronically; they can manage their own catalogs and meet reseller requirements for inventory and distribution; they can print-on-demand, doing one-off unit-based printing at practically zero cost to them, eroding maybe 2% of their margin.
An electronic book can be distributed at zero cost to anyone, anywhere, in the world, and run off any digital device. There is world-wide distribution of a book at zero cost with no licensing intermediary eroding your margin.
It doesn’t matter what size a book is - how many pages or words; in this case, size doesn’t matter. The costs of production and distribution are exactly the same. A book can be replicated a zillion times at no cost.
The longtail is overcome by filters, social media, and search. Consumers can dig into catalogs with millions of titles and find what interests them, and social media can help market titles to new readers.
A book can be marketed directly to consumers by authors, allowing them to make their own brands and relationships. No longer does a publisher get to intermediate that relationship, allowing anyone, anywhere, to create a following of readers.
Its typesetting doesn’t matter. The consumer, not the publisher, can choose their own preferences for typeface on their digital readers.
In an electronic format, books are extensions of digital assistants like dictionaries, thesauruses, note taking and research/citation tools, and Internet search. A single in-narrative click can help inform a reader or lead them to more engagement with the author online.
Editing and art assets are increasingly cheap - most of that labor can be outsourced using Internet based freelancing - allow authors to access quality talent at increasingly lower costs. And one day, AI-generated imaging will offer authors free high-resolution artwork at zero cost.
The development and publishing of a book is highly automated. If you can learn how to press a couple of buttons, you can move data between - what used to be - complicated formatting changes.
In essence, the author is their own publisher, editor, and marketer, and they have direct access to the market and consumers from which to create and maintain their brand. This is simply the dream of authors like Richard Brautigan - we are all publishers.
I am fortunate enough to live in an amazing time of transformation in this industry. The nature of what a book is has radically been transformed.
I generally write short stories (~10,000 words) and distribute them world-wide at no cost, about characters and settings that’d usually be gateway’d out by traditional publishers. But with today’s model, I can write and distribute anything of any size. Who’d want to read novellas about Halflings anyway? Well, I’m lucky enough to just do my own thing and improve my art to connect with audiences and build my own brand. What an amazing time!
The era of waiting around for someone to validate you as an author with an acceptance letter is over. You are an author; you are a publisher. Even traditional publishers vet authors based on their skillsets in developing their own work - they’re more likely to hire someone who comes in with an audience of 10,000 readers and an established catalog of content, than someone who doesn’t already have it. Why put a risky bet on someone who can’t do it themselves?
Even as I write this, though, I’m very much aware that another transformation is in play concerning AI (Artificial Intelligence). In the very near future, most of what readers consume will be written by automation - computers trained on writing specific forms of content, creating amazing works of art that will compete with even the best of us human authors. So the ability to be seen, hired, read, and compensated as an author will continue to meet headlong forces. I write because I like telling stories; not because I think I’ll make any money at it, and that concept of making money is probably unrealistic.
In a world where computers produce written content, only a miniscule percent of authors will actually make money in this business. True talents will own their own brand, disintermediate publishers and booksellers, and go directly to their audience, who will circulate their work in social media as to attract new readership; all the while, they’ll be under constant threat from AI that can emulate their unique style at a drop of a hat.
What is a book? And what is an author? Well, both are rapidly changing.
Take advantage of change. You, as an author, no longer need to wait around for someone to tell you you’re good enough. That’s crap - go publish now! And publish every day.
Thanks for reading my work.
R
Author’s Note: Love’s Repast
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:
“Write about a character who must confess their true feelings by midnight, or risk losing it all.”
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
Author’s Notes: The Knave of Nodderton, Episodes 7, 8, and 9
Over the last week of October and the first week of November, 2022, I published three episodes of The Knave of Nodderton on Amazon Vella.
