I think, when I did my mini book reviews the other week, I did not adequately ramble about the brilliance and amazingness that is The Curiosities. Really. You should read it. I have never, ever enjoyed a collection of short stories more. They are incredibly tight, well-written stories written by superlative authors, and if you like urban fantasy or mythology with a contemporary twist, you will love them. It’s very rare to be able to say that you enjoyed every single story in a collection, but I really truly did. They are wonderful, and the comments by the authors–sometimes hilarious, sometimes useful, sometimes both–and their introductions to each story add a fascinating layer of insight into the story-creation process. I loved this feature both as a reader and a writer.
So first of all: Go read The Curiosities.
Now, there’s something else important to note about the stories in this collection, and that is that they are all drawn from the weekly fiction that the three authors used to write for their Merry Fates blog. If you loved the stories in The Curiosities and want more, or if you want to check out their stories before committing to the book, you can read all the stories completely for free, right here.
Which brings me to the main point of this post, which is to announce that I have successfully conned the twinny one, aka Liana Brooks, into doing something similar with me. Every week, we are going to try to produce a piece of short fiction, mostly based on prompts that we randomly think up, but sometimes not. And we’re going to post them publically for you on the new and shiny blog created just for that purpose: The Twins of Darkness and Good (because we are). These stories, like those on the Merry Fates, are going to be first drafts, with little to no editing done. They are likely to be riddled with typos and inconsistencies, and they may suck. But we’ve done this before, in private, back in 2008, and it was the quickest skills-jump period I’ve had. The Merry Fates agree that writing their weekly short fiction helped them hone their craft like nothing else, so hopefully the stories will be sucky with less frequency as time goes on–plus, this will force me to actually write. We’re allowed to skip a week whenever we need to, but not two weeks in a row.
So there you have it: The Twins of Darkness and Good (darknessandgood.blogspot.com). You can even rearrange the layout to suit your reading preferences. My first story is up, and Liana’s will be up within the day. I hope you like it! Yay! 🙂 🙂 🙂