City of Spells

 Hi friends!

My mom is traveling and sending us wonderful pictures every day. Yesterday she visited Ephesus in Turkey. That name immediately reminded me of something... something I'd been working on a while ago, but abandoned to work on The Ark of Broken Dreams (the novel I was working on right before the one I'm currently penning).

Yes, I have a third unpublished trunk novel. It's only about a fifth finished; I let it languish because... well, I don't know why. It was about ten years ago! I think I got more excited about writing a superhero-adjacent novel. And I hadn't started this Patreon yet to help keep me on track.

The upshot is, I haven't thought about it in years. Until Mom's messages prompted me to dig through some old Scrivener files. And I found a project with the working title of Rune Wolf.

In this setting, Ephesus is an alternate world based on real history, but with magic. Yeah, essentially, a fantasy world with some historical touchstones thrown in.

In the real world, Ephesus was abandoned after the surrounding Aegean Sea dried up and dropped away.

Photo by Sharon Cordell Mack

In my magic alternate history, that didn't happen, thanks to a few things. Just possibly related to the fact that, in my fantasy setting, Ephesus's sobriquet is "City of Spells."

(As Batgirl reminds me, Ephesus is pronounced like "emphasis," without the m. Isn't that cool?)

Just for kicks and giggles, I dropped the first scene from Chapter 1 for my Patreon patrons; check it out if you're one.

Strange Sickness

Hey friends!

Hope you are well. It's been a busy time for me, including a funeral last weekend, but I got home in time to see our guest Peter, who had scheduled a visit for the same weekend.

I seem well enough in the photo with Peter, Batgirl, and me above, and in fact I was positive I was on the upswing and had kicked a head cold from a week earlier. But it turns out, no. Before this, I've never had a regular head cold last more than 5 to 7 days. At 13 days in (or maybe having got a brand new cold?), armed with what I thought might be worrying info my Fitbit helpfully passed along, I sought advice at urgent care.

Because in the back of my mind was the memory of what had happened to me in 2018 when I thought my "cold" was lingering so long that it must have turned into pneumonia—I was actually suffering from blood clots in both my lungs.  (Click the link to see how that played out, but spoiler — I lived.)

Back to the present; I got some good news from urgent care: the NP said my symptoms still indicate a cold. I've never had a cold with symptoms for so many weeks, but apparently they can persist for about four (or more!) weeks after the initial phase. 

As I noted, I'm two weeks in (or have a new one), and am advised to take Mucinex twice a day. Ug. But hey, better than dual pulmonary embolisms, amirite?

It's strange, but at least understandable. Sorta like what I'm dropping behind my Patreon paywall: a couple of pregenerated characters for The Strange.