Fireside Tales
I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. . . . So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.
- Clive Barker, Sacrament
Writings from Fantasybits
These are stories that I wrote for, or were inspired by, the Fantasybits list on Yahoogroups. This is a great list, by the way, with a lot of talented and enthusiastic people on it; it really kick-started my writing. I recommend it highly to aspiring genre writers, especially ones who are having trouble getting their fictions off the ground.
These are works-in-progress, and largely unfinished. One of the merits of posting to a list is that it keeps me going, and so I hope to keep adding to these as time goes by. Keep posted.
Ian Barrett's Tale - This story has become in some ways the centerpiece of my Fantasybits work. It utilizes characters and settings that I've been kicking around in my head for a while now without comitting it to writing. It may well be the start of a very long work if I can pull it off; the epistolary (or, in this case, mostly epistolary) form can be a challenge to sustain, but we'll see.
A Lizard in Crimson - A tale connected by certain threads to the above, as will be seen. I'm aiming for its eventual expansion to novella-length as a sort of companion piece to the rest of Ian's strange adventures.
Castle Meregost (excerpt) - This weighty fragment, also set in the same "universe" as the two previous pieces (though not as obviously so as "Lizard"), must remain a bit of a teaser for a while. I've expanded the story through to its end but have yet to write the beginning; so it goes. I'll get back to it one of these days, and include the story here in its entirety.
Berengar Moran and the Faerie - This was my first experimental foray into defining and expanding the Berengar mythology I refer obliquely to elsewhere in my fictions. I intended this to read like something out of a Penguin or Oxford Classics book or similar: a "scholarly" essay/critique followed by the tale itself, as if reprinted from some ancient manuscript. Decide for yourself if it works.
The Bits Backlog - These are sketches, or vignettes, making use of the various backlist of writing topics on Fantasybits from well before my time. Some are destined to remain as they are, while others might end up as part of larger stories one day.
Other Fictions (forthcoming)