“It’s just a minor breach in the cold rooms,” the black-haired nurse says. “We’ve sent for a priest of Ondir. Everything is perfectly safe. You’ll just have to wait for a while.”
The Book of the New Moon Door
It’s finally time for the zombie apocalypse. You can read this chapter right now on Patreon, or wait until next week when it’s available here!
Also, the January edition of the newsletter is going out at noon my time, which is about an hour and fifteen minutes from this writing. Put your email in the box here to get it (and don’t forget to check your inbox for the confirmation email!
Sinéad O’Connor, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got”
Good morning! It’s an Arctic day here, so I hope that wherever you are, you are safe and warm.
In other news, my household is missing its solitary vehicle, as another driver ran a red light and struck my husband when he was coming home from work on Friday. Everyone is okay, but the car is probably a total loss. We’re waiting on the insurance to tell us what happens next, which will apparently not include coverage for a rental.
If you’ve got a spare $3, and you enjoy my work, I have a Patreon and a Ko-fi. We have groceries and a bus card and the heat is on, so please take care of yourself first.
It’s the end of the month, so there will be new chapters of everything this week!
The Book of the New Moon Door: new chapter on Patreon tomorrow.
Journey to the Water: the latest chapter will be here on the blog on Wednesday.
The Well Below the Valley: Episode 9 will be posted to Patreon also on Wednesday.
Lastly, the January edition of the newsletter will go out tomorrow. If you’d like to sign up, put your email in the box at this link. Don’t forget to click on the confirmation email afterward! You can also find the newsletter signup at the bottom of the page (bottom right on desktop),underneath the Follow Blog button.
I think that’s all for today. Take care, have an excellent week, and always wear your seatbelt.
Berend retreats to a stiff wooden chair, the upholstered seat little more than a suggestion of padding, placed in the hallway. Isabel slumps heavily into its companion a few feet away and on the opposite wall and stares, her expression blank and her eyes hollow, at nothing. He’s going to have to find a place for her to sleep, and soon, before she falls off the chair and knocks her head against either the wall or the floor.
For himself, he figures he has about two hours before the coffee he borrowed from Emryn Marner wears off. The young man was too soundly asleep to be asked, so it might be more accurate to say that Berend stole the coffee, but either way, it was a justifiable acquisition. He should have stolen some for Isabel.
As it turns out, Lucian Warder is alive. Berend had worried that wouldn’t be the case by the time they got here, though he didn’t breathe a word of his fears to Isabel. Warder’s alive, and that means that his entire plan hasn’t gone to hell. Yet.
Would she cast me as a madman in her retelling, a fanatic who beat his fists uselessly against the barrier between life and death, surely to call down the wrath of every god who took notice of him?
Chapter XVIII: A Feast
Eske hears some stories before he continues on his quest in the latest chapter of Journey to the Water, now available on Patreon.
I’m working on the next episode of The Well Below the Valley this week, but in the meantime, there will be a new chapter of Journey to the Water on Patreon tomorrow, and the latest chapter of The Book of the New Moon Door will be up here on Wednesday.
I’ve been thinking about getting back into streaming and/or YouTube. I need to increase my reach, and it seems like people enjoy videos. What kind of content would you like to see, dear reader? Discussion of literary devices and the fantasy genre? Reading the classics so you don’t have to (putting my English degrees to work)? Interesting historical topics (particularly ones that have influenced my work and other fantasy writers)? Live chat?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and have an excellent week! I appreciate you.
ETA: I’ve fixed the social media buttons at the bottom of the page (they had turned invisible for some reason) and added a button at the bottom right where you can sign up for the newsletter.
“Where are you taking me?” I demanded of the stag. “Will you take me to Khalim?”
Gnarled, gray trees pressed in around me. Making my way through them was like shouldering a path through a crowd of people. The bark yielded to my efforts like flesh, but it was cold as death—cold as a Northern winter. I drew my hand back in surprise. Crumbling brown leaves littered the ground beneath my feet, and above, a sickly, yellow-green sky cast eerie light on a lattice of gray branches.
Despite having spoken before, the stag gave me no answer. It walked with heavy footsteps as the trees parted before it, not even turning its oak-crowned head to acknowledge me.
Happy Monday and MLK Day. I hope you have rest from your struggles today.
Not much to report this week: I’ll have a new chapter of The Book of the New Moon Door on Patreon tomorrow, and the latest chapter of Journey to the Water will be here on Wednesday.
“Have you been sent to me by the goddess of the deep, who keeps the gate of bone?”
Chapter XXVII: Nagara in Sunlight
Sorry for the delay! The latest chapter of Journey to the Water is now available on Patreon. We’ll be back to our normal Tuesday/Wednesday schedule next week.
It’s nothing, Isabel tells herself. It’s a traveler’s tale, embellished with every telling until it’s unrecognizable as the original story. An entire village did not turn to metal overnight.
She’ll believe that anyone who chanced to be awake last night saw the red star fall. It had been bright as a jewel, burning like a distant bonfire through the sky of this world and of the next. But the rest? It would require a ritual from the old legends, a coven of mages made immortal by their own power, the sacrifice of dozens of innocents. The next part of the story would involve a holy warrior of the church of Alcos, in enchanted armor that shone like the sun and a sword that could cut through both flesh and lies, riding a winged steed into the place of their power.
Emryn Marner himself doesn’t seem to believe it. He eats his pie like a starving man—all men his age are starving—and doesn’t bring it up again. He and Berend take the tub down to the gutter and dump out the dirty water, and then he retreats to his room with his books. “There’s an exam next week,” he explains. “Though if the world’s ending, maybe I’ll get to miss it.”
“When I was a boy, my teacher said that one of the hells was just endless written exams, over and over, for all eternity,” says Berend.
Space Whales Press 