It is always exciting when a new month begins because that means there’s a new chapter to share! “Stone and Sword, or, The Insidious Influence of the Other” arrives today, and it marks a distinct turning point in our series, not only returning to the story of Father Saren...
A friendly reader recently commented that this month’s chapter – “Argument, or, The Raising of the Elect” – could easily function as the book’s opening chapter, despite being the fifth in the release order. We absolutely agree! It is easy to imagine the story beginning right here with Arden...
“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...
Some readers expressed surprise when “The Elect Stories” made a leap of twenty years from chapter one to chapter two. While the absence of the first chapter’s heroes, Palm and Timriel, is an obvious change, a more subtle one is the shift to present tense. The swashbuckling story of...
I asked the first beta readers of “The Elect Stories,” a handful of questions about themes that stood out to them. I expected to hear things like “good vs. evil” and hoped to hear things like “fate vs. free will,” because those themes are both genre standards and very...
The first chapter of “The Elect Stories” has been available for just a couple of days, but already I have been answering questions about my writing or, more particularly, one word of my writing. One word used repeatedly. “Why so many f-bombs?” Yes, Timriel, one of our protagonists, has...
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