Festival of Stories

Stories are coming. Festivals of stories.

My wife has this thing. She’ll look at any given story I write, and sometimes she’ll say, “That’s a you story.” And it usually has to do with… well, stories.

See, I like writing stories about stories. You can probably blame Neil Gaiman and Sandman for that, really. Or maybe Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451. I dunno where I got it, but I did, and now I love writing about stories.

So when Tell-Tall Press invited me to take part in Nabu Carnevale, anthologies about festivals, I was interested… but I was far, far more interested once I saw that the entire idea came from an ancient festival of stories.

Oh. I am all over that.

Now, the anthologies are about festivals in general. They don’t have to be about festivals of stories, but… well, every single story I’ve got in those anthologies are about, um, festivals of stories. One way or another.

So I looked at different angles of how stories function.

For instance, what if a story could dance? Not just “It was like the story danced as the bard sang it.” No, what if a story was made physical reality and danced? Why would a story do that? What would happen? And so out grew “Stories Dance.” It explores how stories are repeated through the ages, and how a story might long to be free of its own telling. You’ll be able to find it in The Spell Books. You can preorder the digital copy today, or on Monday order your own physical copy!

Would stories gather to mourn their own? If stories can die, how do other stories react? Is there a graveyard for dead stories? Those thoughts led to “The Stories We Leave Behind.” I love these kind of questions, by the way. Treating stories as living things means you can ask all sorts of interesting questions about them. Can stories die? Well, if no one tells them, that’s kind of a death for them, isn’t it? Anyway, you can read my story exploring that in The Starship Logs. Just like the other book, you can preorder it today or wait until Monday to order a physical copy.

What if there were predators that ate stories? Stories wouldn’t have to die natural deaths, right? Hm. How would that work? Where do stories live? Well, most of the time stories live inside of us. So how would a predator eat the stories within us? How would these predators hunt? Thus, “The Stories You Eat,” which appears in The Blood Tomes. (You guessed it – available to preorder digitally or order your physical copy Monday.) I’d like to think it’s a creepy tale!

What is the story afterlife like? If stories can die, what happens to them after they die? What if a story never lives in the first place, but is rejected by the person making the story up? And is it possible for a story in this afterlife to die… again? Yeah, kind of convoluted, but that’s how I ended up writing “The Festival of Rejected Stories.” (This one’s in The Case Files, with the same release schedule as the others!)

So, yeah. Four stories about stories. And after each one, my wife said, “This is a you story.”

If you’d like to make me happy and purchase the anthologies and support not just my writing but a great new publisher, follow the links!