dragonsbane

I have a new short story. It's here.

Normally I don't like putting up qualifiers for things I've written because I'd rather the text stand for itself, but the short stories I've been working on recently, including the most recent one (which I may not have even put up here, what the hell?) are part of a bigger story I've been working on for . . . years, now. Sometimes it just lives in my brain, sometimes I put some words on paper, building up the world and the events. It's changed a lot since I started, but it's solidifying, slowly. The characters, at least, have taken on their own forms.

This isn't really new here; I've written a number of things taking place in this world and posted them on this blog. But increasingly as I build the world, they become events that are part of something bigger. This is the story of the time a character earned the epithet "Dragonsbane"; it's also a small but significant event in a grander story.

Previously I've been happy to file off the characteristics that tie an individual story to the broader narrative; it's harder to do the closer the stories get to being part of those events. The problem is that I worry that it will feel incomplete, or at the very least that treating these as isolated and separate stories is not the ideal way to present these.

So here we are. I still want to tinker with this forever but eventually you have to hit publish.