While The Chance of a Coin shows up first on the list of Peregrine and Blade stories, it wasn’t the first written, and was more done somewhere in the middle of the current stories.
Why it shows up first is that it is more of a vignette, a very short piece of flash fiction that gives a brief introduction to the two main characters, Peregrine and Blade, and a brief insight into what they are like, and what drives them. And it still manages to tell a story.
The Cahuac Cycle is a collection of very short stories that are among the earliest I wrote. Not the very oldest, but they were written before I had started to take short fiction seriously.
They had their origins back in he late 90s from memory – I was taking part in an pbem worldbuilding game/exercise. We each made up a culture in a earth-like world, starting in the stone age just before hunter-gatherers began to settle down and each 100 years we explained what had gone on in the culture, what changes and happened and so on. Farming was discovered, plants and animals were domesticated, settlements started to appear, and so on. It didn’t last too long, maybe 20 turns in, but the culture I had developed had spread and split up and interacted with neighbouring cultures.
As part of it, I came up with a few stories as told by the people of that culture that were creation myths and legends of their people, about how things came to be, revolving around one legendary ancestor-hero named Cahuac. They were fun to write and a little bit different, a bit of worldbuilding that I later tried to fold into another project that some day might see the light of day.
Unlike Peregrine and Blade, Ishkinil of Athan Arch is a series of recently written stories, and while it falls under the purview of S&S as well, it is different to the other series, a reflection, I hope, of lessons learned and the years between them.
The Ishkinil stories were only conceived and written late last year, as part of a writing challenge, and were the first new short stories I’d really written for a while. It wasn’t nano, but was at the same time, over at Royal Road, where the challenge was to write and put up for reading 55,555 words over 5 weeks.
I only attempted it on he spur of the moment, with no real vision of what the stories would look like, only that I wanted to get back to writing S&S short fiction after a long break from it.
In the end turned out 6 stories and around 56,600 words. Not bad for 5 weeks work.
The stories and the setting itself turned out interesting as well, even if it did develop as I wrote it, further expanding upon it as I went by.
Ishkinil herself is a warrior women with some mystical abilities, who has links to Death, and carries a bone white sword called Dirgesinger, which legend says is connected to Death in some regards. The world she walks is dying, rivers and even seas drying up and deserts spreading. The lands are ruled over by tyrants who use dark sorcery to extend their lives far beyond what is normal, trying to evade Death, all of which puts them at odds with Death who is denied what is naturally owed to him.
So far there are six stories in the Ishkinil of Athan Arach series, with three of them already available to read here; A Bargain Paid in Pain and Death, Winged Shadows over Iskor Yar and Claws of the Red Talon. The other three will be following soon.
One of the main and largest of my short fiction stories is the Peregrine and Blade series, S&S inspired by the likes of Howard and Leibner.
The birth of the setting, the characters and the stories of Peregrine and Blade came about when I was undergoing a shift in my reading habits, having become jaded with the monster doorstopper epics that took decades to finish and were filled with needless padding. I’d taken to reading some of the old authors, such as Robert. E Howard, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock, who wrote on the opposite end of the scale – plenty of short stories of a pulp heroic fantasy style often called sword and sorcery.
I’d been starting to write some short stories by this stage too, so I was inspired to try out that style. In addition I’d just read an article on some of the great cities of fantasy – places such as Lankhmar, Ankh-Morpork and Minas Tirith. I wanted to create a memorable city like that to explore. My first thought was to try to incorporate it into the current series of short stories I was writing, The Chronicles of the White Bull. However I soon discarded that idea – the main character of those stories, Nhaqosa, had his own story to tell and I had no plans to have him stay in one place for any amount of time, and especially not enough to explore a great city.
So I moved on to the idea of creating a new setting for the stories. Once that was decided I needed characters for the setting. I decided to play with the typical pairing, which tends to be the big strong man and the smaller, smarter partner. Instead I would make the tall one the brains while the short one would be the brawn. I played around with the idea of making the short warrior a dwarf, but quickly discarded that – I wanted it to be a human oriented world.
I then had the idea to really mix it up – when a man and woman are the adventurers, predominantly it is the man who is the dumb muscle, and the woman the brains, and quite often the one who uses magic. Why not reverse those roles?
Thus were born Fianna, also known as Peregrine, the wild sword-maiden, and her taller, cultured, urbane companion of the cities, Carse of the Red Blade, sometimes a rogue, assassin and dabbler in magic.
