Blog Archives
A Game of Chess
Blood of Iron follows a desperate king trying to save his kingdom who seeks to use an ancient blood-powered weapon to defeat his enemies, forcing his children to choose between loyalty and conscience. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
This is a very good first question. I always wanted to write my very own sword and sorcery story, where good and evil are not very clearly defined, and each character has a motive for his or her actions. Working on this story, I was paradoxically inspired by vampire movies, particularly by the first Blade movie with actor Wesley Snipes in the title role. The idea of using blood as an awakening catalyst, was inspired by a scene of a final battle where Blade faced a Blood god called La Magra, a powerful vampire entity summoned by an evil vampire Deacon Frost through a blood ritual that involved the sacrifice of vampire elders and use of Blade’s own blood. And while the inspiration came from a vampire movie, I think I managed to create a good story involving blood and dark magic.
While the king sees salvation for his kingdom, his children, Prince Hares and Princess Alesta, begin questioning the morality of his plans. How do the characters’ relationships challenge their assumptions about loyalty, authority, and the responsibilities they owe to one another?
King Herman the Ironfist, crown prince Hares and his sister, Princess Alesta are the three very important characters in the story. The King, facing a massive invasion of his lands by an enemy coalition, cares about his children, his dynasty and his kingdom. His motive is a mix of desperation, mixed with desire to crush his enemies once and for all. For him, awakening the ancient super weapon named Sanger is a necessity, and the sacrifice of one thousand men to have it, makes him fully believe that the end justifies the means. In contrast, Prince Hares and Princess Alesta have less influence and power than their father, and while Hares is a warrior and Alesta is a scholar, both of them have a strong sense of justice and morals. In their minds, there are lines powerful people should not cross if it means the deaths of innocents. That makes them people with a strong moral compass, who would rather seek an alternative solution.
What interested you about exploring the conflict between loyalty to family, loyalty to one’s country, and loyalty to personal principles?
All fiction takes its inspiration from real historical events. I read many interesting books about powerful people forced by fate, destiny and circumstances to make very hard choices. In some cases, life, just like war, is a game of chess, where players are willing to sacrifice pawns and then even more powerful and important figures to win the game. An ordinary person with little or no power or influence can do little, but a person who has the power to command men, economies and armies sometimes is faced with hard choices he or she has to make. As far as the loyalty to family and loyalty to one’s country, it is often a Catch 22, because love for the family must save the family, while love for the country can save millions. In regard to personal principles, I think that every good person has them, and will only be willing to compromise them to save the people he loves.
Do you envision returning to Tarkonia or expanding the world of Blood of Iron through future stories?
To be honest, the thought had crossed my mind in regard to the Kingdom of Tarkonia and the world I built around it to create this particular story. I believe that there is a lot of food for thought, and there might be a possibility to do just that. In order to expand the world of Blood of Iron, I would have to rethink a few things in regard to the events I presented in Blood of Iron, and create a time frame where another expanded the story will take place. Since Tarkonia is just one of the countries that has an important role to play, other countries and dominions must be created, explored, and given their own history, motives and conflict outcomes. The story is definitely worth thinking about, but for now, I will put it on a shelf, until I get inspired again to expand this unique world. I will probably draw a map of the realm, give it life and work on the people who inhabit it. There is much to think about, and I will patiently wait for an inspiration to write a new novella.
Blood of Iron
Blood of Iron is a dark fantasy novella about a kingdom under pressure and the dangerous appeal of a weapon that promises to solve every military problem. Tarkonia’s rulers face rebellion, disputed borders, and rival powers, while an ancient source of magic offers a tempting shortcut to security. The story opens with battlefield maneuvers, then moves into royal chambers where arguments about territory and survival carry their own threats. If you enjoy military fantasy with court politics and forbidden magic, there’s plenty here to hold your interest. What gives the setup its bite is the royal family’s confidence that force can deliver lasting peace. You can understand their fear of invasion while also questioning the decisions that fear helps them justify.
Prince Hares, Princess Alesta, and General Tarnak Bars give the story its most interesting relationships. Hares has been trained to command, Alesta brings an interest in law and history, and Bars offers the perspective of a veteran who knows what warfare asks of people. Their conversations put competing ideas about duty into practical terms: how should a ruler protect a kingdom, and what does that ruler owe its inhabitants? King Herman’s authority hangs over these exchanges, making even family discussions feel politically charged. I found the tension between the characters’ stated compassion and their acceptance of harsh customs especially interesting. They’re comfortable with privileges and punishments that deserve scrutiny, and that makes their judgments worth watching. The book’s questions about leadership grow out of the society these people inhabit.
