I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of staring at all the same stuff in my house, where I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year. (Canada has designated this March 11 as a Day of Observance and reflection. Where I live, most things shut down between March 13 and 17 last year. It’s been both a very long year and a very short one, in different ways.)
A mixture of heavy workload and pandemic depression/anxiety have meant slow progress on the decluttering front, but I am getting there, gradually. The most recent success was handing off to a neighbour some unopened condiments that I bought in the Great Shopping Panic of 2020…they hadn’t expired yet, but I knew we wouldn’t get through them before they did, and my neighbour was as happy to take them as I was to get rid of them.
Here at TDP, we’re also doing some virtual housecleaning, taking down the oldest of our short works. The short stories and serials that we posted as freebies in 2014, 2015, and 2016 will be unpublished at the end of March. That will allow us to resell them to other markets (as reprints) or reissue them as ebooks as individual authors.
That means you have until March 31 to read:
- my fantasy serial Still Waters Run Deep
- Erin’s horror story The Contract
- Kit’s creation myth When the World Was Young
- and more! If you want to read them all, start from here and work your way forward.
We are keeping up our two Fractured World shorts:
- A Constant Companion by Kit, a prequel in which Briony meets her mountain cat Poes, and
- Brothers by me, a side story in which the injured fighter Astrolabe deals with grief over losing both his brother and his right arm.
You might notice that the fourth TDP author, KD, doesn’t have any shorts posted during that time period. That’s because the serial she wrote got repurposed as a short adventure novel, which we published as Flame Isfree and the Feather of Fate.
Finally, we are still publishing new freebies on the first of every month. KD is seven installments deep in her latest serial, Kit just started a new one, and Erin and I have most recently published poetry.
So never fear, we’re well on our way to recluttering our virtual shelves. Funny how that happens… (Though I guess it’s not clutter if it’s good stuff. Right? Right? *stares despairingly at bedroom closet*)