With the idea for the two characters, and a city to base them out of, I started writing. I had no other ideas beyond that, the world, cultures, place or history. I quickly wrote three stories – Darkness in the Flames, The Scroll in the Tower and Blood upon the Sands. As I wrote them, the world slowly revealed itself to me.
That was about fifteen years ago and over the next couple of years, fifteen more stories followed, with ideas for seven more before I stopped writing them, for a number of reasons.
But now with the desire to share the stories one more, it means that there will be more coming again.
Most of what I write falls into the short fiction category. While I have written novels in the past, it is mostly short fiction that interests me at the moment, and what I am concentrating on.
As for the genres, for the most it falls within the science fiction/fantasy collective, including a number of different sub-genres within that.
For the moment the stories that are being released on the site fall into the Sword and Sorcery fantasy category, but in times others that have been written (and are waiting for editing) will join them, including heroic fantasy, mythic fantasy, gunpowder fantasy, comedic sci fi, space opera, steampunk, tragedy and weird.
I have also written some epic fantasy and a weird noir fantasy, in novel form, and have plans for others like urban fantasy, cyberpunk, science fiction and some stranger mash ups of various genres.
So, plenty yet to come.
I have made mention of a number of types of short fiction – flash fiction, short stories, novelettes and novellas. They refer to various lengths of short fiction, though the word counts for the are not set in stone and can vary from person to person.
My definitions for my stories are as follows;
Flash Fiction: Up to 1000 words.
Short Stories: 1000-7500 words.
Novelettes: 7500-17500 words.
Novellas: 17500- 40000 words.
Novel: Over 40000 words.
Flash fiction, short stories, novelettes and novellas. I’m a big fan of all forms of short fiction, both reading and writing it. I didn’t used to be so enthusiastic about it.
Once upon a time I was an avid reader of the epic doorstopper form of fantasy, with its multiple volumes of weighty tomes and series that didn’t end. However, the more that they didn’t end, the more I began to drift away from them. Waiting 20+ years for the conclusion of a story I started when much younger began to wear thin. As did the padding that became more ad more pronounced as the series went on that filled out the books solely to keep the series going.
In addition I didn’t have as much time to devote myself to such weighty series. And so I began reading other forms of fantasy – short fiction. The epics went unfinished – there are only a few that I have completed. I grew to enjoy the shorter form for its sharp action, succinct stories, lack of padding and general fun of action and adventure.
These mega-epics weren’t always the way – during the days of the pulp magazines short fantasy stories were all the rage. Authors like Robert E Howard (creator of Conan of Cimmeria, Krull the Conqueror and others), Fritz Leiber (creator of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser) and others wrote short stories, novelettes and novellas. C.S.Lewis’ Narnia series are actually what would be called novellas, and the grand-daddy of the epic novels – The Lord of the Rings – is only as long as single volumes of current day series.
The more I read of them, the more I wanted to write them as well. I had always thought I’d write those sprawling epics when I was younger, but just as my reading tastes have changed, so have my writing. I began to write short fiction and found it much easier and fun. While I knew making a living from short fiction was harder than novels I had found my style and wasn’t going to let that stop me.
The style of writing long and short stories is vastly different – short stories are purer. That doesn’t make them better – just that they have to be distilled down compared to novels. Those 1000 page epic need a lot of padding, casts of thousands, pages of purple prose descriptions and dozens of plots to reach that length. Short stories only have the one, simple plot for the most, and don’t have the space for long, flowery description – they have to do more with less.
It is for such reasons that I currently prefer short stories, both reading and writing them.
Over a couple of years I’ve written a large number of works of short fiction, with a whole bunch more planned. I look forward to sharing them and hope people have as much enjoyment reading them as I did writing them.
Welcome aboard my site, Tales from a Thousand Worlds. The purpose of this place is to share my appreciation for the shorter forms of writing, as well as to share some of my own.
By the shorter forms I mean flash fiction, short stories, novelettes and novellas – anything under around 40,000 words and not a novel. Indeed, many classic novels are now what would be classified as novellas. Short stories once had a large following – you just have to look at the popularity of the pulp magazines of the past to see that. While they are no longer as popular as they were, they have never gone away.
My own collection of short fiction, one that has grown over the years to number quite a few stories, is spread across a number of genres and sub-genres in the SF/F field, hence the name of the site. Heroic fantasy, sword and sorcery, cyberpunk, steampunk, urban fantasy, space opera, weird and the like, they do not quite encompass a thousand worlds but they are varied. I aim to slowly aid them here, and elsewhere.
While I won’t claim that they are literature, I hope that they are full of action, adventure and fun, a form of escapism like the pulps of yore.
talesfromathousandworlds.com 