Blog – Kit Campbell Books

Weigh Anchor

Hello, squiders!

Well, I’ve made it through the draft (again). I have made my maps, and they might actually be good. Well, they’ll at least be useful. (I do need to at least clean up the upper hold on the ship map, where I tried a couple of different combinations of rooms based off of in-book descriptions until I found one that made the most sense.)

(Also I moved a couple cities around on my continent map til I found places I liked them.)

(Also I discovered that the captain’s quarters moves decks kind of willy nilly throughout the draft, so definitely need to fix that.)

I’ve also made my chapter list, with notes about changes that need to be made, so I feel pretty good about getting going on the actual revision now. (Though I did a partial readthrough today, and noted a problem with how much supplies they had varying wildly, so I need to add that to my list.)

ANYWAY.

My in-person critique group is meeting on Sunday, like I told you guys last week, and I decided it wasn’t worth it to try and stuff a major revision in before then, so I’ve sent them the first draft of the first three chapters. I did do some minor editing–couple of typo fixes, a couple of continuity issues I’d noted that were easy fixes. But the hope is that we can see if the characters and plot are at least working before I re-write them and fix the old writing.

(The first chapter is from, oh, 2014 or something. I had these two characters and a basic storyline forever and ever and they were never gelling into an actual story, so I actually took them and used them for Hidden Worlds, assuming they never would gel. Fast forward five years after HW was published, and my brain was like, “Oh, what if we move the story into the same world as the Trilogy?” and BAM the whole thing gelled and that is the basis for World’s Edge.)

(Super annoying.)

(Anyway, when the story gelled, I made a whole bunch of notes and wrote the first chapter, and then went back to whatever project I was working on at the time. The rest of the book was written over 2019-2021. I think I told you guys that last week too.)

I did save some quotes I liked as I was reading through the draft. Who knows if they shall survive the revision, but here some of them are, in no particular order and with no context.

“I’m gonna set him on fire someday,” she confided. “But not on the ship, because that would be bad.”

Viri retrieved the other shovel, handing it to Marit, then shoved the remaining sword into her belt. “Happy exploring! Here’s to hoping there’s no death crabs.”

“No,” Ead said, his hands moving deftly as he worked. “When they don’t hurt, they itch. The itching may be worse. Oh, and it’s entirely possible we’re all going to die in a few hours, so that’s comforting.”

I do find myself in a bit of a conundrum though. Probably not worth it to start the revision until I get the feedback from my critique group, in case they point out something major. No reason to do it twice, amirite?

So what do I do until then?

I started a Victorian horror story back six months or so that I never finished. I should finish that, if only so I can close a couple of reference tabs I have open. I’ve been scribbling down short story ideas in a notebook lately, and in theory I’m doing a bingo challenge in one of my online writing communities, though I haven’t written anything for that.

Or I could take a few days off and read and draw and play video games. That’s tempting.

Probably should make a decision, but it’s getting late and maybe we’ll see how we feel in the morning.

How are you doing, squider? Up to anything interesting?

I Have Survived

Happy…uh, Wednesday, squiders! I have survived the second weekend of the leadership training I was helping lead (though there were many tears, and I’ve picked up some sort of respiratory illness). I will still need to help and guide my team over the next 18 months as they work through their projects, but that’s practically nothing at this point.

And, so, I am free to get back to my revision! (And submitting queries, which I admittedly haven’t done at all this month) Except I am so tired that I just want to sleep for a week straight. BUT unfortunately you’re not allowed to do that, so on we go.

I did my themes and arcs on Monday, and yesterday I started the readthrough/chapter list, although I’ve just remembered I was going to make notes on problems and I forgot to do that too. Well, good news, I’m only two chapters in, so I can catch back up on that pretty quick.

This morning I started the map of the Hope’s Redemption based off a note in chapter two about where the hammocks are, but have found a bit of an issue in that I’m not sure how exactly to put it on the map, because I know there’s two or three hammock areas, and also the medbay and galley are on this deck, as well as an open area for eating. Maybe I need to just make notes until I have enough information to lay things out.

(But this does show that this was a good idea, and eventually if I run into areas where I’m contradicting myself, then decisions can be made and everything can be streamlined.)

