Whussup, y’all!
Lion Tamer, my collaboration with Tina Connolly from her new book Seriously Wicked, is alive and kicking on SF Signal. Go read about it. This was a fun project of realizing a song from Tina’s new book, in which a sweet boy, perhaps too sweet for rock n roll, is possessed by a thoroughly rockin demon.
The Fires of Mercy is also live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, in fiction and podcast form. This cool little story was drawn from a very long and complicated mythology that I’ve been working on for ages. One-and-a-half million words, four novel drafts, and here’s this 4k short story to show for it. A wee iceberg tip, peeking above the water.
(Actually, that’s not quite fair to my 2 million words–a previous BCS story came from the same world.)
I wanted to root this story, a kind of founding myth for the world, in something very understandable–a desperate group, on the run, and someone caught between two loyalties. The aphorism “every act of war has at its heart an act of mercy” isn’t something I believe, but it I wanted to create the sort of philosophy that could drive an order of assassins and allow them to live with their deeds.
This story is the foundation for a much larger magic system, a world where jin are a kind of fuel for magic. I’m currently working on a four-story cycle that takes place a thousand years later, and then I’ll get back to the (sigh) novel.
By the way, if you're still reading this blog, I tend to spend more time with my WordPress site these days: spencerellsworth.com
