Broken Shores

I am in the process of transferring hosting and Broken Shores will be unavailable until I get things sorted out. The process is going to take a while, since I am going to transfer it from Wordpress to a Jekyll setup. The first three stories are still available over at Smashwords, though.

Broken Shores is a series of short stories about the people of the floating island of Ansau. It is hosted separately from this site (eventually I’ll get around to switching it over to Jekyll, as well, for now it’s still on Wordpress) and has 8 short stories posted, as well as a few pieces of flash fiction. It has been on hiatus since about 2012 (just about everything went on hiatus when I had a kid, parenting is hard) but I hope to get back to it one day.

It is fantasy, but I was going for what I was thinking of at the time as ‘hard fantasy’, meaning that it had strong internal consistency, the magic was well-defined, and magical effects had corresponding costs. Some of the ideas that I wanted to explore were:

• contractual magic (magic available to everyone and tied into the currency)
• currency as condensed life force
• a society without inheritance (and how people would try to undermine it)
• magic as a metaphor for cheap energy (oil)
• a non-traditional post-apocalyptic setting (there are sufficient resources, society has been rebuilt)
• an island that floats on the ocean currents

The first story in the series is The Ash Tree, but you should be able to read them in any order. You can also find the first draft of one of my early attempts at the setting, Assassination, in the post A First Draft.