Chapter wise, again, only through Chapter Two. Chapter one needs a complete rewrite. I wrote it in 2014 so I wouldn’t forget it and then promptly went off and did other things for five years before I wrote the rest of the draft in 2019-2021 (I couldn’t really write fiction in 2020, which is why the draft took so long), and man, does it show. I was still doing the double spaces between sentences!

I mean, like, the general content of the chapter is fine. A little out of character for some people, but easily remedied. There’s a line in my conlanged language that I think needs to come out, because of language drift and blah blah blah.

(Basically, I conlanged some of my language for the Trilogy–but not a lot because I find conlanging VERY difficult. However, this story takes place 700 years before the Trilogy, and at this point there’s two separate dialects that will become separate languages by the time the Trilogy events roll around. So ideally I would drift back 1000 years to create a common ancestral language, and then go forward 300 years on this other dialect and good god I sometimes forget where my phone is when I’m holding it, I’m not Tolkien, I’m not cut out for this.)

ANYWAY

Chapter two feels pretty solid as is.

I would like to finish my chapter list/maps/problem list before I start changing things (in case I need to add in correlations or anything) BUT I do need to get stuff to the critique group to read by, like, the 20th, which I’m realizing is only four-ish days away. So I may need to fudge that estimate a bit, or else put my nose to the grindstone and stop playing phone games.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

See you probably next week, squiders, unless I am wildly productive and have something to tell you about on Friday. Ta!

Hooray for Emotional Trauma

Happy Tuesday, squiders! It’s still been hard to move out of the mindset of the leadership training and move on to other things, but I have started rolling on the revision for World’s Edge.

I spent some time on Saturday looking at the problems I’d identified from my initial readthrough (which I think I went over here, but let me know if not) and thinking about how to fix them.

The fixes boiled down to:

Maps – for my own edification and to make sure worldbuilding is consistent. Specifically a map of the Hope and all three of its decks, the path the Hope takes from Altruia across the ocean (including all islands and major magical storm), and the path Rae and Sol/Ead/Marit take on land once they get to the other side. Also considering making Rae’s map, which is the ancient one she’s using for navigation. So I know what she’s working off of. Oh, and Altruia. Altruia has a lot more forest in this time period (compared to the Trilogy time period) and the Republic hasn’t formed yet, so it will be good to know where the humans are concentrated at this point of time.
Emotional arcs – the bare bones are there but they could use some expansion. Marit, who is our viewpoint character, has just gone through a pretty traumatic time before the start of the story, and her internal arc needs to follow the fallout of said trauma and as she heals from it. In addition, Rae (who is the protagonist character) and Sol also have traumatic pasts that they’re dealing with that are essential to the main plot. I bought the The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma book, which is from the Emotion Thesaurus people (a lovely resource), and read through their explanation of emotional trauma at the beginning, which was very helpful.
Clear outline of plot, subplots, arcs, and major plot points – Once I know my emotional arcs I can finalize my plots and all that jazz. Also going to do a couple of the target exercises from Holly Lisle’s (may she rest in peace) revision classes, such as the ones about theme.
Chapter list with emphasis on plots/subplots – I made one of these for Book 1, looking at each chapter and what it currently entailed (and where, if anywhere, it was in terms of the three major subplots), and then made notes on changes. It was super helpful, and I’m going to try it again.

And then I broke those all down into steps and made a schedule. We have a critique meeting at the end of the month and I’d like to have the first two chapters ready to go for that, but we will see. I will be gone all weekend (Thurs-Sun) for the second half of the leadership training and I do need to pack and finish making my staff presents (30 of them, and I’m at 23), plus normal life responsibilities and all that jazz.

Yesterday I spent time working on the emotional arcs. I went through the Emotional Wound thesaurus and also looked at the Needs Pyramid (which the book references, and is actually a really logical way at looking at emotional arcs), and then wrote out Marit’s, Rae’s, and Sol’s specific traumas (and wrote out Marit’s arc. Rae/Sol have smaller arcs because they’ve been dealing with their crap for a lot longer and have all their delusions/coping mechanisms firmly in place). And then, because I was on a roll, I did Ead and Viri too, to a lesser degree.

