Shores of Night

 Morning, Sorry I've been really bad at blogging recently, haven't I? I'll try to address that soon.  In them meantime, I've just published the next part of Shadows, and you can find it  here . This part is mostly fighting, to be honest, though Elna has some other dangers to face. I think you can see how I was "inspired" by the Rollright Stone here. This is the penultimate part, so would you like to see more of Elna's adventures?  I'd like to explore this world more, so if you'd like to read more of her stories, let me know.  I didn't publish anything last weekend, because I went up to Wolverhampton to house sit for a friend who went on holiday. This largely meant I was looking after her chihuahua and watching Netflix - bingeing on documentaries about cults (though there wasn't much I hadn't already seen, which was disappointing) and true crime shows. I did a bit of work, but not very much, and mostly caught up on sleep when I wasn'...

This part of the novella ( Shadows of the Past ) has been published today and is only a small section. It was inspired in part by The Whispering Knights at the Rollright Stones  on the border of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire.  The Rollrights The Whispering Men is a dolmen located close to the main circle, The King's Men, and there's also the King Stone which sits nearby. According to legend, they were an army who were transformed into stone when they were cursed by a witch. I doubt that story is particularly novel, really. It seems like it would be a pretty common idea in later epochs, one concocted to explain their presence at a time when "humans dragged stones for miles to build something" was probably an alien concept, and when the predominant thoughts about time was that the Earth was less than 4000 years old.  I suspect the idea that when you count the stones you never reach the same number twice (and that bad things happen if you manage to get the same number thr...

 Good morning. It's Saturday and that means it's Shadows of the Past day. Today, in part 11, the characters follow The Trail  deeper into the forest to a place of long lost mysteries.  This part captures some of the Torvenlanders' history and the way they helped to change the world they're in, as well as shedding some light on Fergus' past. I wanted to flesh him out a bit, to give a sense of his character outside of being someone dependable and good at fighting. Also, as the piece is called Shadows of the Past, it felt appropriate to say that Elna wasn't the only member of this group to have some trauma from her past. The chapter also deepens the character of Vigdis, making her more mysterious and also underlining that she's not a nice person. In fact, "nice" isn't really a word I'd be comfortable putting in the same sentence as the Rook. She's a mystery and has an iron will. She's the type of person who'd do whatever it takes t...

 We're live, it's up! I'm using too many exclamation marks!  Part 10 (and I'm still weirded out by the fact my little story has so many parts) is up and published on Wattpad. You can find it here:  Tornhunder!  !  The Tornhunder are faerie monsters, a mixture of hounds and thorny vegetation created by the Fae in one of their more sadistic moments (that's not actually saying much - the Fae in this series are extremely sadistic and alien, even the Changelings don't really think like humans). They're a pivotal part of Elna's story, as she was wounded by one as a child. While she doesn't remember them per se, they haunt her dreams - always hunting for her in the village she lived in as a child. This is her unhealed wound, something that marks her as much as the scar on her face.  When I first created them, I hadn't realised the idea had been used in other places - I've always had a fascination with mammal/plant hybrids and think they're cool....