Last week’s story:

I finished Week 39’s story, “The Mast of Inconvenience”, just this past Tuesday… and last week’s story, “The Annotation” (a title that ended up having nothing to do with the story), was done yesterday! I’m all caught up! Yay!

“The Annotation” ended up being a lot shorter than I had planned. I had planned on it being at least 3,000 words long, but it ended up being a piece of flash fiction at less than 1,000 instead. It involves a thief breaking into the supernatural book room at the Library of Congress and attempting to steal a book that he knows has driven everyone mad who has read it. And he reads it. Because of couse. I enjoyed writing it, and I know with some polishing and expansion it, like many of the other stories I’ve written this year, might just be publishable.

But, as I think I’ve said, it’s not the publishability of these stories that I’m going for. It’s training my brain even further to write to a prompt and to, well, just write. I was talking about this with my wife yesterday, and she pointed that out to me. I’m glad to have a spouse that understands these things.

This week’s prompt:

I rolled a 3 on the d8, meaning I draw from the Fantasy deck; and another 3 on the d6, meaning Thriller. How do you write a fantasy thriller? I feel like I ought to ask Andrea Stewart, who writes in both genres and occasionally adds elements of thriller to her fantasy novels (particularly in her most recent, The Gods Below).

Anyway, here’s the prompt:

A fairy-touched bard wants to prevent a war from being started by a harp, but it will open old wounds.

This one looks like it might be fairly easy. I have a character that I’ve written before, Sir Reynold, that I’ve been dying to write again. He’s a contemporary fantasy character, grounded in a fantastical world of talking cats and ogres, but also streetcars and telephones. The first two stories I’ve written about him, “Siry Reynold Fights Another Ogre” and “Sir Reynold Fights the King of Oblivion”, were fun and silly (though the second took a decidedly darker turn at the end).

Maybe I could incorporate a heist! Heist, I propose, is a subset of the thriller genre, and I challenge anyone who disagrees with me to fisticuffs.

This week’s recommendation:

The War Beyond. This is Andrea Stewart’s next novel, due out on November 4. I’ve read everything Andrea has written, and plan to read this one when it comes out (actually, I’ll probably wait until November 14, since that’s when she’ll have a launch event at A Seat At the Table Books in Elk Grove, CA. Anyway, I recommend you read her earlier books, her entire backlist, and then pre-order this one:

And as always:

Stay kind. Stay silly. Stay safe. Be punk as fuck.

Until next week!