(Character introduction in case you don’t remember who people are)

Next step is to do the target exercises for theme and overall plot, and then write out the tentpoles for all the plots, subplots, arcs, and assorted sundry.

And THEN I’m going to read back through the manuscript, make the chapter list (and notes), and work on the maps as makes sense. Altruia and potentially Rae’s map I can do before the readthrough, but the path map and the ship map and all that makes sense to work on as we go through the story, so we can build off what exists (and make changes as necessary).

From there I can start the actual revision, unless this process exposes something else that needs changing and then we’ll need to fix that too.

If I don’t get through the prep work in time to send stuff to the critique group, well, I can still do a surface level clean-up and send it out, and then makes their suggested changes when I go back through.

Anyway, I’m excited! I really enjoy this story and I’m looking forward to making it even better than it is now.

NaNoWriMo is No More (NaNoWriMoNoMo)

Howdy, squiders. I have survived the first weekend of my leadership training, and I got everything ready and dropped off at the consignment sale. Phew. Of course, now I need to get back into everything I neglected while I was working on those…

There’s still a second weekend for the leadership training (not this weekend, but next) but my personal contributions are much less, so I’m not too worried about it.

Of course, getting out of that mindset and into the mindset where I can think about literally anything else has been…difficult. But we’re working on it.

The big news this week is that Nano is officially dead. It’s not a surprise, and I find myself not terribly torn up about it, but I think that’s because I already mourned it when the child grooming allegations and the terrible way that was handled came to light. I will miss it. It really helped me get started in my adult writing and provided me with the knowledge that I could write a novel, and it’s provided many friends along the way.

(I actually downloaded all my stats off the site a few months ago, when rumors of shutdown began to swirl. TrackBear provided a handy link to transfer all the data over.)

The organization changed a bunch between when I first did it in 2003 and when I last did it in 2023. I think there were…5000 of us? And you absolutely could keep up with the whole forum and know people from all over.

I participated in the first Script Frenzy. (The only time I did.) The first Night of Writing Dangerously. (Where I consumed my first Redbull and promptly disassociated, and didn’t touch one again until about two months ago.)

(I can tell exactly where in that draft that kicked in.)

I used to mentor Nano newbies and help mail out gear from Nano HQ, which at the time was a tiny little place up in Oakland. I knew Chris Baty and sometimes he remembered my name.

After the first few years that I won, I started to try something new every year. New genres. New viewpoints. Different story structures. If we were going to wildly write 50000 words in a month we might as well try something interesting and see how we liked it.

I found other writing communities through Nano, most notably the Spork Room, which started as a thread on the Nano boards before it spun off into its own forums. But also WriYe, and April Fool’s (defunct for many years now), and a handful of others here and there.

As I’ve mentioned before, starting in 2013 I didn’t participate every year, and it became less relevant to my own writing over time. It felt like the event became less accessible over time as well–too big, too unwieldy, and after the last website redesign, the forums were basically unusable and the buddy system that had been in place for years was essentially destroyed. It kind of feels like it never really recovered after that (2019), and nothing but bad decision after bad decision followed that.

I do wonder where we will go from here. Writing challenges have been around forever, but none of them have ever had the momentum Nano had. The amount of people participating made it a real event, one people looked forward to each year, planning months in advance. One that existed online and in person, and had the creativity energy to sweep you up and drag you along.

I don’t know that anything can replace it. Maybe nothing should.

But I do remember finishing my first complete draft. How proud I was. How much confidence it gave me. A lot of that draft was written during Nano 2004, and who knows how long it would have taken me otherwise if left to my own devices.

Other people deserve to have that feeling.

Who knows. Maybe something else will come along. But I don’t think it will be one of the other things clamoring to be the “next Nanowrimo.” There’s too many trying, not enough momentum behind any of them.

What do you think, squiders? Are you a writer, and did you do Nano? Have you seen any glimpses of something new?

Too Easy

Afternoon, squiders. How’s your week been?

So like we talked about last week, I hunted down World’s Edge, and I read it this week over a couple of days. (It’s about 100K.)

I actually really enjoyed it.

