Here is my modest little Nathan Waddell shelf in my library. The Nathan Waddell Library! More volumes coming soon, I hope.

I reviewed Upon A Twice Time on Goodreads which I'll copy and paste here- feels weird to review a book I'm in but I don't mention my story so:
 

Quick- name four fairy tales! Don't google it, just off the top of your head. Goldilocks and the Three Bears? Sure! What? Frankenstein is not a fairy tale! It's tricky, a little, right? How about just two? That's the impetus behind Upon A Twice Time. Take two fairy tales and mash them together, and also add the genre of your choice. Science fiction? Check! You like fantasy? It's here! What about culinary memoir? Didn't see that coming, did you? But it all works wonderfully well. So so good, this whole collection. Full disclosure- I wrote the story Megaflora in this anthology, so I won't discuss that one. And indeed I can't discuss every story here but there are some amazing and fantastic and beautiful stories here. Some should be nominated for awards in their genres. What is the governing body for the culinary memoirist's guild? They need to be contacted! (The Gala Tea Celebration Cake, Milton Rockwood)

There's dark fantasy here as creepy and lush as Neil Gaiman's Snow Glass Apples - Jenni Meade's A Dance of Birds and Men.
An aching and hauntingly romantic tale called The Swan and Bellerophon, by Leo Otherland.
A story about Pinocchio that I don't want to say anything else about, but it's brilliant! The Queen of Hearts Interrogates Pinocchio by Gabriel Ertsgaard.
Goldilocks is represented as well, with a big bad wolf chasing her. Rule of Threes by Rebecca Hardy, a story that hopefully will be expanded into a novel at some point. 
A pleasure to read and an honour to be a part of. 16 stars actually, but Goodreads limits me to 5.

 

It came! Started to see some Americans say they got their copy of Upon A Twice Time but I just figured mine would be a while yet. Did you know Americans get mail on Saturday? Weird! I think we did too but not in my lifetime. And my lifetime stretches back a ways now. Anyway, I took a themed photo of the book next to a flower to go with my story, Megaflora, which is written in the genre of Victorian travelogue and  mashes together Jack and the Beanstalk with the creepy and relatively unknown fairy tale "The Queen of the Planets". 

I originally had the idea of mixing Jack and the Beanstalk with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the genre was still the Victorian travelogue idea. I’ve always had this thing I would say at work when someone was tempted to do something stupid (that someone was often me)- Some things aren’t worth going to hell for.  Seemed like a good idea to explore in the context of Orpheus, and I wanted to mix it up and make Eurydice the brave soul who goes to retrieve their lover. But a quick check with Air and Nothingness confirmed that myths didn’t count as fairy tale, and so I was happy to move on with my life. Oh well, right? 

But. 

The editor tweeted at me that he was eager to see what I came up with. Urg! Now I had to write something! Urg!!! But also, so thankful. Let me say working with Todd Sanders, the publisher and editor was absolutely wonderful and a real pleasure and honour. Without that encouragement I would never have written Megaflora. And it was relatively easy to reconfigure as I just imagined that this was the next episode in that same travelogue, so that Orpheus- Sir Orphean here- had already had his misadventure and Lady Eurydice had decided to travel on. It took some digging to find a good fairy tale to use as the second ingredient for the mashup, but a friend pointed me to the whole online catalogue with ATU numbers and everything and I found The Queen of the Planets and …. Voila! Megaflora.

Oh- and that first story never got written but I did scribble a few things down as a rough prototype and one paragraph I did like and regret not getting to use - 

The locals have a name for the type of cloud that obscures the top of the beanstalk, in translation the expression loses something, but it is rendered, roughly, ‘Steam from the giant’s cauldron.’ They say that the thickness of the clouds is an indicator of how many Englishmen the giants are cooking.

And finally, the name for this fictional country they were traveling in, where the beanstalk is situated, I don’t think it made the cut, but it made me laugh. So, for posterity, I can tell you it was Hanselvania. Enjoy!

Update: another of the authors in the book, Rebecca Hardy, made a playlist for every story in the anthology! Very cool!

New phone! Got a tax refund so I spent it on something I sorely needed. Back in October my front camera on my iPhone 7 stopped working, probably for no reason whatsoever, but possibly because I dropped it. That seems unlikely but the only other thing I can think of is ghosts so. 

Anyways so taking pictures has been a challenge- the zoom lens still worked, so as long as I was at least ten feet away I could still take a photo. But only if I opened Twitter and used the camera icon while tweeting. The Camera app would just be a black screen.

 Yeah. I made do but it is so nice to be able to take pictures again! Nice ones. Yay! Here is Ahsoka looking like an instagram influencer. 

I missed Star Wars day but honestly, every day is Star Wars Day over here at the Woods. I did start building a V-19 Torrent micro fighter, which was super easy to build once I found all the parts. Microfighters are tons of fun, love the chibiesque aspect. I have a bunch that I bought, but also some that I cobbled together out of spare parts, hence the whackadoodle colours on some of these. The instructions for all Lego sets are available on their website, so as long as you have the parts (and for bigger sets you almost never do!) you can build them. And the V-19 as seen here was never put out by Lego so I found a great YouTube channel and followed his instructions.

The V-19 Torrent is one of my fave Star Wars ships. Introduced in Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2D Clone Wars micro series which is now available on dsnypl+s. It also showed up in the 3D Clone Wars show, but has never made a live action appearance as far as I know- could be an Easter egg in one of the new movies idk. I have a 3.5" scale Hasbro version as well, not Lego. Lego did make a non-microfighter of this ship but I don't have it. And they made a sort of microfigher but not in this style, so. I need some Clone Pilot minifigs!