Books

Hero's Heart Like Burning

Aeschylus, Captain of the City Guard of Aegina, knew prayer was as dangerous as poking a hydra with a stick. But after one failure as a guardsman after another, he gave it a shot. Aeschylus asked Ares, the god of war, to send him an old hoplite weary of fighting. What he got was a young soldier on a divine mission. What he got was a mess of messy miracles casting a fog of war over some mysterious events. But that's what he got for praying to the god of war. 

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1 Story Ticket: Under the Tall Trees

A child has their story ticket. Ready to turn it in. “Crystal, can you tell me a story?”  

Soon all the children are turning in their tickets. The storyteller and the children move a bit away from the parents, who are chatting by the campfire. 

Each child gets to decide who is in their story (queens, builders, princesses, themselves, guardian angels, and so on) and decide where their story takes place. This book has been carefully packed with some of those stories. 

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The Twelve Blessings of the Two River Valley

There once were twelve princesses living in a two river valley. They so frightened their father by wearing out the soles of their slippers each night in their locked room that the king offered any man the hand of a princess (he had twelve on offer) in marriage and the kingdom after the king died if they could solve the mystery. The price of failure was death.

Quite simply they danced every night with magic princes in a magic palace by a magic lake in a magic forest that they reached by a fairly normal staircase under a trap door in their room. Where the trapdoor or the forest or the lake or the palace came from wasn't a question the king bothered to ask before he boarded the trapdoor up and married the oldest princess off to the old soldier who had figured out the situation. 

But then, that king was a great hero. Two-thirds divine. However that worked. He thought he had been blessed to live twelve lifetimes. That’s not quite what the Queen of the House of Dust had meant when she’d given the two river valley twelve blessings, which was to say twelve children.

What those twelve blessings did, or how they loved, that’s a story that goes beyond the truth of tattered soles.  


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To Sail the Comet Roads and Other Dreams

For as long as humans have looked up at the sky, we've ascribed human characteristics to celestial bodies we see there. Have told stories about them. Whether its the ever changing moon, meandering Venus, stately king Jupiter, and so on. We do the same thing when we send robots into space. They even get social media accounts. Here are eight anthropomorphic stories set among the stars.

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1 Story Ticket: After Dinner

Friends gather to talk about their week. A woman arrives and a child runs up asking for a story. "After Dinner," is the oft reply. Children get story tickets and a chance to define the story they'll get when they turn in their ticket.

This collection is carefully packed with stories told after the dining was done.

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Amazon: Kindle

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Smashwords: E-book

1 Story Ticket: Campfire Stories

In the woods, a group of friends gathers beneath the tall redwoods. There's a fire going against the chill. A child runs up to ask for a story with a story ticket in hand. 

Soon all the children are turning in their tickets. 

Each child gets to decide who is in their story (princess, unicorn, dragon, robot, and so on) and what those characters are named. 

This book has been carefully packed with some of those stories.

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Smashwords - ebook

Amazon Audio

Clay of Many Colors

There’s a story, you may have heard it, about a fruit that if someone ate it would grant the knowledge of good or evil. The divine planted the fruit bearing tree in the garden and told us not to eat it. Here’s another one, there’s a box (or a jar) that contains all the ills of the world. Plus hope. The gods who gave it to the woman told her not to open it. The jar was a punishment for the theft of fire, which kept humanity alive.

It’s human nature to bite the fruit and open the box (or jar). We let evil into the world. We set fires that keep us warm or burn the forests. We cling to hope too. Strive for better. Slide in the mud. Try again. It’s that mixture of mud and hope that has been much on my mind following the election to US president of someone who played on so many of society's fears. This man didn’t invent the fruit. He didn’t make the jar. They’ve always been part of the fabric of our world.

This collection muddles in the roots of those fears and hopes through a mix of stories from various religious traditions and tales of people simply moving through their days. All of them looking for hope at the bottom of the jar. The sweet taste of the knowledge of good along with the bitter evil.

Resist. Persist. Hope.

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Smashwords - eBook - Free

Intrepid Horizons (an Anthology) 

Come along on our travels through space, time, or even the most mundane circumstances, as they change what life is like, from space colonization and rocket ships to whirling sand and magical shoes that whisk us away to intrepid horizons.

by Lynn Townsend  (Author), G Grim (Author), Johannes Svensson (Author), Crystal Carroll (Author), Narrelle M Harris  (Author), Grace Sabella (Author), Clara Di Lena (Author), A.R. Collins (Author), Kimber Camacho (Author), Delilah Night (Author), Brandon Nolta  (Author), Susanne Hülsmann (Author), Jennifer Silverwood (Author), Jessica Augustsson (Editor)

The third collection of speculative fiction stories from JayHenge Publishing, gathered and edited by Jessica Augustsson. 

Within, you will find tales of courage and bravery, heroic journeys and audacious adventures, in the space where the known and unknown meet. 

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Lit Gloss: A Rose by Any Other Name

The Bard of Avon. William Shakespeare. He occupies a very central position in English Literature. Well, he has a canon, and students are forced to read him.  Every production of a Shakespeare play is a variation on which aspects of the story that the director and the various artists involved want to accentuate. Hopefully, people watching the plays have a similar level of engagement and walk away thinking about what those variations meant. They might wonder just why was Beatrice so opposed to marriage. One bad love affair seems like not enough reason. They might image that Shylock leaves Venice after the end of Merchant of Venice. They could try to decide if faking Juliet’s death was really the best plan? Actually, strike that one. It clearly was a bad plan. While not at Hamlet or Macbeth levels, things could have gone better. This collection of short stories explores exactly those sorts of ideas (pursued by bears) in the margins of the plays. 

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Corner of First and Myth

The City is a place where all mythologies and folklore mingle and mix. It is the mother of Cities. The rainbow serpent bridge may turn into a serpent again during rush hour commute (and isn't *that* annoying). While the red brick road spirals out through parts of itself that the City has discarded. The City sprawls across space. It condenses on an island. The living dead roam the mall, which makes it difficult to run a shop. A goddess of nature wanders traffic searching for her missing daughter. Snow White runs a mining company. While the Lamia runs a resort. Inanna wants to know who will pay for what's been done. Take a walk on the mythological side of the street with fourteen stories that bend myths and jay walk from time to time. Just be careful not to look Medusa in the eyes. 

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Blood Maiden

In the City, gods from all mythologies mashup with the every day. 

Blood Maiden, a Mayan death goddess, is starting her senior year at Himinbjorg High, where her skin, hair, even the shape of her nose mark her as an outsider among the teenage Norse gods. If Blood Maiden can just figure out how to deal with Zeus perving on her friends, ask her best friend Danny (Princess Danae) to the prom, work out all the tangled prophesies everyone is under, just maybe she'll figure out what she's supposed to do with her life without killing anyone. 

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eBook: Amazon, Smashwords

Paperback: Amazon

The Fifth Sun 

In an alternative European renaissance, where princes keep vampires as servants, the British Isle has been split into two kingdoms. In the South, Queen Mary rules an England in turmoil. Fearful for her unborn child, she increasingly obeys the whispers of the stone mirror on her wall. While in the North, Queen Elizabeth juggles suitors, the undead and preventing the apocalypse.

Each night, Elizabeth dreams of the end of the world. Dreams she shares with four people scattered across Europe: a psychic lost in the present, an undead Crusader, an Aztec priestess and a teenage vampire. Elizabeth struggles to understand how she can save a world that's shaking itself apart.

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Visit Shorts for more Historical Fantasy stories.

Vorkosigan Companion

Long ago, I contributed a map of the Vorkosigan wormhole jumps as it was at the time of publication.

Amazon link