But I got to the end and was like, well, this is really good! I’m not sure it needs a lot of revision work.

Which is bull, I’m sure. It’s got to be, right? No one writes a perfect first draft.

I mean, it’s not perfect. The sailing terminology is haphazard (sometimes the viewpoint character will call something by the correct name and then explain it/learn about it later). There’s a ton of typos, so I wrote certain bits really quickly. The internal arc for said viewpoint character definitely needs some work, and the ending is rushed and poorly described, and it needs to tie into said internal arc better.

But in general, it’s really solid. Aside from the above, I’m not seeing anything terribly obvious that needs to be added in (though there is a conversation that I wrote as a drabble that is referenced a few time, and that needs to just go in the book itself).

Now, it is said that you write the first draft for yourself, and the second draft for your readers. The first draft is definitely working for me, and it’s entirely possible that I’m missing something that I’m not seeing.

So where do I go through here? Do I do my in-depth revision planning with the hopes that it ferrets out things that aren’t working (and not that I’m wasting my time)? Do I do a lighter version of the prep and focus on the things I saw as being wrong? Do I do a superficial edit to fix wording and typos and throw it at my critique group to see if they point out bigger picture issues I’m missing?

I’m not sure yet. And I won’t really have a chance to think too hard about it until the first week of April, after the first weekend of my leadership course and the drop-off for the consignment sale is done. Until then I’ve got to focus on getting those done (and not freaking out in the meantime).

What do you think, squiders? What would you do in my place?

Hope you’re having a lovely March!

Pondering Accomplished

Good evening, squiders! How are you doing?

I’m a little overwhelmed around normal everyday things and this leadership course I’m staffing at the end of the month, and the consignment sale. (I think I’ve talked about both of those before. Let me know if not.)

Last week I noted that now that I’m submitting Book 1 to agents (I got my first rejection this morning) I could go back to my revision, but that my brain was thinking about other stories instead. And through talking through that with you guys, I realized that maybe that particular revision (the scifi horror novella) is not the right revision to be working on at the moment.

I have spent some time looking at all my projects (mostly revision, some new stories vaguely outlined) and pondering things, and I have come to the following conclusions:

1) If I am querying a YA fantasy, it makes sense to work on another YA fantasy. If an agent calls to make an offer, or to see if we’re a good fit long term, and they ask what I’m working on, and I have changed both age range and genre, that could be a turnoff for them. I noticed that many of the agents I put on my querying list were asking for YA fantasy but not necessarily science fiction or horror, and if they wanted YA fantasy, they didn’t necessarily want adult fantasy either. (Not everyone, obviously, but enough.)

2) I write a lot of first drafts, and then I put the story away to eventually get to in my revision cycle. This has perhaps hurt me in the long run because I have a lot of stories that need revision and I will probably never get to all of them. (And maybe some of those older ones should be forgotten anyway.)

3) A lot of my existing stories could be rewritten (or if not yet written, modified) to be YA, so that’s good. Probably.

So what have I decided?

Of my existing revision projects, only two are YA fantasy: Broken Mirrors, which we talked about last week (the one that is straddling the line between MG and YA and doing neither successfully), and World’s Edge, which you can find here on the blog, since I wrote it for Nano in 2019. World’s Edge takes place in the same world as the trilogy (just 700 years before) as well. World’s Edge is borderline YA, as it was also an experiment. I wanted to write a story where the viewpoint character is not the protagonist. So the main character is 16, but the character driving the story is an adult. A little fiddly, for sure.

Of those two options, World’s Edge seems like the right choice, as it’s the right genre(-ish) and the same world as the book I’m querying, and Broken Mirrors is a disaster.

That said, I have no idea what state World’s Edge is in. I finished the draft in 2020, I think, and haven’t looked at it since. (A common issue, unfortunately. I have gotten better about going all the way through the process, but not all the time.) It could be a mess, or need a lot of work.

So the general plan is to read over World’s Edge and see what state it’s in, and then make a determination about whether it’s a good project to start now. And perhaps we look at writing a new project if it’s a mess. Something age and genre appropriate.

On we blindly stumble! See you next week!

