Snow Day - a Touchstone short story

Interrupting my packed schedule of reading Chinese webnovels, here is a bit of seasonal fluff for the Touchstone fans.  It was meant to be a quick short story, but turned into 10,000 words somehow.

Expect character glimpses and worldbuilding - this is not a plot-heavy story, though I did end up thinking quite a bit about the times of the year when families get together to have arguments about minor things but generally be cheerful at each other.

[The snow, of course, is not seasonal at all for Australia.  It was 44C here yesterday, but thankfully cooler today. (I'm not anywhere near bushfires, btw, though we do get a fair bit of smoke from them.)]

As usual, the publication process will take varying amounts of time depending on the retailer.  I'll add links below as they come up.  [Published in 2020 or 2019 depending on what part of the planet you're on. :) ]

Smashwords
Amazon US, UK, AU
Kobo US, AU
Google Play

Search Apple's app to get the story there (this usually takes a couple of days to publish).

An award for Forfeit

Award recognition is one of those complicated things for writers.  Is there such a thing as 'best'?  Judges bring their own individual taste.  Popular awards rely very much of a piece/author being known to the voting pool.  It's all very complicated, so I've tried to adopt the attitude of appreciating any compliments coming my way without getting too hung up on missing out.

But I'm still going to enjoy adding to my display cabinet an Aurealis Award for "Forfeit" as the Best Fantasy Novella 2016.

HUGE thanks to Judith Tarr for prodding me into tightening up the story.  And thanks again to my readers.  You're the ones that really make my day.

You can watch the ceremony here if you're so inclined.

June status and writing side-effects

I was just checking my Goodreads records, and it says I've read 26 books so far this year (as we near the halfway point) and twenty of them were read before March (so six books between March and June).  By contrast, in 2011 I read 159 books in the year.

This is one of the big costs of writing for me - when I'm doing first drafts, I tend to stop reading.  It's too distracting.  I also tend to avoid whatever genre I'm writing, so I've read barely any fantasy (reserving what I do read to re-reads, graphic novels, or fave authors).  Mystery is a useful genre for me since I don't write it, and usually am more able to put it down and go back to what I'm working on.

Anyway, the lack of books read does indicate a lot of writing, and in a couple of weeks I'll be able to send all three stories for the 'side trip to France' off to be edited, and will start working fully on Snug Ship.  If I'm diligent, I should have three whole releases this year, which will be interesting!

Writing 'interstitial' stories is a new experiment for me.  I have a plot-line for the Trifold stories that will be covered in five books.  Stories in between the stories need to be worthwhile in themselves, and yet not substantially impact the main story, allowing the shorts to be optional.  Two Wings, Forfeit and Death and the Moon are all a combination of showing the reader France, and character stories where Griff, Rian and Eluned are all focused on 'who am I just now'.

But I enjoyed it!  I think I will do some more in between stories in Trifold - but not until Tangleways is done.

[Note that there is no story from Eleri's POV - she's a harder voice for me to capture.  Griff is very funny, though.]

Something short - All Foes

I'm not much into writing short stories.  They either turn into novels, or are simply moody little pieces.

This is one of the latter, up as a freebie on Smashwords.

A Short Indulgence

I'm not by habit a short story writer.  It's a very different form of writing to novels, and I've only written a handful.  The most recent was an urban fantasy idea I wanted to get out of my head to stop it bugging me, and coincided with a competition which crossed the theme.

Rather than leave it to languish, I've put it up as a freebie on Smashwords.  It's very short (1500 words!) and on reading it over it seems to me that the fewer words I have to use, the bigger the words will be.

A Brief Departure

I'm not a short story writer. Most everything I write wants to be at least twenty chapters long. Very occasionally an idea will fall into my lap, such as when I bought a sledgehammer and wondered what an Australian urban fantasy would look like, but that's no reason for me to want to write a short.

And then I noticed AussieCon 4 was running a short story competition.

Entry mailed today, clocking in a whole 14 words under the 1500 limit. Word limits are hard, though I think the exercise of cutting improved the story. Working in the required phrase, "make ready", was almost as hard, since it's very odd wording, and kept making me think of Captain Picard: "Make it so".

I think I'm most likely to win if no-one else enters, but it was fun to do this once. And who can resist a story with characters called Ru and Blue?