Now that the first twelve chapters of “The Elect Stories” have been released for a bit, it seems like a fine time to talk about where the tale goes from here. After all, some of you who have finished reading these 12 have been asking for a while about...
A friend of mine who has diligently purchased every installment of “The Elect Stories” upon its release recently made a confession: he hasn’t actually started reading them yet, but he enjoys collecting them. Fair enough. You don’t even have to open them to see that Todd’s covers are super...
Intrigued by Todd Sharp’s portrait of an angst-ridden Jonny Guess featured on the cover of Chapter 9, a friend asked if each issue contains a stand-alone story, or if he’d need to read all eight back-issues before finally learning about the long-haired dude in the purple coat. Well, “The...
If you’ve started reading Chapter 9: “Delving Deep, or, The Macabre Misadventures of Misters Scrivener, Bellwether and Guess,” you’ve likely noticed that it does not pick up where Chapter 8 left off. When last we saw Mister Guess, he was sheltering the fugitives Palm and Timriel in his home...
Back in August, a reader commented that Chapter 5 – in which (no spoilers) Arden Clarkson makes his first contact with the sylueds and discovers his father’s secret – could easily have functioned as the opening of the book. At the time, I replied that the first five chapters...
“Grimdark” is a term that I only picked up on in the past year or so, mostly on Reddit and Goodreads. It is a descriptive, and increasingly pejorative, name for a subgenre of Science Fiction and Fantasy that is pervasively bleak in tone and dwells on the most negative...
This month’s cover art by Todd Sharp features the blood-red silhouettes of three men mounted on galloping horses. The curlicues of the art nouveau background, rendered in textured shades of brown, evoke the hand-tooled leather of western saddles. All three of the men are wearing broad-brimmed hats. Two of...
With the arrival this month of our fourth installment – “Negotiation, or, The Various and Sundry Businesses of Mister Jonathan Guess” – we introduce a new character and a new tone to the stories. Unlike Palm, Timriel, See, and Gelgarth, there’s nothing heroic about Jonathan Guess, unless you choose...
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” That’s Steven King’s advice to aspiring writers from his excellent book, “On Writing.” I...
In Chapter 4, we meet Jonathan Guess, a young man who rises to power in the city of Vessena as a new kind of law enforcer – the “Thieftaker General” – while also operating as the right hand of Fortunado, the nefarious “Thief Lord” himself. Playing both sides of...
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