My Story for Seasons Eternal

For this year’s anthology, we chose a shared premise — what might happen to a world where the seasons stopped changing? Each side of the planet is frozen in a different season. A century later, various societies have evolved to cope, but they’re still struggling under the pressures of the change.

But you can’t write a story about a society. Stories are about people.

That’s the ever-awesome Siri Paulson doing what she does so much better than I do–talking intelligently about things. I do a lot of squeeing, whining, and ranting. But you must like it a little at least, since you’re here?

I’m glad you’re here! Who else am I going to babble about writing to? And on that note…

My inner writer does not like to write short stories. When I wrote Romeo and Julian: A Near-Tragedy Near Verona for a Goodreads group event? 18,000 words. Louder than Sirens, Louder than Bells for the same event next time it rolled around?

68,000 words. (and one hundred eighty-seven five-star ratings so far, thank you very much!)

Both those stories want sequels.

Anyway, that was much of the problem when my story for Seasons Eternal didn’t want to be written. It actually wanted to be written very much–and a lot more than I had time or space for.

I didn’t want to start with a confident Shishiri, chief of the Daer, wife of Adorya and Rendon, who at least had an idea what she was doing. I wanted to start the day they put the chief’s spear in Shishiri’s hands, still covered in the blood of both her mother and the bear that killed her.

Luckily, I know my inner writer’s tricksy ways. I struggled on, and found another way to start the story. I’m very happy with it, and I hope you’ll give it a shot.

And maybe one day I’ll write the prequel, and share the time Shishiri dropped an elk on the girl she loved.

You can find Seasons Eternal right here. It has three great stories besides mine, the ebook costs 99¢ and the proceeds benefit UNICEF. Seems like a heckuva deal to me.