Adventuring Again

Warning: Very mild spoilers for “Forged in Iron and Blood” herein. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it in the Best of Deep Magic anthology 2, along with a bunch of other wonderful stories.

 

Ever since I wrote “Forged in Iron and Blood” a couple years back, I have had in my head this vision of fan art for the story. In my head, Lina and Seelah are setting off on another adventure.

But you can’t really force fan art, you know? So I just sat on that thought and hoped that magically someone would just create it (because I have totally realistic dreams). But last year, I turned forty, and as part of my celebrations, I decided I was going to go out and buy some lovely arts and crafts from my friends and seek out artwork that would bring even more beauty and joy into my household (we already have what I call my “wall of happy,” which is covered in bits of art and family photos and such—but I wanted to add to it!).

Around that same time, I saw someone in one of my Facebook groups asking for illustrator recommendations. I checked out the illustrators suggested and found just the person I was looking for: Bethany Crandall. I decided that it was silly to wait around for someone to create what I wanted; I was going to make it happen myself.

So I hired Bethany to make the picture I wanted. I told her about my characters,* their personalities and descriptions, and I gave her the overall idea that I was looking for. Then she just went to town.

And here it is! It’s not what I imagined, but to me it’s actually a lot better. I originally imagined a much more somber picture, to suit the original story, but I love the cheerier mood of this piece so much. As I think about it, this is what I hope for Lina going into the future—I want her to be off on buddy adventures with Seelah. They’ll go into an area where a dragon has been ravaging the hillsides, and they’ll have a chat with the dragon (and maybe a cup of tea) and settle things happily. They’ll visit a town with a bully mayor, and they’ll help the villagers rebel. Seelah will pull a giant ball of yarn out of her basket and knit a scarf for a troll with a cold.

I want them to have fun, exciting adventures without the fate of the world at stake. I want Lina to eventually stop having nightmares. I want them to keep making peace everywhere they go but not be burdened quite so heavily.

So I wanted to share this artwork with you. It’s going in a special place on my “wall of happy” (along with an epic family portrait that we also commissioned from Bethany—which we have turned into a huge canvas on our wall and it is soooo fantastic!), and maybe (I hope) someday it will inspire me to write up some of the continuing adventures of Lina and Seelah.

 

* Seelah has to have a basket!

** I love love LOVE the scarring on Lina’s arms, from all the blacksmithing work.

Lina and Seelah, On the Run

Warning: Major spoilers for “Forged in Iron and Blood” herein. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it in the Best of Deep Magicanthology 2, along with a bunch of other wonderful stories.

I wrote this micro-story in response to a prompt—500 words or less, a secret, and the word “serendipity.” It needed to stand alone, so it kind of rehashes a bit of what happens in “Forged in Iron and Blood.” But it also hints at the future for them.

I wish I could say that I have more stories written for Lina and Seelah; that’s always the first thing people ask after they read the story—what do they do next? I love that there’s so much interest in these two lovely aging women. I still want to write their stories, but for now, nothing has really resolved into a plot.

Next week I’ll be sharing some artwork I commissioned about them, and I’ll be talking about how I see them in the future. But for now, I hope you enjoy this little tidbit.

 

***

 

Seelah leaned over and lit the kindling, blowing on it gently as it caught the nearest twigs. In the last weeks of travel, they’d discovered that Seelah was the better campfire starter—ironic, given that Lina had spent the decades as a blacksmith and before that as a traveling soldier.

“I’m truly the only other person who knows who you are?” Seelah asked, leaning back slowly, her back creaking. “Too old to sleep on the ground like this,” she muttered to herself, and Lina agreed. Her every muscle protested every morning.

Then she shrugged. They’d already covered this ground, multiple times. “It wasn’t safe.” She gestured back the way they’d come, back to the village they’d been forced to flee. “You already saw what happens when someone comes too close to the truth.”

Seelah nodded. Lina was on the run, and Seelah had willingly joined in to protect her—and that was before Lina had revealed who she was. Now she seemed even more determined to help keep Lina safe, in whatever small, grandmotherly ways she could. “I suppose you’re right.”

For what seemed like the thousandth time, Lina whispered thank you. It had been pure serendipity that Seelah had been in Lina’s blacksmith shop when the men arrived. And then it had been Seelah’s sheer brilliance and bravery that had helped Lina escape, right under their noses. Lina owed Seelah her life, of that there was little doubt.

Seelah waved the thanks away. “Couldn’t let them hurt my dearest friend, could I? Even if I didn’t know how important you are to the kingdom.” She shook her head. “There’s still part of me that can’t believe I didn’t guess it years ago.”

Lina smiled. “To be fair, you guessed most of my other secrets.”

Seelah laughed and poked at the fire with a long stick. “True.”

They both went quiet again, each counting down the days to an unknown future when they’d have to stop running and somehow get Lina back into hiding, in a new life, safe again from the men who would kill her so they could start a war. For now, though, there was a friendly silence in listening to the crackle of the fire as darkness descended around them. They were as safe as they could manage, Seelah’s basket was filled with delicious pastries they’d bought in the last town, and the future would have to wait.

“Lina?” Seelah finally said into the quiet.

