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!

 One day I hope to have an entire shelf of books I've written or contributed to. So far I don't quite have enough but slowly slowly. Other than The Ursus Verses there's three anthologies and a beer can. This one will soon be added:

I think it's looking good! The publisher says it should arrive sometime in the summer. Here's the Table of Contents:

Meantime I'm just writing away, little of this, little of that. You know. Having fun.

 Quick update for the anthology I will have a story in, the Kickstarter is humming along nicely with still a couple of weeks to go. I think this print run is limited to 250 copies, and as far as I know, no plans for a second printing. Maybe I will reprint the story in a far future edition of The Ursus Verses but it's such a specific story (the mashup of two fairy tales and a genre) that I'm not sure it will really work in a different context. In other words if you want to read it your best bet is to back the Kickstarter! Also you can order some of their back-catalogue, which has some really cool books. See the Air and Nothingness Press website for more on that.

And not for nothing, for there to be future volumes of The Ursus Verses, I need to make my money back on Volume 1 ;) Scroll down for how to purchase your own copy. I don't think I linked to a nice review Lyda Schoch gave me for the digital edition- I got a professionally designed logo for the print edition, which is the biggest difference.

Kickstarter Day

It's Tuesday and that means Kickstarter day- I don't really know why that is the case, but it is. Excited to actually be mentioned in a Kickstarter- as a featured writer in this anthology! I had a lot of fun writing the story that will appear in it. The call was to take two fairy tales and mash them together, using a genre of our choice. I'm not sure actually if I can say much more than that, yet. A little mystery is good, right?

Another one that went live today, from a Twitter mutual and all around great guy, Connor Alexander, is Coyote And Crow, an RPG set in a North America that was never colonized. Already funded!