The worldbuilding has an appealingly physical quality. Elaborate breakfasts, training weapons, royal insignia, guarded libraries, and carefully arranged military formations make Tarkonia feel like a place organized around rank and routine. Magic belongs to that same system of bargaining and control. Wizards negotiate payment, rulers weigh strategic advantages, and old records become resources for present conflicts. That combination gives this sword and sorcery story a clear political dimension, with supernatural power treated as something people want to acquire and manage. The frequent meals and private conversations also establish how comfortably the royal household lives alongside public cruelty. Those details can be unsettling, and they give the book an atmosphere that suits its dark fantasy themes. Some of the strongest imagery comes from the sheer scale and menace of the ancient magic.
Dialogue often states a character’s beliefs directly, which makes the central conflict easy to follow but can leave the exchanges feeling stiff. The pacing spends a substantial stretch preparing for events, with the most forceful action concentrated toward the close. Still, I stayed interested in how the story connects military necessity, personal ambition, and responsibility. Blood of Iron has a compact, earnest approach to fantasy, and its strongest appeal is the pressure it puts on the idea of a protective ruler. It’s a worthwhile choice for readers drawn to dark fantasy about royal power, dangerous magic, and the human cost of seeking security.
Pages: 75 | ASIN : B0HH85TMJT
Can We Look Directly at It, Just for a Second?
Rain Corbyn’s Can We Look Directly at It, Just for a Second? is a queer horror novella with an unusually personal view of the apocalypse. Its narrator retreats to the Catskills, convinced the world’s final day has arrived, carrying a lifetime of resentment, desire, shame, and unfinished business. Climate fiction and body horror meet in a landscape where the ocean has swallowed familiar boundaries and the natural world keeps finding strange ways to grow. There’s a wonderfully uncomfortable intimacy to the setup: planetary catastrophe shares space with awkward social encounters and private grievances. Corbyn makes that collision funny, ugly, and emotionally convincing. Even with the world collapsing, being a person remains an exhausting job.
The narrator’s voice gives the book much of its force. They’re caustic, horny, frightened, perceptive, and capable of turning almost any interaction into a prosecution of themselves or somebody else. You can laugh at a petty complaint and then recognize the hurt beneath it a sentence later. Corbyn is especially sharp about the ways therapeutic language, political righteousness, and online habits can shape relationships, including how the vocabulary of care becomes useful to people seeking control. The narrator participates in these habits, too, and their awareness of that keeps the satire interesting. Gender dysphoria, neurodivergence, and the wish to be desired are woven into the narration’s smallest decisions. Who’s looking? What do they see? How much explanation will make being seen feel safe?
As ecological horror, the novella gets under your skin through texture. Algae, insects, fungus, salt water, and damaged flesh make its world feel damp, hungry, and alarmingly alive. The body horror is graphic and sexually explicit, with disgust, attraction, and tenderness often occupying the same image. Corbyn’s comparisons come quickly, drawing on horror movies, internet slang, childhood memories, and ordinary consumer junk. That density can be tiring, particularly when several images compete for attention in a single passage. It also suits a narrator who compulsively translates experience into language, then worries about how that language will be received. The prose’s excess becomes part of the character’s struggle. Fans of weird fiction will find plenty to chew on in the book’s unstable relationship between human bodies and the ecosystems they inhabit.
I appreciated the book’s attention to the hunger for permission: permission to change, to want things, to feel anger, to stop performing goodness for an imagined audience. Its literary horror grows out of that hunger as much as it does from its grotesque imagery. Beneath the jokes and fury is a bruised longing for affection that doesn’t require a flawless explanation of the self. Corbyn keeps that longing complicated, giving the narrator enough vanity and spite to make their vulnerability feel earned. If you enjoy queer horror and experimental climate fiction with a fiercely opinionated voice, this novella offers a concentrated, demanding read. It’s at its best when a revolting image and a painfully familiar feeling arrive together, making you wince for two reasons at once.
