I hope everyone enjoyed a wonderful Christmas, or that you're continuing to celebrate right up to Twelfth Night and Epiphany. Regardless, I think we're all looking forward, with some trepidation and a lot of hope, to 2022.
2021 was a big year for me in so many ways, between starting a new job, helping the local children's theatre company return to the stage, and releasing my first ever completed novel online. As I mentioned in my last post, I have at least one more book written. Originally I wanted to release it in January but it's still not ready for prime time. So instead, I'm prepping shorts to post here on the blog while I finish my longer stories for the future.
Shorts are a great challenge for me because they force me to brutally prune back on my verbosity. The first one, set to drop Saturday, is only 100 words (which is normally the number I would use to write just an opening paragraph). Not all of them will be drabble-sized, but they will all be one shots inspired by Northanger Abbeyin a collection I'm calling "Trifles Light as Air."
And, of course, I designed a cover:
The title is very meta: Jane Austen originally quoted this line from Othello with her tongue firmly in cheek in the first chapter (see the post I did on allusions for more info), and now I'm co-opting it again for an entirely different purpose. To fit the lightness of the work, I looked for period correct embroidery, and was very fortunate to find samples at the Cleveland Museum of Art released under a Creative Commons license to copy, modify, and distribute. Please support this generous Open Access initiative by at least giving the museum some page views (there are more other beautiful online exhibits), or via financial assistance as you're available.
I do still plan to post a retrospective of Gentlemen of Gloucestershire, once I've had time to fully recover from the holidays and properly analyze the data I've accrued. In the mean time, I hope these shorts provide as much joy to you as they are proving inspiring to my writing journey.
