The second of the Cahuac Cycle short stories has been finished off and upoaded now.
This one is called Wolf and the Stars, and is a little different than the other three in that, though it features Cahuac, it doesn’t revolve around him.
I think it should be obvious what the story is referring too, but it is the kind of thing that would be explained in mythological creation stories.
The third short story of the series of mythological fantasy tales about Cahauc has been added to the site and to smashwords.
This one is called Cahuac and the Bees and follows on from the events of the first two, though is still a stand alone story.
In this one Cahuac must find out why the flowers are no longer growing which is stopping the bees producing their bounty of sweet honey. Cahuac’s journey takes him places both new as well as familiar.
A fourth story for the collection is close to being finished as well.
Was surprised when I did a count of the number of downloads of the various Pure Escapism short stories on Smashwords to discover there have been almost 1700 to date. Which would imply a few people are reading my stories – or at least starting to read them.
The Hall of Black Trees is to date the most popular of the downloads, narrowly ahead of The Pit. The various parts of Cara’s Choice are the ones most linked in member’s libraries – though there is no way to see who has linked them sadly.
Not a huge amount of feedback, but you can’t have everything.
Been a while since I last finished a short story to upload – need to do so soon.
I’ve got a couple more Cahuac short stories in the works. I’d been turning over ideas in my head for what to do next with him and not one but two stories started taking form. Given how short they are and how fun and easy to write they are, it shouldn’t take long for them to do.
Currently they have the working titles of Wolf chases the Stars and The Bee and the Flowers
Another short story has now been completed and added to the Pure Escapism collection. By my count the total amount of words between them comes in at around 96,000 now, which came as a surprise to me when I compiled the numbers.
This story continues on the tale of the giant white minotaur Nhaqosa, following on from The Pit and The Merchant’s Legacy. This one is called Echoes of Dark Reflections.
The world that Nhaqosa has found himself in has always been the most gritty and brutal of the various setting, but this one is darker still, at least for my writing. The story never intended to turn out the way it did. The concept behind it had always been there, to give Nhaqosa something of a different challenge, one that would test even him. However the story took a different path than I expected and I had to ramp back the ending a bit. Even so, the events are going to leave scars on Nhaqosa, and how than pans out in future stories we will have to see when I get around to them.
Given the nature of the story, it seemed logical to introduce a new race, one that I had been trying to work out how to bring into the setting. This is the Talsharan, as mentioned previously in Long Lost Relics. They have something of a dark, unpleasant history to them as well, one that will require further exapnding on at a future date.
The story is also in a way a bit of a homage to Dark Sun setting. It isn’t set on Athas, but it does in parts have a feel for the same brutal setting of Dark Sun I’d like to think.
And so with another story down, it is time to move onto the next one.
I just added one of the short stories I mentioned I found the other day to the list of downloadable stories on the Pure Escapism page. This one is called Long Lost Relics.
Okay, I’ll admit that there is a bit of a bad pun involved there; they story revolves around the recovery of a long lost religious relic, and at the same time the story itself was a bit of a lost relic recently recovered and rewritten.
The story itself originated from a game I played many years ago that sadly ended when the GM got overtaken by real life. It was a fantasy 4X style game – building up a nation via exploration, research, construction and war. The story itself relates certain events that happened during the game itself.
It has nothing to do with the worlds of my fantasy writing, even though I am trying to get the Talsahran, the race I played in the game, into the setting somehow. It has been put up simply as a relic of past writing.
Just finished off the rough draft of the Echoes of Dark Reflections short story, at slightly over 4500 words.
I did this in the new minimalist rough draft style, so it will take a lot of reworking and polishing in the rewrites to get it in a readable form. Not sure how long that will take.
Nhaqosa and his bad go through a bit in this story, which may change them a little in future stories, but I think it may have needed to be done.
More when it is closer to being finished.
Over the last few days, in addition to working on the rough draft of Tears of the Mountain, I have also been making progress on the next short story in the Nhaqosa collection, called Echoes of Dark Reflections.
The rough draft is getting close to the end, but do date it has turned out a bit darker than other stories. The Nhaqosa setting was always the most brutal of them, but other events in Echoes of Dark Reflections seem to be making it grittier. Whether that will survive to the final draft remains to be seen.
The story hasn’t quite been finished yet, and I’m trying to make up my mind about something before doing so. Nhaqosa is accompanied by a merry band of mercenaries, around two dozen in total. Most however remain unnamed and only around three have received any real attention in the stories to date.
I’m trying to decide what to do with them. I could kill most of them off so only a handful remain, but this is likely to have a big impact on Nhaqosa given he sees them as family. The other is in each story focus on one or two of them and then cycle them into the background again. The nature of the stories is that there would always be deaths, it’d just be more pronounced in the former option, and it would be the way I’d go if I was truly evil.
I’ve gone through each page for each short story currently available and finished off the background notes for each. Nothing profound; just a little something relating to how the story came about or something of interest within the story and what was behind it.
The editing of all the short stories is done, for now at least. Next step is to get the new versions uploaded to the site.
Interesting discovery made during the process. You pick up far, far more errors when you read it out loud than just reading it; your eyes tend to skip over errors far more readily otherwise.
Which means if I ever get around to podcasting them, I’m liable to find errors still on the ones I didn’t read out loud.
Next step is to get back to writing. Lots of ideas to get down.
Mist and Shadows 