Pages: 120 | ISBN : 9781590217900
Uncommon Strangers
R. Luce’s Uncommon Strangers is an intimate, deeply personal literary novella about identity, loneliness, love, and the difficult business of becoming comfortable with who we are. Blending memoir with fiction, Luce takes readers into the lives of men struggling to reconcile their desires with the expectations of family, society, and themselves. The book opens in 1972 with a troubled young man sitting beside the Erie Canal in Brockport, New York, contemplating a life that feels increasingly distant from the one he imagined for himself. From that deceptively simple beginning, Luce moves between personal recollections and fictional stories, exploring the emotional consequences of poverty, family dysfunction, the Vietnam War, sexuality, and the pressure to conform to traditional ideas of masculinity. At its heart, this is a book about the human need to be understood and the extraordinary lengths people sometimes go to in order to avoid understanding themselves.
One of the book’s most interesting qualities is its structure. Luce alternates between autobiographical reflections and the intertwined fictional lives of Dorr Reed, Jim Marsh, Michael DuQuesne, and Steve Miller. Their experiences offer different perspectives on many of the same questions confronting the narrator. Dorr’s traumatic experiences in Vietnam, his complicated relationships with men and women, and his struggles with addiction and self-worth give the fictional narrative much of its emotional weight. Meanwhile, the narrator’s recollections of growing up poor, enduring a troubled relationship with his father, and struggling to meet conventional expectations of manhood provide an intensely personal counterpoint. The two narrative threads gradually illuminate one another, making the boundaries between experience and imagined possibility particularly interesting. Luce is especially effective when he grounds his reflections in specific moments, whether it’s a terrifying childhood confrontation with his father, the liberating atmosphere of Woodstock, or the quiet anguish of a man who desperately wants to love and be loved.
Readers familiar with Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous will recognize some of the emotional territory Luce explores. Both books examine masculinity, sexuality, family trauma, and the lasting influence of experiences that shape our understanding of ourselves. Both also recognize that love and acceptance can be complicated by the very people and social expectations that are supposed to provide us with security. Where Vuong uses poetic language and the intimacy of a letter to his mother, Luce favors a more expansive, conversational approach that combines storytelling with philosophical reflection. He’s interested in examining the thoughts behind his characters’ decisions, frequently following memories into questions about morality, personal responsibility, and human behavior. At times, those reflections slow the narrative, but they also reveal a writer determined to examine his subject from multiple angles. His treatment of friendship and romantic love between men is particularly affecting, especially as Dorr and Jim discover how difficult it can be to accept love when years of shame have convinced them they’re unworthy of it.
I think what gives Uncommon Strangers its power is Luce’s willingness to explore the messy, sometimes contradictory process of personal transformation. His characters make painful mistakes, hurt people they care about, retreat into destructive habits, and occasionally find the courage to change. Dorr’s eventual development as a writer becomes especially meaningful in a book so concerned with the relationship between storytelling and self-discovery. The recurring image of the Erie Canal provides a fitting backdrop for the larger narrative, suggesting the passage of time, the persistence of memory, and the possibilities that lie beyond the boundaries people create for themselves. Luce also brings considerable tenderness to his examination of fathers and sons, particularly in the moments when resentment gives way to a more complicated understanding of love and forgiveness. By the end, the book has become a meditation on aging, regret, reconciliation, and the creative imagination’s ability to help us make sense of our lives. Uncommon Strangers will resonate with readers who appreciate psychologically rich fiction, autobiographical storytelling, and books willing to ask uncomfortable questions about what it means to live authentically.
Pages: 178 | ASIN : B0HCXVH62B
Memorable Moments
Paperbacks & Baguettes is a novella-in-flash set in a bookstore and café where baristas, booksellers, and customers create a community through small, repeated encounters. What was the inspiration behind this collection of stories?
For years, I managed a bookstore café, and if you had asked me then whether I was collecting stories, I would have said no. I was making coffee, shelving books, helping customers, and trying to keep the day moving.
Looking back, I realize I wasn’t remembering the busiest days. I was remembering the people who kept coming back.
There was the customer who always wandered the shelves before ordering. The bookseller who remembered what someone had enjoyed months earlier. The regular who glanced around the room before sitting down, hoping a familiar face was already there.
Over time, people who had arrived as strangers began expecting to see one another. If someone hadn’t been in for a week or two, someone else would ask about them.