Honestly, I won’t even bother citing the stats. They’re dismal. Let’s agree I’m writing for myself and shouting into a void. I have yet to even see The Knave run across “newly updated” or “recently added” stories; I just don’t rank with the algorithm.
Again, I think this is just a failure of Amazon’s platform. There should be a lock against a story categorized as “romance” appearing in “fantasy”; even a “fantasy romance”. It dilutes the algo so that everything “romance” appears at the top of every list. I mean, just let me compete against other “fantasy” stories, okay? Jesh!
Anyhow, these three stories are a dip in the action. I’m moving Gammond around Auchenshuggle and describing it a bit in the process. I’m reintroducing some characters mentioned in the 1st and 3rd episodes and giving Gammond some needed sleep.
I did write a bit about halfling luck in the 8th episode and I really enjoyed that. Luck is a major facet of Gammond stories, and this story presented an opportunity to cover that.
Halflings in D&D are considered “lucky” and I imply as much when I’m writing. They can’t roll ones, and what that means is, during the course of the game, if they fail at something, they get to re-roll. When I wrote about Gammond in Aevalorn Tales, I wrote about the distinction of bravery and luck for Gammond. When I work with Gammond, I’m usually doing an interplay between good and bad luck - something extraordinary can happen with him either way.
In this story, Gammond “luckily” enters Auchenshuggle and isn’t spotted; he “luckily” encounters Gar Pok, an imprisoned sympathizer, who can lead him to Brath Dannig; he’s “luckily” allowed into Brath’s home by his sister who sees a halfling at her door as “good luck”; and he “luckily” gets some free food and a nap. Lining up all of the fortunate coincidences without making it appear contrived is part of the challenge.
Also, in episode 9, Danros “luckily” learns the Chamberlain’s real name, Remus Scorpio, and continues to be burdened with the red-haired halfling dogging his future. Readers can see where I’m setting up an inevitable collision between Danros and Gammond, but first, I have to reveal something out of my hat in the next episode.
Also, importantly, we've learned in episode 9 that Danros used to be a member of a theater troop out of Nodderton; in episodes 2, 4, and 5, I eluded to Nodderton having a theater culture. So Danros used to be a bard who became a thief to survive.
I’ve also revealed a physical toll for using the Palantir. It’s a limitation imposed on Danros to create a little bit of drama.
The story’s about half-way finished. I’ve revealed Scorpio as the actual antagonist, Danros is an an anti-hero, and Gammond’s my protagonist, and somehow these two characters are going to meet up to take on Scorpio. It’s around 16,000 words at the moment so with a little more embellishing, I could spin it around into a 40,000 word novella at some point.
Anyhow, thanks for reading!
Author’s Note: The Pig King
On Sunday October 23, 2022, I published The Pig King on Wattpad; an approximately 11,000-word short story broken into five episodes.
I was doing some research on a potential new story and ran across a historical event that took place in the Pacific Northwest around 1859 called the Pig War! Cool, eh? Essentially, a pig was killed in a disputed territory which nearly sent the US and UK down a path of conflict. I wanted to write a Maedrey Puck story about how Halflings avoided greed and corruption when they came into more contact with the human lands of Gaelwyn, and I thought something like the Pig War would be a great premise. I fleshed out the story’s outline while taking a Sunday walk with my partner, Camille; she actually came up with the Trial by Jam.
I was seriously disappointed when I learned there was already a classic fairy tale entitled The Pig King written by Giovanni Francesco Straparola. Luckily, the tales are so dissimilar and his work was published, like, 500 years ago, so I figured I was in the clear with copyright law.
Frequent readers of mine will recognize Kindle Muckwalker as the Ranger mentioned in The Groteseque of Sylvanus. Kindle and Jayleigh Warmhollow are contemporaries. You might also recognize Faw Kag as the human glass and herb trader from The Knave of Nodderton.
