“The Rose and Honey Soul” is done!

A little over two-and-a-half years ago, I started work on a short story inspired by Dark Souls. It was a dark, baroque, and dense story about a an Asher adrift in a world drenched in eternal dark following her partner and lover’s disappearance. I wrote about 5,000 words, and loved the world and characters, but came to the realization that something wasn’t quite right.

I set it aside, as I often do with projects that aren’t working, and moved onto a few other things (like “On the Phone with Goblins,” my novelette about two geriatric wizards solving crime from their retirement hone, which is quite unlike “The Rose and Honey Soul,” and “The Dinosaur Graveyard,” which is short, bright, and hopeful.) Fast forward to June of this year when I opened up my work on “The Rose and Honey Soul” and realized very quickly what was wrong with the story as I’d been telling it: it wasn’t a short story.

So, I opened Scrivener, bounced around between outlining it as a novella and a novel (turns out, in the end, it fell right smack in the middle, natch), and quickly filled out all the holes and came out with a multi-chapter outline that not only seemed to work, but excited me in a way that the original draft hadn’t.

So, I got working.

The Thousand Shattered Gods

My WIP novel finally has a name: The Thousand Shattered Gods.

I don’t want to say too much at this point about the plot, etc., but I will say that it’s set in the same universe as “The Red-rimmed Eyes of Tou Ma,” my novelette that was originally released in Unfettered II, and shares a principal protagonist: Farid Sulayk. My plan has always been to have a series of novels with intersecting short fiction, and this is the start of that.

You may have seen my Twitter conversation last week about epic fantasy. It began with me searching for book recommendations, but an off-hand comment about how, in my heart-of-hearts, what I *really* want to be writing is big, adventurous ’90s-style epic fantasy, but that I was under the impression that it was a hard sell. Thanks to encouraging feedback from Brit E. B. Hvide and Hannah Bowman, two people with loads of experience in the publishing industry, however, I returned to my outline for a novel I started working on a couple of years ago. It didn’t have a name, and I’d stalled on writing it after about 20k words because something just wasn’t quite right.