It wasn’t a dramatic story. It was an ordinary one. But I came to realize that familiar places can change us simply by becoming part of our lives. That’s where Paperbacks & Baguettes began.
Many of the book’s most memorable moments come from small gestures rather than dramatic events. What attracts you to writing about those quiet, easily overlooked moments of everyday life?
I’m interested in the moment someone realizes they’ve been remembered.
A barista starts making a drink before the order is placed. A bookseller sets aside a novel because they think a frequent customer will enjoy it. Someone clears a chair because they know another regular usually sits there.
From the outside, those gestures don’t seem like much. But they say something we all hope to hear: I’m glad you’re here. I noticed you.
Those moments stay with me because they’re easy to overlook while they’re happening. Looking back, they’re often what we remember most clearly.
Recurring objects—books, coffee cups, umbrellas, playlists, and scarves—create a sense of continuity throughout the collection. How did you decide which details would reappear to tie the stories together?
I never made a list of things that should come back. They returned for the same reason they do in real life.
Spend enough time in a place and certain things become part of its rhythm. The mug someone always reaches for. Umbrellas gathering by the door when it rains. A scarf left over the back of a chair while someone wanders the shelves. The same song that somehow seems to find its way back every few weeks.
Those details reminded me that the café wasn’t starting over with each story. Life had been going on before the reader arrived, and it would keep going after the story ended.
I wanted the café to feel lived in, not simply described.
What do you hope readers carry with them after spending time in the world of Paperbacks & Baguettes?
I hope they think about the familiar places that have become part of their lives.
Maybe it’s a bookstore, a coffee shop, a library, or a neighborhood restaurant. Places where people begin to recognize one another, not because they’ve shared their life stories, but because they’ve shared enough ordinary days.
We’re often part of each other’s lives long before we have words for the relationship. We know someone’s usual table. We notice when they haven’t been around. We hope they’re doing well.
If the book does anything, I hope it’s simply this: that the next time readers walk into one of those familiar places, they notice the people who have quietly become part of their own story.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Some places hold you longer than you expect.
Paperbacks & Baguettes unfolds in a bookstore café – paperbacks, coffee, food; early mornings and late closings; regulars who linger and staff who notice what others miss. Exchanges begin to matter: a scarf left loose, a mug still warm, a playlist quietly shared. Closeness forms – not through grand gestures, but through attention. A love story told sideways, shaped by presence rather than plot, and by care rather than drama. It belongs as much to the room and its people as to any single pair.
Paperbacks & Baguettes: Stories Between Us
Michael M. Brownstein’s Paperbacks & Baguettes is a novella-in-flash set inside a combined bookstore and café, where baristas, booksellers, managers, regulars, and passing customers create a community through small, repeated encounters. The book builds its story through brief scenes: an umbrella left by a shelf, a playlist shared across the counter, a scarf catching on a book, a warm cup waiting for someone who may return. Familiar people and objects reappear, so each vignette adds another layer to the ones before it. By the end, the bookstore café feels less like a backdrop and more like a living presence that notices, remembers, and quietly connects everyone who enters.
Brownstein’s writing is at its best when it pays attention to gestures that usually disappear before anyone thinks to name them. A hand pauses above a mug. Two people adjust their grip on the same box. Someone straightens a book on a shelf that doesn’t belong to them. These details carry much of the book’s emotional weight, especially in the gradual relationship between the woman with the scarf and the man behind the counter. Their connection develops through music, books, glances, and unfinished sentences, which makes the final scenes feel earned without turning the romance into the only reason to keep reading. The larger story is also about work, belonging, and the ways shared spaces become meaningful through ordinary care.
The book reminded me of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, though Brownstein works on a smaller and gentler scale. Both books use linked stories to show how individual lives overlap within a community, and both trust accumulation more than dramatic revelation. Strout often moves between sharply defined characters and exposes the private tensions beneath public behavior. Brownstein stays closer to atmosphere, letting recurring sounds, smells, objects, and routines provide continuity. His characters aren’t always named, but they become recognizable through their habits. That approach gives the book an intimate, almost musical structure, with images and phrases returning like variations on a melody.