A Handful of Demos

Howdy howdy, squiders. Still pondering what to work on, and to be honest I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it as I’m staffing a leadership training at the end of the month that’s taking a lot of my time, and I’ve got to drop stuff at a consignment sale the day after. I’m hoping to more proactively look at my project options tomorrow or Thursday.

At the end of February/beginning of March, Steam had a special demo event for games coming out this year. I downloaded six and played five of them (the sixth got taken down before I got to it, so sucks to be that game, I guess) and thought I’d talk about them.

Whisper of the House

This is one of those games where you unpack and organize houses. It was surprisingly relaxing, plus there were some time travel elements and the hints of something more going on. The demo was about an hour long. I did get stuck once (and the hints were no help) but figured it out. (The books had to go on the bookcase.) I put this one on my wishlist to look at more when the full game comes out.

A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe

A cute little puzzler. Demo took about 20 minutes. Artwork is cute too. You play as Asocial Giraffe, and you have to figure out how to do things without interacting with anyone else. The animation if someone does talk to you is pretty funny, and the puzzles reset pretty easily. By the third puzzle I had the whole idea down. I’m not a huge puzzler fan, so while I enjoyed the demo, I won’t be playing the full game.

Wanderstop

I really wanted to like this game. You play as Aria, a fighter trying to become the best trying to recover from a series of setbacks by training more, except you get sidelined by a random tea shop in the woods. The game itself seems to be about tea–planting plants, drying tea, making the tea, etc.–and I would assume there’s a storyline about learning to take care of yourself and so forth.

But the gameplay was horrible. My computer isn’t too shabby with graphic-heavy games, but this was so jerky it became impossible to play. I gave up about 45 minutes in when it became obvious that it was lagging too much to continue. There’s no reason for this game to be as graphic-intensive and laggy as it is based on its subject matter.

Is This Seat Taken?

Another puzzler, but more of a traditional logic puzzle than Asocial Giraffe. You have a variety of little shape people, all who have wants, and you have to place them all in places where they will be happy. Demo took about 25 minutes and went though…four stages, I want to say. There’s a bit of a storyline going on as well. Cute game, fun puzzles. I’d play it. I put it on my wishlist.

Einstein’s Cats

Demo took about 30 minutes. Very similar to Is This Seat Taken? except you have a variety of cats and boxes/baskets on shelves to place them in. The most logic-y puzzle of the bunch. I was perfectly happy to put cats in boxes, but my daughter got a little bored. I will say that sometimes you were not given enough information to solve the puzzle, which was a little annoying but easily overcome.

But Kit, you might say, why are you looking at silly puzzlers? Well, I think Steam put the games it thought I would like best on top (there were a lot of available demos, and I did not go through all of them. Six seemed like a reasonable amount of demos to go through and I stopped after that) and I do tend to play a lot of shorter games. Mostly that’s because I don’t tend to have the attention span to get through longer games easily–it’s not that I don’t love a story-rich open world RPG, but I’m not going to get very far, and I’ll probably play a bunch for a few weeks and then not touch it again for months, if ever.

(Not to say I won’t get through an open world RPG, but it’s going to take me a hot minute. I have a lot going on, and gaming is often pretty low on the priority list.)

Did you guys play any demos in Steam’s promotion? (I don’t actually know what it was called, I kind of stumbled into it) Did you find anything interesting?

Oh, the Wandering Brain

Happy ~~Saturday~~ Sunday, squiders! I’m having a great day, and I hope you are too! (My Saturday ended up being so great, I never finished the blog post.)

Now that we’re actively submitting, we can go back to the revision for my scifi horror novella.

So, of course, my brain is off on every possible tangent unrelated to said novella.

For example, several years ago I wrote a YA horror novel called What Lurks Beneath the Bleachers. It started as a joint epistolary novel I was writing with my friend Kate, each of us writing letters as a separate viewpoint character. Kate wandered off in the middle of it, and I eventually (with her blessing) rewrote the whole thing myself, keeping a letter at the beginning of each chapter.

I later went back and rewrote it, and I ran it through the critique marathon once (where it got shredded) and have not touched it since.

But it does live rent free in my head, and I would like to get back to it at some point. I wrote one of the main characters, Ali, in another joint novel that I wrote with a different friend, and I have a third book partially outlined that would take place after Bleachers.

