If you read fantasy for the magic, the world-building, and the occasional moment of dark humor—I write that. One urban fantasy series, one epic fantasy series, both set in the Fractured Arcana universe, with more coming. My newsletter takes you deeper into the worlds, the characters, and what's next.
A nod to an old friend & 20k words
In this one: an old friend from way back, 20k words of progress, and a new reel from Thaumatropic Fractures.Last newsletter I asked for some accountability help. A few people reached out. One was someone I think of as an old friend from high school. But I've got to tell a little story about him. Way back before high school, in 5th grade, I transferred into a new school roughly mid-year. In one of my classes, the teacher insisted I do a placement test. But the placement test was this set of cards that you worked through, apparently until you missed so many in one set. This stretched on for days, to the point where other kids were asking why I didn't have to do the homework or participate in classwork, and just sat doing the cards every day. The teacher said something like, "Well, because right now he's worked up into the ninth grade cards, and I want to see how far he'll go." Embarrassed, I purposefully missed the rest of the answers to end the situation. As you might imagine, I didn't earn any friends from that. Sometime later that week, there was some situation where the class was mocking me, but this one kid... big kid... by every right could have been a school bully... says, "It must be so cool to be that smart." And he meant it. And it halted the mockery. I doubt my buddy remembers doing that for me. We didn't become friends until High School, so years later. He went on to become an Airborne Ranger, then went to West Point, and after serving our country became a teacher. He's now working on a dissertation while teaching, and he told me he'd check in on my writing and asked me to poke him about his research. So here's a big public poke along with a thank-you for so many different things since 5th grade. That said, I HAVE gotten more writing done on my next book. I hit a bit of a tough phase where I was about 20k words in and realized I needed to do some global shifts that affect everything. I've slogged through those changes, which is slower than cranking out next chapters. In the past, I would have just made a list, marched forward, and done the changes later. But these were too significant, and they would have affected the rest of the story, so I'll decided to spend time on it. I intend to get those 20k words out to my early reader (for those that don't know, that's still my mother... she cranks through books like crazy, and always pretends to want to read my stuff). In the meantime, here's a teaser from the world while you wait--more like it coming on social: All books by Steven J. Morris Previous Newsletters
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Steven J Morris
If you read fantasy for the magic, the world-building, and the occasional moment of dark humor—I write that. One urban fantasy series, one epic fantasy series, both set in the Fractured Arcana universe, with more coming. My newsletter takes you deeper into the worlds, the characters, and what's next.
Hey Reader, Quick fun bit before today's update: the polls from my last email are in. I'd asked how many of you had actually read the three portal fantasy books that made me want to write the genre: Mordant's Need: 14.3% have read it The Darwath Trilogy: 0% have read it War of the Flowers: 14.3% have read it Almost nobody has read them, which tracks. They're buried treasure. If any of them ended up on your list because of that email, I'd love to hear how it goes. Okay, the actual update. I...
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