Awhile back I noticed a Kickstarter project called "Thrilling Adventure Yarns," an anthology of pulp-style stories. I loved that idea, and wished I'd been invited.

The following year there was a second volume, and again, I wished I'd known about it.

And the third year, I was invited to submit a story to Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2022. I was offered a choice of genres, and chose sword & sorcery, since that's a lot of what I wrote back in the 1970s.

Catch is, I'm not that young anymore, so I've lost some of the youthful wildness that a proper sword and sorcery story should have, and there were length limits (which several contributors ignored) that restricted me a little, so the story is arguably just fantasy, rather than true S&S.

Still, I wrote my story, they bought it, and it's in the book. I started with the sword-and-sorcery cliche of a barbarian robbing a wizard's home, since I wanted to stay true to my chosen genre, but I tried to give it a new twist or two.

I did, of course, include some standard elements: Giant spiders, a beautiful young woman, and so on.

Because the Kickstarter was successful enough to reach all its stretch goals, there is also an illustration with each story. Here's the full-color one for "The House of the Spider," though it's black and white in the actual book.

Publication was originally scheduled for December 2022, but there were delays, and actual publication was in February, 2023. It also wound up a fatter book than intended -- several stories ran long. It's out now, though, in hardcover, softcover, and ebook. Give it a look.

That's it; here's your list of handy exits:

The Misenchanted Page
Front Page | Main Site | E-mail me!