Last Week’s Story

Believe it or not, I finished last week’s story ahead of time! “The Blue Throne” was finished late Friday evening, and features everything in the prompt. It did not feature any Fisher King elements, though, even though I was hoping to include that. Instead, it’s a ghoul who gets his comeuppance when he goes after a prize that he shouldn’t seek. It’s more of an outline than a story, but still, I had fun writing it.

And that’s the thing about writing, isn’t it? It’s fun. Even when it’s frustrating, I enjoy seeing where the plot goes, where the characters will take me. I enjoy finding how things work, and how the whole story will hang together. It’s challenging work, finding the story and building it. Digging it up, as it were.

RANT MODE ON: This is the main reason why I won’t use large-language models (colloquially termed generative AI, even though they aren’t) to write stories or novels. They take the challenge and the joy out of the whole process of writing. This, of course, along with all the ethical issues surrounding them: theft of intellectual, copyrighted works without consent, not to mention the cost to the planet. LLMs and AIs are really bad things, yo. RAND MODE OFF.

Anyway. On to the next thing.

This Week’s Prompt

I rolled a 1 on my D4, which means that this week’s prompt comes from the Main Deck of the Story Engine. So here’s the prompt:

A librarian wants to find redemption in an innovative technique, but they must become what they fear.

As always, I’m pretty excited about this one. As you may or may not know (I certainly have made no secret of it), I did spend some time in library school. Twice, in fact, until realizing it wasn’t for me. I still love libraries and librarians, so this prompt really inspires me. The prompt may seem pretty straightforward, but I will see what I can do with it.

I don’t have much else to say this week, so I’ll just go right to…

This week’s recommendation

…which is Dragon Freehold by T. M. Baumgartner. Theresa has written a number of wonderful fantasy and science fiction novels, as well as several cozy mysteries under her open pseudonym Tess Baytree (check out Death Walks a Dog). This one, which started out as a serial on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform (RIP), is full of thievery, romance, and dragons. Check it out!

And did I mention that Theresa is a friend of mine? She’s an excellent writer. I don’t know why she isn’t more widely known.

In other news

I am about to embark on the reading of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, that sensational bestseller from the 1700s. I expect it will take me some time to read this beast of a book. It’ll be fun!

Thank you for reading. As always: stay safe, stay kind, and have fun!