The repeated descriptions of light, warmth, steam, shelves, and things left unsaid can feel carefully patterned, but that pattern is also central to the book’s appeal. Paperbacks & Baguettes asks the reader to slow down and notice how affection often appears before anyone calls it affection, and how a room becomes a home through repetition. It’s a warm, observant book with a strong sense of place and an unusual confidence in quiet moments. Readers who enjoy linked fiction, understated romance, and stories about the hidden emotional life of everyday spaces will find plenty to linger over here.
Pages: 172 | ASIN : B0H4BFVS7H
Viscera Varnish: A Novella
Viscera Varnish, by Jason Garman, is a horror novella about Daniel Virek, a celebrated Chicago artist whose talent has begun to curdle into repetition, panic, and desperation. After a humiliating gallery opening confirms that the art world is losing faith in him, Daniel returns to the grisly private ritual that once made his work feel alive: murder as medium, the body as pigment, suffering as process. What begins as a portrait of artistic decay soon slips into stranger territory, where guilt, ambition, and something occultly bureaucratic gather around him like wet paint refusing to dry.
I liked how confidently the novella marries the grotesque with the mundane. Garman does not treat Daniel like a mythic monster at first; he lets him move through apartments, galleries, fast food bags, traffic, bad parking, and petty professional humiliations. That ordinariness makes the horror feel less theatrical and more contaminating. The violence is extreme, but the more unsettling element is Daniel’s almost clerical calm. He has turned atrocity into workflow, and the book keeps asking whether the world around him is horrified by that or merely waiting to see if the result sells.
What I appreciated most was the way the book skewers the appetite of the art scene without flattening it into parody. The gallery patrons, managers, and critics are ridiculous, but they are not harmless; their hunger for genius gives Daniel’s monstrosity a market. The prose has a slick, nasty elegance when it wants to, especially in the descriptions of canvases that seem less painted than coagulated. I also liked the late turn toward the uncanny, where the story stops being only about a killer artist and becomes something more metaphysical: a grim little fable about inspiration, extraction, and the cost of being “special.”
Readers drawn to horror novellas, psychological horror, body horror, supernatural horror, occult and dark art thrillers will find plenty to admire here, especially if they like their nightmares intimate, bloody, and morally rancid. Fans of Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart may recognize a similar fascination with the border between ecstasy, creation, and mutilation, though Garman’s voice is grimier, more contemporary, and sharpened by satire of artistic prestige. Viscera Varnish is a savage little gallery of ambition and appetite, where the masterpiece is never as frightening as the price paid to make it.
Pages: 131 | ASIN : B0H1DSB67X
Lies, Lust, and Larceny
Lies, Lust, and Larceny, by Lisa Marie Shankles, is a satirical novella about twin sisters, Lilah and Laylah Larceny, whose retirement plans spiral into jealousy, identity theft, petty crime, Norwegian prison fantasies, and an unexpectedly strange adventure involving aliens, a mysterious cat named Dyngus, and a trip to Scandinavia. At its heart, this is a comic crime adventure with satirical and light sci-fi elements, built around sibling rivalry and the wild places envy can take a person.
What stood out to me first was the book’s sheer willingness to be odd. It doesn’t ease into its weirdness. It jumps. One moment I was reading about Dyngus Day in Buffalo, family tension, retirement, and salon life, and the next I was following a plan to use Norway’s humane prison system as a retirement strategy. That’s a bold premise, and I appreciated how fully Shankles commits to it. The humor is broad and often deliberately ridiculous, but there is an energy to it that keeps the story moving. It feels like the kind of tale someone might tell over coffee after saying, “You will not believe where this goes.”
I also found the contrast between Lilah and Laylah to be the book’s strongest engine. Lilah is more open, curious, and impulsive, while Laylah is driven by resentment and the ache of always feeling second-best. That emotional thread gives the absurd plot something real to stand on. The writing can be uneven at times, with long explanations and some jokes that land harder than others. It’s going for chaos, color, and momentum. The author’s choices are playful and unafraid, especially in the way she blends crime comedy, travel fantasy, paranormal touches, and alien strangeness into one offbeat package.
Lies, Lust, and Larceny is a light, eccentric satire for readers who enjoy strange premises, flawed characters, and humor that leans into the outrageous. I would recommend it most to fans of quirky novellas, comic crime stories, and anyone who likes their fiction a little unhinged, a little mischievous, and not too concerned with staying inside the lines.
Pages: 182 | ASIN : B0C9S88LGB