So every now and then my brain will randomly start listing the things that need to be fixed:

Technology has to be added in (I started it long enough ago that not every teenager had a cell phone)
Tone needs to be evened out (some chapters are funny, some are scary, but it flip flops and not helpfully)
Removal of the letters? (arguably the core of the story, but do kids even write letters anymore?)
Go to single viewpoint? (might fix tone flipflop)

All lovely thoughts, although not currently relevant.

(Although, since I’m trying not to add more revision projects onto my plate, if I change enough things, it may actually count as a new story in my head?)

(No, bad Kit. Focus.)

Another story that I would like to get back to someday is called Broken Mirrors, which is and always has been an awful title. This was the first book I ever revised, and I actually queried it for a bit. It’s fairy tale satire about a witch and a princess who are best friends. Like Bleachers, it suffers from tone issues. I wrote it to be YA (the characters are 15 and 16) but tonally it reads more like MG because of the fairy tale silliness.

So, again, my brain randomly decides that This Too Needs Fixing instead of focusing on whatever I’m actually working on.

Except unlike Bleachers which has some obvious fixes (if it’s horror make it horror, you ditz), Mirrors has yet to solidify one direction or the other. Do I make it MG to keep the sillier aspects of the story? (YA is not allowed to be silly. I don’t know why.) Do I make it more serious to make it more YA? If I go MG, do I actually know how to write MG?

(It basically breaks down to how tied am I to Aunt Gertrude living in a gingerbread house in the middle of the forest vs. how invested am I in the romance subplot.)

(Jury’s out.)

But it doesn’t actually matter, because neither Bleachers nor Mirrors are on the immediate schedule of writing projects. First we do the scifi horror novella, then we work on the paranormal cozy mystery, somewhere in there we write something new, and THEN we can look at other things.

Unless, you know, I get an agent and need to work on Book 1 edits, and go on sub, and all that jazz. And then I assume I move directly onto Books 2 and 3. Who knows! Chaos.

Maybe I should throw the schedule out and put all potential projects in a hat, and draw one out. Screw schedules! Schedules are for nerds!

Part of me wonders if there’s some deeper psychological thing going on, like deep down I’m frustrated that the scifi horror needs more work than I initially thought, or I’m worried I won’t be able to fix it, or something.

Maybe I’m just not in the mood to write horror.

Who knows! Not me!

But if I am going to move on to something else, now might be the time to do it, while I’m still not too far into the revision.

I may ponder that, actually.

Good talk, everyone. See you on Tuesday (or maybe Wednesday)!

My Daruma Has an Eye!

Good afternoon, squiders! Exciting developments in these parts.

(I’m not sure who put Taig in mad mode in the background. I suspect a child.)

We talked about my daruma doll a month back or so, but for those who missed it and don’t want to look, darumas are little Japanese dolls that you wish on. I brought mine back from Japan in 2014 for the sole purpose of querying Book 1, and we’re just going to ignore how long it’s been since I bought it until now.

They come with blank eyes, and you color in one when you make a wish, and the other when the wish comes true.

Two weeks ago I expressed frustration with how things were going with juggling the Book 1 submission materials and revision prep for my scifi horror novella and had it helpfully pointed out that maybe I was trying to do too much at once. I sat down and thought about it, decided it was probably true, and stopped the revision prep to focus solely on my submission material.

Well, squiders, my submission materials are done, my agent list is made, and I’ve already sent out three queries. Right now I’m making a moodboard and a trope list for pitch events on Blue Sky (and I guess maybe Twitter but ew).

So, yes, all I needed to do was focus.

Which is infuriating.

I wrote a book once about working on multiple projects at the same time, and in general I stand by the techniques mentioned there, but I did include a section on working on only one project at a time, because that is what works best for different people and different times.

And I suspect as long as I could, I would have procrastinated on the submission materials. I think getting the focus on the agent list really helped, because it gave the whole submission process some tangibility. It wasn’t just “make submission materials and yeet them into the void,” it was “oh, here is an end goal, I need these things for these specific people.” Also, now I can see if agents I want to query are going to close soon (or have just opened), which gives the process some immediacy as well, and is why we have queries out.

