The little boy came running into the room, coat tails flapping.
“Quick!” he cried, “hide me! They’re after me!”
Olive put down her embroidery.
“Who is after you?”
“Them!” the little boy wailed ungrammatically as he wiggled his way under the sofa. “The chief mages!”
“Watch out for the cookabon—“ Olive broke off as a loud yelp came from under the sofa. The chief mages, huh? If they were after that boy, that might explain the proliferation of such creatures as the cookabonna dragon under the sofa. They never could figure out how much of an effect their promiscuous spellcasting had on the whole community. Or perhaps they just didn’t care.
Olive hung her head upside down in front of the sofa.
“Tell the cookabonna there’ll be some biscuits available presently,” she said to the vague shapes scuffling around beneath. “And don’t worry about the mages. They know better than to come in here.”
I finally, at long last, finished a book again. (I know, right?) Just to clarify, no, it’s not a Septimus Series book, it’s a standalone. And by “finished” I mean that last week I buckled down and implemented the changes my editor, the intrepid and amazing E. L. Bates, had suggested. So now, I think, the story is finished and is the best that I can make it.
So now what? Actually, one thing I’m considering doing with this book is to send it to publishers, to see if one of them might put it out under their label. And one of those publishers I’m looking at requests in their manuscript submission form that I supply links to my web presence, but only of sites that I use to promote my work. Umm, okay. Then I guess I better do some promoting. The publisher wouldn’t want to just see posts about my cat and my stuffed bear, would they? No matter how handsome Louis and Steve are.
So, yes, in case you were wondering, my books and short stories are still out there to purchase and/or read! There are quite a number of them now. I tend to forget just how many.
The Septimus series is what started it all. It began with a blue pottery bowl:
“Cat was ordinary—until the day a blue bowl whirled her off to a magical medieval world… Catriona, ex-librarian, dumped by her boyfriend, is just trying to restart her life when she gets sucked into and carried off by a blue pottery bowl. Suddenly thrown into a world where she can’t move for mysteries, how is this modern town girl going to cope alone in the woods with a comatose man and a muddy baby? And there’s that hint of something sinister…”
TheTwelve Days of Christmas is the story of a woman whose boyfriend mysteriously vanishes on Christmas Eve, just when some unearthly beautiful people show up in town. Can Mac get Tom back in time before the Twelve Days of Christmas are up?
The Forty-Dollar Christmas is what I call a “here-and-now” story, i.e. contemporary fiction: a tale of how Liz tries to show her neighbour and his little girl that for celebrating Christmas, it’s not the content of your wallet that counts.
Again, both those books are available on Amazon for Kindle and print, and at most other ebook vendors in other ebook formats.
As for short stories, there are quite a number of them out there right now, and most of them are available to read for free! Go overhere and follow the links.
So there you have it, that is Life, the Universe, and A. M. Offenwanger Stories to Enjoy. Get reading!
It was a clear, sparkling day, and under the sofa the cookabonna dragon sang its melancholy tune. Olive sighed. She would have to dust under there again.
The problem with maintaining a blog is that one really ought to post something on said blog. Well, I haven’t been able to think of anything to say. Yes, I know it’s Wednesday and that calls for a Wordless Wednesday post, but I don’t have any particular picture I wanted to post today, either.
But then, it’s been two years, really, since I’ve been doing much of any posting, quite aside from the year I “officially” took off. And in those two years I’ve accumulated a lot of pictures. So, how about, for the next while you’ll get some retro-pieces? Retro-thoughts, retro-pictures. And the thing is, when I first started blogging, more than ten years ago now, I did warn my esteemed readership that this wasn’t going to be a blog “about” anything in particular. Hence the tag line: “Life, the Universe, and a Few-Odd Other Things”.
It’s been two years… And we all know what those two years entailed. It’s sapped so much of my energy, of my ability to think and to create.
As you’ll know, if you’ve followed this blog for a while (or know me in real life), “Sleeping Beauty” is one of my favourite fairy tales. I keep thinking about why that is, and why this story holds such fascination for us as a society that it’s one of the perennial favourites. I mean, it’s kind of boring, isn’t it? It’s literally about a girl who… sleeps. But I don’t find it boring, and neither do any of the other millions of people who keep enjoying this story.
Just to get something out of the way, no, it’s not because the story is about the prince’s heroic journey to rescue the girl. That’s a Disney addition. In the Grimms’ version, which is the one I love, the prince does nothing more exciting than walk up to the thorn-covered castle, which lets him in because he unwittingly happened to show up at the right time. No dragons, no sword fights, no baddies to battle. Only sleep, so powerful it even knocks out the flies on the wall and the cook in the middle of smacking the scullery boy.
It’s the sleep that’s the real antagonist in this tale – and its solution, the way it is defeated, is to let it run its course. Once the hundred years are up, a prince shows up and the princess wakes. The prince is nothing special (apart from being a prince, but in fairy tales, those are a dime a dozen); he’s not “the chosen one”, he’s not “destined to fall in love with the princess”, let alone her previous lover who actively seeks her out to rescue her (most film versions of the story go with the latter, but, sorry, that’s not actually in the folktale). The only thing he does, and does right, is to listen to the story an old man tells him about the enchanted princess in the thorn-covered castle that nobody can get to, and let his curiosity get the better of him.
And suddenly there are roses on the thorns, and they part to let the prince in just in time for the princess to wake up.
Maybe that’s what we need to hear today: The sleep will run its course. There is nothing to do but wait it out, but once it’s done, there are roses and kisses and, unfortunately for the scullery boy, a smack upside the head.
Perhaps I had something to say today, after all.
Life, the Universe, and Sleeping Beauty. The sleep ends when it’s run its course.
Now that I think of it, even the stories started when I was thirteen.
“This is going to be the last piece of fiction you’re going to write in your school career,” our teacher said. It was Grade 7; creative writing classes did not exist in the academic type of school that I attended where we were trained for university. So this one last piece of narrative writing we got to do was an assignment to first create a “narrative core” – a fake newspaper account – and then turn it into a 2-page story.
I wrote a tale of a raccoon stolen from a circus who escapes his captors by sheer raccoonish cleverness (he chews his way out of the cage). That piece, too, I still have, in an extremely tattered blue binder. My teacher’s comment on the bottom of the second page says that it “flawlessly fulfils the requirements”. Not a single red mark on the whole two pages other than that comment.
The binder holds a number of other stories, some handwritten in my schoolgirl’s script and some typed on my mother’s typewriter, more or less hunt-and-peck style. On my own time, of course; the “writing for grades in school” train had, as mentioned, left the station.
I quit writing partway into a tale about a fifteen-year-old cowboy in the American West whose horse steps into a prairie dog hole and throws him; he gets picked up by a young man of twenty (which seemed quite old and grown-up at the time) whose fifteen-year-old sister nurses our hero back to health. The story fizzles out after some ten pages on account of lack of direction; I only had a vague idea of where I was going with it and nobody to tell me how to take that idea and turn it into a novel.
Life, the Universe, and the Beginnings of the Stories.
I was thirteen when I first fell in love – with pottery, that is. I can still visualize the pottery studio in my high school where I learned to handbuild a wide, shallow bowl. This bowl:
Yes, I still have it. My first pottery piece – or maybe it was my second? Regardless, it’s been my regular, everyday fruit bowl for the last forty years.
Life, the Universe, and Beginnings. This was where the pottery started.
