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...
I grew up enjoying Westerns. I’ve always had a particular fondness for Sergio Leone’s “Man with No Name” films, even before I could properly articulate why. Despite the bad dubbing, the anachronistic production design, and the all-over-the-shop acting, something about those films has always felt more “true” to me...
If nothing else, this month’s cover art – a dark portrait lit with unnatural neon colors, our standard background “frame” warped and washed in black and gray – should tip you off that there are changes afoot in the world of the Elect. From the first page of this...
One of the cool benefits of publishing via Amazon Kindle is that the work can be revised or corrected even after it has moved from our virtual shelf to yours. If we spot typos or grammatical errors, a corrected draft can be uploaded that will be swapped out for...
Plato wrote about the concept of “telos” as being a “perfect paradigm” or “ultimate version” of whatever was being discussed. His student Aristotle and his contemporaries expanded upon the idea, saying that everything and everyone has its own form of telos to achieve, that being their own “purpose” in...
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...
Fantasy stories transport us to other worlds with the power of words. It is the nature of the genre that some of those words will be wholly new inventions of the author. We writers aren’t trying to be difficult, and (most of us) don’t enjoy forcing you to memorize...
With a new month comes a new installment, and this month’s story is one we’ve been looking forward to sharing for a long time. It was consistently ranked as a stand-out by the beta readers, and is one of the author’s personal favorites, as well. “Reward, or, The Calling...
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