Over Thanksgiving, I started working on a new project, Journals of Fedran, a collection of short stories, essays, and general world-building goodness for my fantasy world, Fedran.

I had a lot of fun writing this, mainly because I decided to write the various stories in different styles by creating characters who actually wrote the pieces. And I used the theme of an old style newspaper as the theme to gather it all together.

Writing as characters

I've never written as characters before. There were a few rough points, some of the stories, like Under the Streets and Raging Alone are definitely my prose, but Ramus and the Savage Slasher is just as much not me. But, when I established that one story was written by a character, then all of them needed to be.

There are some hints to various plots in these stories, including those writing the tales. It is fun scattering them in there, though not all of them will pan out because of my writing backlog.

Table of Contents

1. Notes from the Editor
2. Introduction to Resonance
3. Ministry of Standards
4. Farimon’s Gift
5. Farimon’s Revelation
6. Speaking Miwāfu
7. Raging Alone (Part 1)
8. Painful Love
9. The Cros Gambit
10. Grand Cros Clashball
11. Bloodball
12. Steam Engines
13. Ramus and the Savage Slasher
14. Alone
15. Under the Streets
16. Crime of Hearts
17. Midlife Crisis
18. Growing Up
19. A Cup of Soup
20. Zoetrop Knives
21. Simple Chicken Soup
22. I Love Her, I Hate Her
23. Second-Hand Dresses (Part 1)
24. Simple Goren
25. Classifieds
26. Action
27. Credits
28. Colophon

Kind of scary how it turn out. The entire length is just under forty thousand words. Which is about ten thousand more than I expected. A lot of it came from Midlife Crisis, a short story that was recently rejected by an anthology.

Next steps

I'm pretty much at a stopping point for Journals in that I don't think I can do much more until I have an editor look at it. I've been editing, reworking, and generally staring at it for a few weeks and I'm not really getting any more progress.

Unfortunately, like Ash, I think things are going to be mostly on hold for these. Even though I'm planning on releasing this under Creative Commons, it does need a proper editor or two to finish it up. So, I can't really say its completely “done” until that happens.

Alpha reading

That said, I'm still going to post the alpha version of the Journals up on my website. These are self-edited, but not quite the polish that I would consider acceptable for the final or print version.

Version 0.0.0 (Alpha)

I'm throwing these up for a couple reasons. The biggest is a sanity read. The problem with grand ideas and working in relative isolation is that sometimes things don't really mesh together. Likewise, I've never written a short story collection before, only novels. With the short stories, they are more disjointed than the linear plots that I usually work with.

So, if you are willing to read it and give opinions, I would love anything you are willing to give me.

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