Things You May Have Missed

There’s no weekly dose of new fiction today, and no new essay tomorrow.

Instead, I’ll share a few links to things you may have missed (especially if you are relatively new here, and quite a few of you are—hello!). These links are both fiction and nonfiction.

Fiction

The weekly episodes of Dancing With Death, the sixth of the Tales of The Lesser Evil, ended last week. In total, there are ten parts to this story, and you can find the navigation page here, should you wish to read it all together. I have updated the individual posts with signposting, so you can relatively easily skip to the next part. One thing we who share fiction here keep asking for is an overhaul of the ways we can serialise stories—it is a lot of extra work to add the links at the moment, and it isn’t always intuitive for you, the reader, either. Fingers crossed something better will arrive in the future.

Dancing With Death features Flinders Jeigur, in a novella set between the two strands of her life I wove together in the novel, Death In Harmony. At the moment, Death In Harmony (all 29 episodes of it) remains free to read, but it will be popped behind the paywall in mid-March (more on this next week). As such, you have time to read it now, should you wish! Again, the introduction page is also the navigation page, with links to episodes, and signposting throughout.

Also free—and I intend it to always be so—is the novella Only One Death, the first of the Tales. This is a gentle play on the ‘standard fantasy quest’ story format, so prevalent in the genre. I say gentle—the story itself is not really gentle and it is not exactly a spoiler to say there might be more than one death… Again, the introduction also contains the navigation, and it too is signposted throughout.

Nonfiction

The latest of the guest posts (the backstory behind which can be found in a post called Let’s Take A Walk), a superb, thought-provoking piece by my sister

Lydia Crow

, went out at the beginning of the month. If you missed that, do have a peek—it is definitely worth your time.

As a side note, I intend to have a bit of a restructure on my Substack homepage—it can be difficult to find things there (although a part of this is not due to me, but to how Substack itself is structured). I would like a space to house all the walks in the guest post series, for example, make them easier to find. Watch this space!

In January, I shared a piece entitled The Time, Right Now. In some ways it was intended to serve as a soft introduction to a sort-of series of essays I would like to share with you on the subject of hope. Not the fluffy, optimistic hope so many view as fragile and potentially futile, but a hope which is down in the dirt, which feels the earth in its fingers and keeps digging. The sort of hope we need to continue in times which feel increasingly dark. Active hope is something more of us could use.

And, last weekend, I shared an essay entitled Hope Is Rebellion, which continues this series. This particular essay was one I was nervous to share being, as it is, rather personal in once sense and, in another, an attempt at a joyful form of rallying cry. For me, mixing these things is always a worry—but I need not have worried, the comments I received were wonderful, and I am so very grateful for all of you who read and shared this essay. As you can see from the header photo, this letter also features a rather delightful stone (or beech) marten…

Finally

For today, that is all. As usual, all the photos in this piece were taken by me, simply pretty pictures to break up the text. I have so many thousands of photos I have never shared, so it makes sense to let some of them see the proverbial light of day. These particular ones are also here to remind me—and, perhaps, you—of warmer days to come. Can you smell this last one?

Next Friday, I hope to share an update on the current and future status of The Lesser Evil, with some snippets of news and ideas I’d like you to ponder. (I might be asking for your help, but in a potentially interesting fashion!)

You can also share with those you know:

Or leave a comment or thought if you wish. I will always reply, although the time scales might be longer than I might prefer. (I’ve caught up with recent comments, but still have a few to catch up with from earlier this year and around Christmas—I’ll get there, and thank you for your patience!)

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Many thanks for reading,

Alex