The Monthly Report: Last of the year
Honeymoon of Body and Soul
Welcome to the Monthly Report feature of the Warthog Report, where I go over what I published here in the past month and plans for the current month. I hope my readers in the U.S had a good Thanksgiving, which is one of my favorite holidays.
Last month was a little busy, filling the gap between stories of Battles Beneath the Stars with a new short story and promotion for it. And the promotion is also significant since it features a character I’ve been meaning to introduce as a master of ceremonies for crossovers.
Somewhere between worlds, between the pages of books, behind the stage of any story, is a place known as the Crossroads. Sometimes it is a bar the unsuspecting wander into for an impossible chance encounter. This time it was the stage of a talk show.
As for the story itself, I’m proud of it, and it seems that it was received well by people. St John Starling of
(a queer gothic romance which you should read) wrote a kind recommendation for it on his own publication that I’ll share here under the link instead of an excerpt.
Have you ever wanted a powerful supernatural being to love and cherish you into submission? I need you to stop what you’re doing and go read A Marriage of Body and Soul; a short story about a troubled young man
and card-carrying monsterfuckerwho summons the demon of his dreams but gets slightly more affirmation than he bargained on.
As for the non-fiction last month, I wrote about an ancient Egyptian poem for Let Me Talk To You About, one that is rather personal to me.
Talking about this poem individually in a non-academic context isn’t the easiest task, it’s fragmented, notoriously difficult to translate, and open to varying interpretations in a translation shaping way. I will start by discussing it as I first read it when I was much younger, then I will discuss some developments with how the poem is understood today.
And for the more free form post, I talked about the previously mentioned What Manner of Man and its intertextual relationship with Dracula.
This withholding and delaying of information is a key part of how What Manner of Man builds on Dracula’s first part, since to expand an opening act into a full story requires a much slower pace. There are no London and chase segments of the story to take the narrative away from Whithern Hall or to set up.
To move on to discussing the upcoming month, the poll for the next Battles Beneath the Stars protagonist appeared to be a tie between Eamon and Erlingr, but one voter commented that they meant to vote for Erlingr but accidentally voted for Feriel, so shifting that vote settles the tie in Erlingr’s favor.
I’m excited to finally show off what I have in store for Erlingr’s story, which as usual comes with the concern of executing it well. I won’t promise an exact publication date for his story’s first chapter just yet, but I’m keen to have it ready for your reading soon.
This is all for now. Thank you for reading the Warthog Report.
I’m glad you liked the silly blurb I wrote for A Marriage of Body and Soul. Sorry again for misclicking on the poll.
a busy month! did you have a nice thanksgiving?