Hi, dear readers! Lest the title confuse you, I won’t write an update post EVERY month. Only if, as now, I’ve had to make a major change in plans for some reason. I stated some then-plans during last year’s retrospective. I strongly recommend checking out that post if you’ve just found this blog: it provides a list of all my favorite stories from 2021. It’s a very good place to pick your own favorite from all the flavors I have on offer so you can start reading my work.
In brief, I do still adore what I’ve done with Those Who Lie Beneath and Fathomless Chasms Where Our Hearts Should Lie. I want to finish both of these stories eventually. However, they’re also intimately connected with a deeply traumatizing event last September. It was my fault, but continuing to hurt myself by mashing my head into these pieces won’t erase my wrong.
As it stands, both stories have a well-conditioned triggering effect for me. I need space from them to write other stories. When I say “triggering” I mean that Fathomless Chasms in particular has a primed Pavlovian response that inflicts headaches, coughing, and (thankfully mild) relapses into psychosis. So, er… best not touch it for a little while.
Those Who Lie Beneath burns less fraught. It still carries some of pain’s weight, though. I also have a lot more to ponder about that one, and–well, it’s fundamentally as much a work of occult biography (and autobiography!) as a story. I felt tempted to say you could regard it as something of a religious text. I’m actually putting a clawed foot down on that one: do not. Neither I nor any other sister of the miidyaerita seeks worship. Godhood holds no savor for us. Consider Those Who Lie Beneath a manuscript of a strange old devil’s spirituality. That’s true enough.
And enough for you to respect, I hope? My sudden lapse into frustrated words of warding shows clearly enough that I’ve still got complex feelings of my own to sort through before finishing and publishing it. These books will still be free whenever I do finish them, but I need to balance that with work that at least offers some prospect of getting paid. I do need to eat as long as I’m living out a mortal life on Earth, yes?
Besides, given the wealth of stories linked in last year’s retrospective alone, I doubt very much that you’ll be at a loss for free reading from me if that’s what you desire. Back to living under capitalism, yes?
Thus, I’m building up steam for Sirens of Deceitful Fruit. I originally said I wanted to make this my last free book in the Mythos, but it’s quickly bloomed into something I’d much prefer to be paid for. A weird fiction horror story set in the Louisiana Bayou? Yes, I think I’d rather mark it off as “you pay for this one” so I can really settle in and take my time with it. Sirens follows a group of five friends chasing the break of a lifetime: an anonymous benefactor wants to pay them to take their ghost-hunting hobby full-time.
Their first assignment? To investigate the favorite manor of a notorious and eccentric planation-owning family deep in the Bayou itself. Things go screwy from minute one, when their journey’s tone sets itself with a pre-investigation dinner at a strange restaurant that exists on paper maps but not on satellite. The staff are definitely part of either an obscure New Age movement or a full-blown cult.
Then the team arrive at the manor shrouded by overhanging fronds. The nexus of a close-knit off-the-grid community. The hub of a wheel whose spokes would rather not be connected by it.
“Why not burn it down?” asks Myra, the team spokeswoman.
“No one wants to find out what will happen if we try.”
I originally favored other projects, but I was tag-teamed by one friend and one of my girlfriends who convinced me to pick Sirens instead. I hope the excitement carries! For now, I’m going to return to building up ideas and playing around with the early events in my mind. Take care, readers dear!
~Kairlina~ ❤ ❤ ❤
Ashenvein Gate: Stories & Dreams 