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I want to thank everyone who tuned into the live cover reveal on @Anconab's feed last night, showing the cover for LORD AND KING, Book 3 The Drowned Kingdom Saga, to the world! In case you missed it, I've attached the cover below in all its glory! So proud to have luminaries such as @JannyWurts @Holly Tinsley Tim Hardie, and Eve Koguce grace the cover with endorsement quotes / blurbs! LORD AND KING IS COMING, Spring 2023!!

Sarah’s books are free today!

WILL BE STREAMED LIVE ON TWITTER, COURTESY OF the wonderful @Anconab 8PM EASTERN!!! COME CHECK OUT THE COVER FOR LORD AND KING, and catch up on series news!

That was a splendid livestream with Blaise, and the cover image looks very sharp! I also truly loved the reveal on the next title in your series. Can't wait!

I love to collect rocks. How about you? Here was one rock I found and decided to share it with someone else in the world.

Greetings! Here is the thread where I will post th current standings in the competition, and update the thread monthly! The scores are averages of the three judges' score for each story based on the criteria of: overall writing/structure, usage of the prompt, worldbuilding/characters, and originality. After January's prompt, here are the standings! 1. Layla - 15 points 2. Thomas & Varsha - 14 points 3. Frog - 13 points 4. Karl - 12 points

Well done everyone on this month's stories! It was a pleasure to read every single one!

Hello Everyone! I apologize for the delay in posting the prompt, life has been slightly insane lately on my end. After reading what you all wrote for January's prompt, I'm excited to see what you can do with this month's! This prompt comes from my fellow judge @Holly Tinsley and I love it! The prompt: I don't think you're supposed to eat that Good luck, and I look forward to reading your stories!

I missed the live, but went back and saw it now - the cover looks wonderful! Congratulations P.L

If you can read faster than Andrew Wizardly Reads, you must be AI. This man is the definition of a VORACIOUS reader! He's also a very popular booktuber and a fabulous fella. He loved A DROWNED KINGDOM, and now he's onto THE LAST OF THE ATALANTEANS as part of his February 2023 TBR! He's got some awesome books on there...and yes that DEBUNKED COVER...wow!!! Getting some serious FOMO about that one! Check out Andrew's content, it's amazing, and check out this video!

Even just a mention in these videos is a big deal! One day I'll read as fast as @Andrews Wizardly Reads does

We all know and love Petrik Leo, one of the best SFF booktubers out there. One day he commented on Twitter that he thought the cover of TLOTA was cool, so I offered to send him both books. We DM'd and now that he's got both, he was kind enough to show them off in this recent book haul video. Some amazing books that Petrik has hauled, including one of my favourite Indie authors, Daniel T. Jackson, and Aiduel's Sin - JUST RELEASED! A great one to pick up if you like great character driven fantasy. Illborn, Daniel's first book was my Indie Book of the year in 2022. Anyway, check out the video!

How is everyone’s weekend going? its been pretty busy here. On Friday we went out for dinner and drinks with friends. On Saturday went to see Infinity Pool and went out again with friends for dinner. Today we had our Strange Days meetup and edited some videos. Busy weekend! How are all of you?

I feel the same way about mine. Yours and everyone's are so good. Maybe we should make a self-published short story collection at the end of the year. I love the different takes people had on the prompt!

I just posted mine. It's all in fun. What I'm most excited about is the challenge to myself to write at least one short story per month. I have a lot of ideas but I work best when I have deadlines. I look forward to reading everyone's' stories! 🙂

There are a lot of really cool rocks along the shores of the Great Lakes. These photos are from Lake Superior IMG_4411.MOV

About 4 words longer than mine 🤣

Lovely cover! For a moment I thought you had written the new Game of Thrones book!

One more chapter to go... we have lots to talk about.

It was a pleasure reading all of them

I was amazed by all of the stories. They all were wonderful and inventive.

Congrats P.L.!!

Thanks so much @Paromita Mukherjee!

"There is pain always, and ugliness, but the light and beauty of the world shine always above and beyond the powers of darkness to destroy." - Christopher Ruocchio, Kingdoms of Death

We could plough the money back into the next one, and once costs are covered, the rest goes to a charity. No arguments that way, other than which charity...

I was a voracious reader. These days, not so much. For one thing, I find it very difficult to turn off the writer/editor brain (particularly with SFF) and end up dissecting books instead of enjoying them. I combat this by reading outside of my genre and often reach for books on tiny niche aspects of some historical event/person that might impact whatever book I'm writing at the time. I miss reading fantasy, but its the rare book that is SO good it smashes past whatever issues I have. Happily, there are a handful of authors who seem to manage this pretty much every book.

