Swan Tower

It's been several years since I put out one of my mini-short story collections, but a new one is en route! A Breviary of Fire honestly could have been ready a bit sooner, but I fell into a slightly OCD determination to balance out the regional groupings within the collection so they had equal numbers of stories. Because of this, the publication dates of the stories range from 2005 to 2023. They're all based on folklore and mythology in some fashion, but not European fairy tales (those have gone into Monstrous Beauty and Never After), nor on folksongs (those will be getting their own collection, probably next year).

A Breviary of Fire will be out on the twenty-first of this month. You can preorder it via the links here or wait for it to come out so you can buy it direct from the publisher, Book View Cafe; there will also be a print edition, but I've been juggling too many things to have that quiiiite ready in time for simultaneous publication with the ebook. I will definitely post here when the ebook and print pub dates happen, though!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/SACWt0)

We had another session of our L5R game on Sunday, which astute readers will recall was April Fool's Day.

The Togashi monks -- of which my character is one -- are renowed for doing kind of weird and/or inexplicable things. Clearly I needed to play a few April Fool's jokes in character, right? Unfortunately, I'm not much of a prankster, and by the time I thought up this idea, I was already at FOGcon (meaning my brain was well on its way toward being fried). The only trick I managed to come up with in the end was to give the Ikoma libraries a text they did not have, namely the Book of the Cricket: the world's tiniest scroll, detailing the many calamities that should have killed my lucky cricket but haven't. (And I do mean tiny. I had to use a magic tattoo to be able to see well enough to write it, and the Ikoma had to use a pair of spells to copy the scroll and then enlarge the copy before they could read the damn thing.)

But because my brain can apparently do folklore in its sleep, I did come up with a story for why there is a tradition in Dragon lands of playing tricks on the last day of the month of the Dragon. For any interested parties, I give you the tale of Chibuta and the passing of winter.

( In the earliest days of the Empire . . . . )


. . . it would work better if it were the first day of the month of the Hare, since that's the official start of spring, but our game just had the cherry blossom festival, which is on the 23rd day of the month of the Dragon. So I had to work with the timeline I had. Also, "chibuta" means "earth pig." Plug in a couple of synonyms, and you'll see the terrible joke I made there.

(And yes, starlady38, I think I mashed the wrong readings together again. But I only had my cell phone dictionary to work with at the time -- not to mention the four brain cells that had survived FOGcon -- so please forgive the error.)

Clearly our game needs to last long enough that a year passes IC. Next time, I'll be less exhausted, and more able to think up good pranks.