Celtic Bard: Blog

I have finally finished and submitted The Death of Love in Morristown! For those of you who have been waiting and e-mailing me and praying to my muse that I would eventually finish it, I apologize. My muse is a rather capricious and sadistic bitch who decided to whack me upside the head with ideas for many, many other things over the last two years. As I wrote when I first posted it, Death and Love in Marjah came to me as the first sentence of the story and it was almost a rush to fill it in from there. The Death of Love in Morristown was prompted by some of you readers who read the first story and wanted loose ends tied up. That is not how I write, generally, and so the inspiration was lacking. Or maybe my muse was just sulking at having her job usurped. Whatever the case, I got to the first two paragraphs of Part III of TDoLiM and then the ideas dried up. Last week I decided to grind it out and finish it, if only to make that yellow line in my story list go away. The end result is something more along the lines of a trip down a painful memory lane for Maeve and some insight into Con for Shameera. Either way, I hope those of you who have been longing for the completed story are happy with the end result. Please, please, PLEASE don't ask for another one. This one was almost painful to write and I don't like writing when stories get like that.

As for the other two new stories, I want to thank those of you who have responded to them; it has been overwhelmingly positive. Aside from one person who decided to use the story as an opportunity to blame the Fall of Man and everything that preceded it on George W. Bush, the e-mails have been supportive, even from those who felt I went a little heavy on the political tones of it. I usually try my hardest to keep the overt politics out of stories, if only so I don't get mail like that, but A Match Made in the Hindu Kush was about a soldier in Afghanistan and nobody who talks to guys serving in that mess can be 100% neutral. I have too many people in my life who are associated with the military to keep that from coloring my thoughts on that subject. And anyone who spends any amount of time with military personnel and their families would have trouble, too.

On The Arrogance of Empire, I have gotten positive responses as well but one reader sent me an e-mail that made me think about what I was thinking on that story when I wrote it. He seemed to want to know why Kallath did what he did and how Sieti-Kha went so bad so fast as an Empire. Suffice it to say the e-mail and my response were much longer than that but that will do for a summary. For those of you with similar questions I will repost the e-mail and my response to it on my external blog at http://jmfhildebrandt.livejournal.com/ so I don't have to retype it all from memory (the name withheld, of course). It was an interesting and thought provoking e-mail and I tried to make my response worthy of the effort he put into it.

That is all for now. I will hopefully get back to work on your favorite unfinished story soon and my muse will no doubt hit me with new stuff (the sadist). Until then, enjoy the new postings and revisiting the older stuff.

As promised, ladies and gents, new stories have been submitted. The first, A Match Made in the Hindu Kush, was already posted as of this blog entry. The Webmaster is smoking today. It is about a U. S. Army sniper on a mission near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Something goes awry on his exfiltration and he winds up in a cellar, bleeding and having no memory as to how he got there. That is about all I will say about the plot. It is part of the Magic at War Universe, though none of the characters from the Con/Shameera stories are involved.

The second story, The Arrogance of Empire, is going to be the first in a new high fantasy Universe called Pan-Deia. Pan-Deia is a world that probably has waaay more gods than it needs and their fingers are always getting tangled in the threads of mortal's lives. No gods in the first story about a general sent on a doomed invasion mission but the first novel-length story in this Universe is all about what happens when gods are convinced to put all of their attention on something that has mortals in a dither. That story is called The Shattering of Faith and I will start posting that one when I have more than the chapter or two that I have now. I have been working too hard on other stuff to have done much on it lately, so it might be a while in coming.

As for The Death of Love in Morristown, I finished it as promised this week but it needs to be transcribed from chicken scratch to English onto the computer, edited, and re-edited before I can post it. There will be two more parts to it and they focus mainly on Maeve and Shameera. Hopefully they will be submitted before the end of the weekend.

That is all for now, enjoy the new stories and check back here for news on TDoLiM.

All right folks, there should be two new short stories coming your way this week, possibly into this weekend, depending on how work goes this week. The first is the introduction of a new Universe called Pan-Deia in the story The Arrogance of Empire. This is not going to be a happy story. There is no trick happy ending. What you see in the first quarter of the story is what you get throughout the entirety. This is a tragedy from beginning to end so try not to get too upset, since I have warned you. It is also written in an unconventional style as more a jog through one character's (for the most part) memories as he heads towards the end.

The second story is one many of you have e-mailed me about over the last two years and change that it has languished Incomplete and Inactive. I will, by the weekend at least, have finished The Death of Love in Morristown. This one is a story that takes place between the third and fourth to last paragraphs of Death and Love in Marjah. It was meant to wrap up a loose end or two, nothing more. So please, please don't ask for another one! This one was agony to write (thus the long lag time between Parts I & II and the final parts) and DaLiM was meant to be a stand alone story, complete in itself. After that I will get back to work on the next chapters of Future Distorted and Anomaly of the Fates and maybe even a few short stories that have languished with TDoLiM on the incomplete shelf.

There is a third story I have titled A Match Made in the Hindu Kush that I am in the middle of transcribing from chicken scratch to English. It is fairly long (though still a short story) so the conversion process may take a while. It will go in the Magic at War Universe and is about a sniper on a mission in Afghanistan. That is all I will say about that but I hope to have that one up soon, too.

That is all for now. Check back in a couple days for news on those postings.

Since posting House of Samuelson, I have gotten some feedback that made me change the voting on the non-story as well as changing the description. Apparently it irked some that it was not a story despite the fact that if you read the description and the end note it indicated that this is not really a story but more a very long appendix to the Xeuxondra Universe. There are stories within some of the clan headings, but it is not a coherent, put-together story in the traditional sense. That is why I described it as a history.
So, the voting option has been removed for House of Samuelson and a very plain warning that it THIS NOT A STORY! placed in the description. Since some people did find it interesting, I will leave it up for those who care to look it over. For those upset that I wasted your time and energy with it, my apologies but I am apparently not alone in finding such things fascinating.

As the title suggests, I have submitted something new in the Xeuxondra Universe. It is something that gives background to the family that Josef Samuelson from A Stranger in an Even Stranger Land winds up joining in Reign of Madness, my first published novel. I have, for a while now, thought about writing some of the short stories that this work (House of Samuelson) naturally suggests and those may be forthcoming in the next few months, my muse and other work and real life permitting. I have always found this sort of thing interesting when other authors make it available and, given some of the response to An Abridged History of the Order, I am not alone in that. So enjoy and mind the end note for a more complete explanation.