I did wonder about that. We take the best couple from each month and publish 24 short stories. Not sure how we would do the logistics of it all though. We could almost do it on a regular basis, if the writers battle happened over a series of years... "Page Chewing Tales" 🤣

And, my story is up! Thank you to everyone who had such kind words of encouragement. I had a lot of fun of fun writing the story once I got out of my head P.S I took a peek at all the other submissions, and they were all super fun to read.

I was a huge five stones enthusiast when I was little [A game played with well, five stones - here's a video demo. My grandma used to collect stones for me if she saw any she thought would make the game more fun for me, so I have a significant rock collection, but I don't have any pictures to share, unfortunately. Most of them looked like the ones from Drew's pictures above though. They were a lot of fun to play with! ]

Just finished editing mine. Gonna give it another quick read later and should have it uploaded tonight. Looking forward to reading everyone else's too!

The wonderful and talented @MaedBetweenthePages features some books in this fabulous video that can potentially widen one's worldview. @Zamil Akhtar's Gunmetal Gods (which I absolutely loved) was among them, and (to my honour) so was A DROWNED KINGDOM. Taylor's extremely insightful and cerebral exploration of this topic is fascinating to watch. Check it out!

René Descartes wondered if we were living in a dream. He thought about this even before the Matrix came along. What are your thoughts on this?

Thank you so much for the support, it means so much to us! And thanks, PL for helping out with the author names, I was a little late checking the boards today!

"For this night and others he was free. He could sit, set his hands to silver strings and at long last, bend sorrow into music." @JannyWurts CURSE OF THE MISTWRAITH, The Wars of LIght and Shadow Volume One.

https://twitter.com/binding_broken/status/1618318965226508288?s=20&t=QOsMnTqTicwcv3yImS9DTg

I have been tying in the changes fast and furious to make deadline, so if I've been absent for a stretch, this may make up for the lapse. Here's a pearl of wisdom quote from the mother of a very good friend of mine, may it serve you well! 'Take care of your body when you are young, otherwise you will be old for a very long time!'

Ha, didn't realize there were two ways of doing it. This is the route I was assuming to go with, but I just realized we can add attachments to posts in the thread. I should be uploading mine tonight. Just want to give it a once over and make a few tweaks here and there. And I apologize in advance, I'm really pushing the word count here, started having fun with it and just kinda went with it. As I write this (before making changes and being entirely happy with the ending) I think I'm sitting around 2,997 words. I'll be sure to do some shorter ones in the coming months, haha

I enjoyed it.

Here is my offering A Bad Day!

I'd love to! I read justice of kings last year and am going to read the sequel when it comes out

Interesting question and great answers. My only counterpoint to any of the above is that some people, like myself, struggle with reading novels. I've never been able to quite put my finger on why, and it's rarely anything to do with the quality of the writing or story. When it comes to fiction, there is something about my brain that just doesn't compute anything longer than 100 pages (mostly). On average, I probably complete between 3 to 5 full length novels a year (and that's through discipline), although I might start more than 30. I have experienced the looks of absolute horror and disbelief on people's faces when I tell them I am a writer who struggles to read novels. Maybe I would be a lot better writer if I could, but I can't. I like to read - I like to read biographies, studies, academic papers, poetry, non-fiction. To be fair, all of this might explain a lot about my writing haha!

I realise it is probably a big ask as you all have things you need to do, but is there any chance of feedback on what we got right and wrong in the judges eyes? Just looking at ways to improve as a writer. In fact, if anyone wants to DM me with feed back it would be appreciated. I assume all feed back from people here would be constructive as you are all nice people 😃

Great choices. Jarmusch!

With Valentines Day being in February, we chose a kinda sorta love story. @Susana Imaginário recommended Only Lovers Left Alive, we haven't picked a time and date just yet but will be hosted by @Mr_Selfy https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1714915/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Yeah something like that would be great

I really like the idea of doing an anthology. The logistics could be a bit complicated but it would be worth discussing and figuring out. Maybe even set it up so that any royalties from sales just go into future volumes? Or something like that. (One of the biggest arguments I've seen against similar suggestions is about the division of royalties, so this always seems like a viable option to me)

@Mr_Selfythanks so much for your support! It means the world! And great feedback! Check this tweet out please for a list of the authors!

Oh wow, this looks great! I've backed the project - @Holly Tinsley @P.L. Stuart You're going to smash it! When we were doing a couple of Kickstarter promotions with STORGY.com, we really threw the net out and it's always useful to try some house known names to try and promote. If you can let me know the twitter accounts of the authors involved, I can use our STORGY twitter to put a shout out and promote the Kickstarter 😄

Fancy Shmancy! I may splash out on it... Hoping to get my spare room sorted this year and could do with some new sexy books to go with the 1000 odd books I already have

Get sprayed edges... All the cool kids are doing that 🤣