Always quirky, sometimes sweet speculative fiction

Tag: Charming

Charming Out Now

Leading Edge 68

Click to buy

I’m elated today to announce that Charming has been released in issue 68 of Leading Edge Magazine.

Even more exciting, that’s Prince James, my protagonist, on the cover! I may or may not have been dancing since I first realised a couple of weeks back when I received a sneak peek at the cover.

My morning has been a flurry of social media sharing it and I just sent out my first email newsletter ever announcing it. If you’re a newsletter member please let me know if the email looked good – it really is my first ever attempt!

Do you not know anything about Charming yet? Charming is one of my Retailored Fairy Tales, the very first to be released. Here’s the story in one line:

“To keep his small kingdom from bankruptcy Prince James sells his services to worried parents and lazy lovers to rescue their princesses for them. His latest mission however, is proving to be his most difficult.”

A dire wolf, an enchanter’s eldest daughter, lies, a princess trapped in a tower at the bottom of a lake, and the dark secrets of the Black Forest, all while trying to keep his kingdom afloat and maybe, just maybe, finding his love-at-first-sight girl.

Right now it’s only available in paperback (buy here) but the ebook version will be along shortly and I’ll let you know at once when it’s released.

Certifiably Delighted

Me and my shiny new certificate. Yes, I framed it.

Me and my shiny new certificate. Yes, I framed it.

I’ve already mentioned this, but I suppose it was more in passing in a goals round-up than in a big way. So let me rectify that.

Last year my (still not yet published) short story, Charming, received an honourable mention in the fourth quarter of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers Of The Future contest.

An honoruable mention nets me a nice certificate to commemorate the achievement. And it just arrived in the mail 😀

Now I’ll be putting it beside my lovely Redlitzer trophy and my ‘published author’ plaque/desk stand thing. I’m starting to get a nice little collection going.

If you’d like to know a little more about Charming this is the one sentence summary I have for it on my ‘Current Projects’ page:

To keep his small kingdom from bankruptcy Prince James sells his services to worried parents and lazy lovers to rescue their princesses for them. His latest mission however, is proving to be his most difficult.

Charming is still out there shopping for a home and has a couple of sequels at various developmental stages too. I’ll keep you updated on its progress.

What Is Mythpunk?

Yesterday I finished off two more of my mythpunk short stories, so now I’ve a total of six short stories. I keep referring to them as my ‘mythpunk anthology’ even though I’ve no plan to make an anthology of them just yet. You may be asking right now, what is mythpunk?

To be honest, I’d never heard of the genre ‘mythpunk’ before reading Chuck Wendig’s flash fiction challenge a month (or so) ago – though I have noticed a fondness out there for ‘punking’ eg/ steampunk and dieselpunk, both of which are awesome.

Mythpunk is apparently what I have been writing recently in my short stories, Groundskeeper, Charming, The Wyvern’s Sting and The Troll’s Toll. Mythpunk is a form of speculative fiction which takes elements of myths, fairy tales, and folk tales and mixes them with more modern ideas, like feminism and multiculturalism or twisting it in an unusual direction.

An illustration from Beauty and The Beast, artist Angela Barrett. This picture inspired a whole new tale and an unorthodox ending to another.

An illustration from Beauty and The Beast, artist Angela Barrett. This picture inspired a whole new tale and an unorthodox ending to another.

Sassy girl who tends a labyrinth designed to trap princess inside, check. A princess sold into captivity fighting for freedom and to gain back her throne instead of just sitting around and waiting for her prince, check. A broke prince rescuing princesses for the bounty money, check. Sounds like this is one of my new favourite genres.

Of course I’m not sure that my work has quite the edge that deserves a word like ‘punk’, but then again a lot of writers feel themselves inadequate in regards to certain aspects of their writing, so perhaps this is mine?

Regardless, I’m having a lot of fun toying with the mythpunk genre(another idea recently popped in my head to be a fun follow-up to Charming that would actually tie a few of the stories together) and don’t see myself abandoning it any time soon.

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