Like Clockwork

I just sold a sorta-short story (really, when it pushes nine thousand words ... can you call it short?) entitled "Sailing The Seventeen Seas" to Fantasist Enterprises' Sails & Sorcery anthology. The nice part is, S&S will be coming out early to pick up on the wave of interest from the last PotC movie, so I should have less than a year's wait before I see my baby in print.

"Sailing The Seventeen Seas" is set in the same world as my novel "Butterfly's Poison," though there is no direct reference to BP. It is probably set a decade or two later - I had a passing reference in the story to Synnove, the daughter of main character Treddian and only fifteen during the events of BP, as the unconventional ruler of Nevelia (a city), but I cut it in edits. In any case, why seventeen seas? Well, the world in which StSS (or should I call it S3?) is set has no real landmasses, only large islands and countless oceans, many of them called different names by different countries ...

StSS is the story of a merchant ship, a shapeshifter, an inventor, and a pair of fugitive passengers. Also like BP, the central character is an escaped Shardathi slave, but there the similarities cease. Vlisa Karhene is the first mate of the Narwhal and has the unenviable task of keeping her mad-scientist captain in line. The title of this post, of course, refers to the fact that the setting involves a higher tech level than most fantasy and a clockwork bird plays a key part in the proceedings. As for the rest, well ... that would be telling.