The People of the Growing Moon
All right, time to start commenting about some of the stories I have out now, starting with this one, from Curious Volumes Publishing.
Nice cover here--fittingly implying cave paintings as it does. The story was already published in print by Spinning Whorl, so I probably explained a bit of its origins at the time. But for new readers to the blog, here's a bit of how it came about. It's actually one of my earlier stories, though it went through a significant rewrite (in fact, completely tearing the story apart and putting it together in a different way) immediately before I sent it to Spinning Whorl.
At the time of the initial writing I was working on my first novel manuscript, and one of the characters is always aware of the phase of the moon, because it's his one connection to his mother's people. So I had to research and figure out exactly how the moon changes throughout its cycle...and that research created a single image in my mind, that of a people who live exactly for half the moon's phase and know that they will die once the moon reaches full. And yet they worship the moon and celebrate each night that brings them more time to enjoy the moon. (Given their short lifespan, each 24-hour period seems like much longer than it would seem to us, so they have numerous periods of sleeping and waking within each day.)
That image lingered in my mind for a while, though I wasn't sure how to use it...until I came up with their opposites, their shadows in Jungian terms, those who live during the waning cycle of the moon. That's when the story was born. So, go check it out if you want to see what happens from there.
All right, time to start commenting about some of the stories I have out now, starting with this one, from Curious Volumes Publishing.Nice cover here--fittingly implying cave paintings as it does. The story was already published in print by Spinning Whorl, so I probably explained a bit of its origins at the time. But for new readers to the blog, here's a bit of how it came about. It's actually one of my earlier stories, though it went through a significant rewrite (in fact, completely tearing the story apart and putting it together in a different way) immediately before I sent it to Spinning Whorl.
At the time of the initial writing I was working on my first novel manuscript, and one of the characters is always aware of the phase of the moon, because it's his one connection to his mother's people. So I had to research and figure out exactly how the moon changes throughout its cycle...and that research created a single image in my mind, that of a people who live exactly for half the moon's phase and know that they will die once the moon reaches full. And yet they worship the moon and celebrate each night that brings them more time to enjoy the moon. (Given their short lifespan, each 24-hour period seems like much longer than it would seem to us, so they have numerous periods of sleeping and waking within each day.)
That image lingered in my mind for a while, though I wasn't sure how to use it...until I came up with their opposites, their shadows in Jungian terms, those who live during the waning cycle of the moon. That's when the story was born. So, go check it out if you want to see what happens from there.
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