Before I drop my big news, let me recommend you check out a neat new webzine,
Abandoned Towers. Great fiction and poetry can be found there in numerous genres. Whether fantasy is your first love, or mystery is more to your liking, or westerns are your way of relaxing, AT probably has something you'll enjoy.
Now, while you're there, click on the Fantasy portal to read the new Smoke story, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." It's a laugh riot, promise.
Okay, that isn't the big news. What with the hissing and scratching, I think it's time to let this cat out of the bag. . .Smoke has landed a book contract!
I've signed a contract for a collection of stories about Smoke and his friends, and his enemies--the whole crazy cast. Cyberwizard Productions will be publishing said book late next summer or fall (there's a good chance we'll have the official release at World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, California). So, stay tuned.
For those who have no idea who--or what--Smoke is, a brief introduction: Smoke is a dragon. He's curmudgeonly, threatens to eat people a lot, but somewhere under his scaly exterior, he has a good heart. He is, much to his grudging annoyance, often recruited for his draconic talents by the wizard Ropespor. He's even had to overcome his phobia of knights enough to work with Sir Roger and Roger's squire, Blug--lest the nefarious man-fiend Radnoxious overthrow Mentolarcz, Liptonia, and all of Wohon.
Smoke first appeared in
Blood, Blade, and Thruster issue 3 last October (sandwiched right between interviews with Joe Hill and George R.R. Martin!), in the story "Where There's Smoke, There's Heartburn."
Here is a teaser exerpt from "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", which can be read now at
Abandoned Towers:
Smoke padded to the entrance of his den and, blinking in the light of dawn, peered out. Not forty yards from the cave stood a large troll, his head nearly level with the second vertebra of Smoke’s neck. He was wearing a dirty loincloth and a glittering vestment of chain mail—the latter part being especially unusual for a troll.
The troll was admiring Smoke’s collection of suits of armor. These were propped up on poles and arranged in a long row beside the path, like tin-man scarecrows. The steel tableau had been donated—quite against their will—by knights who had, with misguided zeal, given Smoke a hard time.
The troll scratched a warty buttock, flashed a yellow-toothed grin and pointed with his club at a suit of armor. “Dat one was a customer of mine. Him too. Oh, dey claimed to be pious, didn’t dey? Hah! Dis one offered extra if I could arrange a tryst wit’ a virgin and a unicorn!”
“What do you want?” Smoke’s voice rumbled from the shadows of the cave.
The troll spun around. “I only want what’s mine. Dem’s my property you got in dere. I’m fairly askin’ you to send ‘em on out, ‘n I’ll trouble you no more.”
“What do you want with fairies?”
“Well, dat’d be my business. I stay out of yours, ‘n you stay out of mine. Dat seems fair.”
To emphasize his point, the troll slowly thumped the club he gripped in his right hand onto the palm of his left.
The club was, in fact, a small tree, its branches just showing the first buds of spring.
Smoke looked at the tree in the troll’s hand, then at the hole in the earth where the lone tree on his cliff had grown. His eyes grew wide and his neck reared up out of the cave.
“You—KILLED—my only greenery!!!”
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nostalgic
chipper
confused
"What if?" creativity: You're creative, but not weird or creepy. Well, at least not usually. Odds are you have your moments of both, but on the whole you live a pretty normal life and see your forays into your imagination as either a hobby or a profession, but not a way of living.