“Yes?”

“Can I tell you a secret?”

Lina released a short bark of laughter. “Please. I’m pretty sure I can keep it.”

“I feel so silly about it. I’ve loved my life, you know. My dear Himleh—he was the best husband a woman could ask. And the children and grandchildren have made may days so full...”

“But?” Lina prompted.

“Well, I’ve always wanted to travel. See the world. Experience new things...”

Lina sat in stunned silence for a minute. “Your secret is that you wish to travel?”

Seelah chuckled. “Well, yes.”

Lina looked around. The campfire warming them, the open road waiting before them, the skies above them. She’d thought she’d need to settle somewhere again, build up a life where she hid her connections to the war like she had before. But maybe she didn’t need that. They had the money, and a moving target was always harder to find. Maybe they’d just stay two silly old women, traveling the world, nothing at all to hide. “Seelah, I think we can accommodate that. Where should we go next?”

 

 

"Forged in Iron and Blood," out today!

I’m so pleased to finally be able to share “Forged in Iron and Blood.” It has been embarrassingly long in the works (like, most authors spend less time on full-length novels than I spent on this one), but I’m immensely happy with how it turned out,* and I hope you enjoy it! You can order it, along with a bunch of other great stories, here.

I figured that, now that this story is out in the world, I’d share a few bits and pieces about how it came about. No spoilers here.

A couple years ago (seriously), I saw an open call for short story submissions that really struck my fancy (I can’t remember it exactly, but it was something about iron and oak, I think—tales of the fae), and I started mulling over it. My husband and I were just about to leave for Italy for an anniversary vacation, and I remember standing in line to board our first plane (before we were so massively jetlagged that we could hardly string together complete sentences)** and explaining the theme to him and starting to brainstorm. At that point, if I recall, I had about one idea—I wanted an awesome older woman in my story.

Brice (the husband) is my most fantastic brainstorming partner. I bounce all my best ideas off him, and they get better. There are also about a million zany ideas that I immediately discard (he usually brings up dinosaurs or explosions at some point, or weird stuff like talking goats and such). But it’s so much fun that I don’t mind. 

By the end of our first brainstorming session, we had a character named Lina, who was a retired soldier, and she had an awesome berserker fairy friend, and there was going to be a kind of Wild West shootout sort of thing.

I took the ideas and ran away from that plotline, but I saved a few of my favorite parts (including bits of the early description of her berserker friend), and I came up with an ending that I was soooo excited about, and I wrote that. And then I stalled out. (I have an embarrassing number of stories that have an awesome beginning and ending written, with absolutely no way to get from one to the other.)

So it sat around for a while, while I worked on some stories inspired by our Italy trip (those are still drafting—one is a novel, one is a short, a couple are totally dead in the water) and the deadline for the submission call went whooshing by. And I finally wrote it and workshopped it and was still stuck on a couple of little elements. So I kept putting it off to work on other stuff. And/or avoid working on other stuff.

Finally, in August of this year, I had an awesome experience that kicked me back into gear. As you may know, I’m a slush reader for Deep Magic.*** Our fantastic board members (Jeff Wheeler and Charlie Holmberg in this case) occasionally offer us various opportunities to learn from them, and they gave us the chance to submit a first page to them for critique. I submitted the first page of “Forged in Iron and Blood.”

To make a long story short, Jeff especially liked it, and I made a commitment to submit it by the end of the current submission period. Now I had a deadline! And suddenly, just like that, I got back to work (I know there are these magical people who work better when they’re not on deadline, but I’m not one of them). There was more drafting, more critique, and an amazing editing cut by my husband. I was trying to drop the dross from 9000 words and struggling over a couple hundred. Brice got hold of it and somehow managed to delete about 3500 without even breaking a sweat! I ignored about a third of his changes and smooched him for the rest—he made the story so much clearer and lovelier—and it was ready to submit!

And that’s the story! One final note, though: The day I got my acceptance letter had been a bad day. I don’t even remember why, but it was blech. When I saw the email come in, the little preview of it on my phone made me think it was going to be a rejection—yuck. So then when I opened it and got the acceptance, I had to do a little happy dance. It definitely helped make the rest of the day a lot better.

If you read the story, I hope you enjoy it. If you haven’t bought it yet, you should! ;) It’s only $3 for my story and a whole bunch more! You know you want to.

* Except that one sentence that I just today realized how I would have liked to rewrite it! Sigh. The life of a writer—nothing is truly done, you just have to let it go.

** Little did I know how much worse jetlag could be, traveling with small, sick children literally to the other side of the planet—13.5-hour jetlag is crazy talk.

*** This means I get to read through tons of submissions that come in to the magazine, and I pass the stories that best suit Deep Magic up to other readers—it’s an awesome opportunity, and I’ll have to write about it more sometime!

Publication announcement: Love Undefined

Hey, lovely readers! I’m excited to announce that a new romance anthology, featuring a story by yours truly, is coming out next Thursday, December 7th!

Love Undefined is a collection of 12 short, clean romances ranging from contemporary to fantasy to sci fi. They’re by a variety of LDS authors, though only one or two are explicitly religious.

Enjoy the lovely cover. Isn't it beautiful?