So, we’re actively doing this. The eye has been colored.

Wish me luck!

Promo: Dragon Flight Anthology

Good morning, squiders! I’ve got an anthology for you today for anyone who loves a good dragon story!

Fantasy

Date Published: January 23, 2025

Publisher: Dragon Soul Press

Caution: Dragons ahead.

Prepare to delve into fiery worlds full of dragons. From hatchlings to ancients. From tame to wild. Many have their own goals, and most want to see the world reduced to ash. To reshape the world in their own reptilian image. Others struggle to survive, but heroes rise among them.

Which side will you choose?

Featuring 27 stories by the following authors: Vicki Erwin, Bruce Buchanan, Demi Michelle Schwartz, Sadie Lielle, Andreas Flögel, Desirae Gracyn, C.L. Hart, Kristen Argyres, Sandy R. Stuckless, Jessica Lee Minneci, Rae Evans, S.E. Reed, Larry Hodges, David O’Mahony, Mae Thorn, M.L. Quinn, Racquel Sims, Sierra Jackson, Daniel DiQuinzio, Ana Cordoba, Gabriella Balcom, D.J. Elton, Ann Stolinsky, Charles Barouch, Arwyn Sherman, Kiera Kearsey, Binod Dawadi, and J.E. Feldman.

A Night In the Magical Menagerie

Can creatures with radically different motivations get along?

In this fantastical tale a fox named Tod and a tortoise named Torte are brought to the Forest Environment of the Magical Menagerie of Celephaïs by the Outer God Nyarlathotep and his daughter. The friends encounter a wheelbarrow full of peculiar fruit and several exotic creatures. Will they enjoy a good life in their new home, or is this strange place as filled with peril as the one they escaped?

Excerpt

In the Forest Environment of the Magical Menagerie of Celephaïs, a fox and a tortoise gave one another a puzzled glance as they examined a wheelbarrow filled with strange yellow fruits.

“Before Nyarlathotep and his daughter left us here last night, they assured us that King Kuranes’ gamekeepers would care for us,” the fox said. “I am not sure the gamekeepers know what they are doing. What are these, and how is one meant to eat them? They are covered in spines like a hedgehog, and the green growth on the top poked me in my nose! Come to think of it, Torte, I’m not sure I trust Nyarlathotep or his daughter. After all, he is the great Cosmic Trickster, and surely, the apple does not fall far from the tree.”

“This is only a name imparted to him by humans, Tod,” Torte said. “Humans are a peculiar lot. Nyarlathotep was forthright with Captain Sammy, and he has been forthright with us.”

“I defer to your intuition, my friend. You are slow to anger and take the time to thoroughly assess situations. Very well, rather than postulating malice on the part of Nyarlathotep, I postulate that he does not know what my kind eats and nor, apparently, do King Kuranes’ gamekeepers.”

“Perhaps these were left here for those animals that eat fruit,” Torte said. “I have never before seen the like of them, but they have a pleasant scent. On the other hand, perhaps they were left here inadvertently. Upon discovering their mistake, the gamekeepers will return with the correct foodstuffs.”

“If you believe they have a pleasant scent, I will knock one to the ground for you,” Tod offered.

About the Author

C.L. Hart had a stormy start to her life. She was born at 6 A.M. the morning after Valentine’s Day in 1965 during a raging blizzard.

She has been a fan of horror and weird fiction for as long as she can remember. She used to read horror comics under the covers with a flashlight as a child.

She started reading Edgar Allan Poe when she was six years old. In her early teens, she discovered H.P. Lovecraft. She pretended to lose the copy of At the Mountains of Madness that she borrowed from the school library and paid the fine so she could keep the book.

Ms. Hart blames the team at Chaosium Role-Playing Games for renewing and strengthening her obsession with Lovecraft’s writing. She lives in a small town on the northeastern plains of Colorado in an appropriately old and storied house with her son and cats. She enjoys watching the normal people pass by as she records the happenings in the weird worlds of her imagination.

C.L. Hart writes poetry and nonfiction as Cara Hartley, and erotica as Lil DeVille.

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