(buy me in December? hey)
A post to celebrate what’s come out in December with work by me.
New Edge Sword & Sorcery #5, #6
find at newedgeswordandsorcery.com
In these I have three items.
A story, #5 – this was a crowdfund extra, so I said in the Discord I’d listen to requests. Carl asked for: ‘Goatskin drinks milk alone in the grass, maybe slowly roasting something. Can it be at night? So she can see the stars and it’s all liminal? I just want 6000 words of her thoughts.’ (But do not worry, dear reader: this extra story was shorter than the NESS usual; I was given 2500 words). Bearji suggested Old Goatskin, which I’d had in mind for a while myself. While Nicholas Diak threw in food that talks back to her?? And then Nathan Long put a loop in that with ‘Hallucinating a conversation with the goat she is eating, which caused the hallucinations.’
These strange requests came together in ‘The Change’, a story that looks back upon the Mongol conquests, with its changes to the world and its traumas to Goatskin. There also fed into this story a couple of episodes of madness in my past and my treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder two years ago. So, not breezy, but I gave Goatskin the age I am now, and being a happy post-madperson (look, it’s absurd how happy I am on a lot of days), not dismal.
Read to the David Bowie song. Change, my people: it’s happened before, it’ll happen again.
Art by Savanna Mayer (@well_dipper) for ‘The Change’
A poem, #5 – ‘Sword & Sorcery I: It belongs to you’ is an invitation to Sword & Sorcery. At least, if you like dog’s suet and goat’s pizzle I suppose.
A profile, #6 – ‘Raw: Janrae Frank and Chimquar the Lionhawk’. In which I get to profile a Sword & Sorcery author who fell by the wayside, but whose story in Amazons! wowed me in 1979, or shortly afterward – I can’t remember when I acquired that anthology. This was an honour and a thrill to write.
Chimquar art for my Janrae Frank profile by Chuah Shih Shin (@sscindyss_art)
Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes
Has gone out to crowdfund backers; official release is January, when it’ll be available to everybody. I might write a blog post then, if I’m cheeky enough, about my story’s inspirations. In brief, as I said on Bluesky,
(find me on Bluesky, quite often: @brynhammond.bsky.social )
The queer joy is strong in this one, and we also eat a few of the rich.