There are two co-stars in this story. Swain Thistlewillow, the land owner, and Gilbert Bramblewood, the pig owner. Deliberately, I wanted to make Gilbert feel like a burly Scottish fellow and Swain feel like an entitled New Englander. Swain and Gilbert aren’t enemies but they are caught up in a conflict. Neither wish to back down and they’re creating a rift in the halfling community.
The way I see it, Halflings are a communal folk spared greed, scarcity, and competition. Halflings don’t hoard. They share. Maedrey Puck helped create a reminder for sharing that would stick with future generations. There’s an abundance of resources that surrounded Halfling communities like Ehrendvale, so that puts downward pressure on scarcity. Sure, there’s the idea of private property, but Halflings give what they have to help others. They keep what they need, they share what they can, and they don’t perceive themselves in competition with others.
In this story, I describe the Halfling community of Ehrendvale as a trading hub. Human greed had started corrupting cooperative Halfling traditions, and this story tries to set the lore to keep the human influence at bay.
This story is about the folly of greed and hoarding wealth, and compromising for the betterment of all in a community instead of an individual. I think it’s a good reminder in the years ahead as economic scarcity, greed, and inequality dominate our real lives.
The Pig King will be one of the first works I’ll take cross-platform - to Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Books, by Q1 2023.
Thanks for reading!
R
Author’s Note: The Knave of Nodderton, Episode 6
On Wednesday October 12, 2022, I published the sixth episode of The Knave of Nodderton on Amazon Vella titled Trapped and Tangled.
My goodness, the stats are just dismal.
It’s a characteristic of Vella given the mysterious alchemy of their search algorithms and what goes in their story carousels. My story shall exist forever in the background. But I’m not going to let toiling in obscurity get me down!
In this episode, we rejoin Danros and I give the reader a wealth of insight into his character. To begin with, he’s looking for a way out of Auchenshuggle and the role he’s been forced to play. His current predicament wasn’t orchestrated and it turns out he’s more of a victim than we thought.
Next, Danros is a skilled thief and he’s sneaking about Rendaldo’s manor trying to find a way out. Unfortunately, a secret door eludes him.
We also learn how he came to possess the Palantir and how the device works. We also get a glimpse of the treasure he’s amassed during his stay in Auchenshuggle.
And a bit of scrying toward the end allows us to see that Gammond has a part to play in his misery.
By now, I think my reader is getting the impression that Danros isn’t necessarily the villain of the story. As always, you should look for the fella with the goatee.
This episode marks a turning point in the story where the reader’s let in on the joke. The wrathwizards are really a ruse disguising real villainy in the background. More of Danros’ plight can be seen in this episode, and why the pressure is mounting on him to get out before it’s too late.
Coming up in Episode 7, Gammond arrives in Auchenshuggle where (from Episode 5) he’s expecting to stay at the Bird & Rye. Well, you can probably guess how that’s going to go.
Thanks for reading!
R
Who is Maedrey Puck?
Character Description
Maedrey Puck is a lightfoot halfling cleric of the Aevalorn Parishes, a Child of Yondalla.
In her sixties, she walks with a limp and relies on a weirdly-curved juniper wood staff to hobble around. She has piercing olive eyes, a smattering of black freckles, and a pock-marked face.
I often describe her as having many strands of tight box braids interlaced with crushable metal and bone beads; in writing the character, she may turn to these items for spell components when her focus, the juniper wood staff, is out of reach.
I write her as a devout eccentric - totally off of her rocker - who uses her very twisted sense of justice and wisdom to protect halflings; honestly, she is just as likely to drown someone as baptize them.
She exists in the past as a contemporary of Skyer Dannon and her stories generally concern a time when the Aevalorn Parishes started having more frequent contact with the human City States of Gaelwyn.
Her name of Puck is deliberate and refers to the character in Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Stories
As a cleric, I use this character to explore spiritual and moral themes. I find her fun to write because she’s sly, crafty, and tuned to the metaphysical world.
She made her first appearance in the Ballad of Skyer Dannon and her first dedicated story was The Pig King.
