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Yes, I have a third unpublished trunk novel.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.