Dear friends,
Recently, I've been enjoying the trip down memory lane as my Patreon book club and I read my first novel, The Song of the Sirin. It's been really wonderful to get back into that world. Too much time has passed.
Sometimes, when writers read their older works, it turns us off. After all, if we study our craft, we're supposed to get better with each book. The problem with that is that you start noticing your mistakes, and the more feeble-hearted of us can get a bit irritated at our older selves.
That has happened to me in the past. But this time, not sure why, I'm noticing the "beginner" version of me, but I kind of miss him :) He had just come out of a rich part of his/my life that gave tons of story fodder in the form of settings and characters.
And that younger version of me had some harsh words for older/wiser me. He said: "Why aren't you writing more?"
I was a bit embarrassed, I have to tell you. So what did I do?
I wrote a short story. Take that, younger version of me!
And it's not the only one I'm planning on writing, by the way. So... if you've read my first novel and gone on to the second, you may have noticed that a lot of time passes between the two stories. What happened to Voran, our main character, in between the published novels?
Well, plenty of stuff, naturally. But one of them I've written down for you as ... The Healer and the Beast.
In this brand- new story, we encounter a young girl named Varvara. Wise beyond her years and with a strange connection to certain kinds of animals, even her own family would prefer if she were a little more... normal.
(But they probably shouldn't have given her a fairy-tale name if they had wanted that.)
When she finds a magical artifact in a deep forest, very strange and wonderful things begin to happen all around her...
I had a ton of fun writing this. Hopefully that comes through to you, my friends, as you read :)
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