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Faux ad of Spire City: Banking!
Where do the people of Spire City go for their banking? Probably not here if they have the steampunk equivalent of a good credit score… But if not, this is the place to go. This is one of the ads that would have crossed multiple columns of the Spire …
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Cities of Wonder copies have arrived
Doing print copies through KDP’s print-on-demand service (as with Createspace previously) always gives you this moment of wondering how the final product will look. You can examine the pdfs all you want, launch the viewer, order proof copies. But until…
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Return of the Spire City ads
Lots of talk about ads today… Here are some very different kinds of advertising.It was roughly 11 years ago when I began the pre-writing for the Spire City episodes, dreaming up the characters, the effects of their terrible infections, and details of…
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Cities of Wonder, Trains of Irreality released!
This has been sneaking along beneath the surface for awhile now, but at last I can make it official.This collection/chapbook of flash stories and poems is now available!Going back over ten years, I began playing around with the idea of a narrative appr…
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Hopepunk? Do we really need a label like that?
While I was traveling recently I happened to read the Vox think piece about “Hopepunk.” The (genre-ish) label was coined by Alexandra Rowland, so I followed up later reading on Twitter some of her thoughts on it, her elaborations and exp…
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New story! “The Scapegoat Village” in Kaleidotrope
Starting off the year* with a new short story published in Kaleidotrope, my 5th story in that magazine (two back when it was a print zine and now three in the online version). “The Scapegoat Village” is a lyrical, stylish sort of fantasy—I was playing …
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Silk Betrayal: sneak peek, Roots of Betrayal
And now we have come to the end of this past month’s celebration of The Silk Betrayal. Thank you for joining with me in this series of posts, and be sure to get yourself a copy of the novel and a few more to share. Encourage your local library to purch…
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Silk Betrayal: minor characters
As I’ve mentioned before, there are many characters in The Silk Betrayal. I’m not going to go through and introduce every one of them. But I’d like to highlight a few here and introduce them to you:RashulRashul is pure charisma. He’s the Beto O’Rourke*…
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Silk Betrayal: religions
The Religions of Eghsal ValleyI’m part of several different online fantasy writing communities. One topic that comes up periodically in worldbuilding discussions is how to handle religion in our imaginary worlds. I’ve always answered that I’m not the least bit interested in any sort of divine reality behind the stories—keep the story focused on…
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Silk Betrayal character: Jasfer
The third principal character I’d like to introduce is Prince Jasfer Talai, one of the Thirty Princes who rule the valley. That makes him one of the thirty most powerful people in the entire known world…but that responsibility rests light on him—for …