My true love gave to me “Grail Bearer” an audio book story by Sarah Avery, released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. If you like the story, she asks that you consider giving to the scholarship started by the man who inspired the story. Sarah Avery is the author of the Rugosa Coven novella series, including Closing Arguments and Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply. The third book in the series will be published in 2010.
My true love also gave me “Berry the Shade” by J. A. Howe, the author of many stories set in the land of Kritter, one of which, “Flame in the Night Region,” is available in the anthology StereoOpticon. In “Flame in the Night Regions,” J. A. Howe’s heroine fights to give the woman she loves exactly what she wants. Which, you know, in fairy tales never ends as well as one might like.
You must be registered on the blog to download a story. There’s no limit to the number of stories that can be downloaded, but you are only entered into the drawing for the ebook reader once for each story you choose (void where prohibited). In other words, if you download both of today’s free stories, you are entered twice. If you also buy a book in the bookstore (the holiday sale has been extended through January 5!), you’ll be entered again.
Download: The Grail Bearer (This file is over 21 mb)
Download: Berry the Shade
About Sarah Avery +/-
| Sarah Avery is an escaped academic who taught way too many sections of freshman composition. After earning a doctorate in English with a dissertation on modernist poetry, she spent a few weeks driving around the Adirondacks blasting Tori Amos on the car stereo and asking herself, What would happen if I stopped holding back? The answer turned out to be a return to her first love, fantasy fiction.
She grew up as an army brat in Kentucky and Korea, Japan and Germany, with a long enough run in Maryland to think of the place as home. An initiate in the Blue Star tradition of Wicca, she has presented papers on Neo-Pagan concepts of sacred text at the American Academy of Religion and the Parliament of the World’s Religions.
Her poetry has appeared in Calyx, Free Lunch, Feminist Studies, and Beloit Poetry Journal, and a sword and sorcery story is forthcoming in Black Gate. Feel free to visit her blog, Ask Dr. Pretentious. Sarah lives in New Jersey with her husband and son. |
About Closing Arguments +/-
| Closing Arguments is the first in a series of novellas that will be coming out from Drollerie Press featuring the Rugosa Coven. This first one features Bob Baines, a normal guy, if by normal you mean raised by civilized Theosophists who didn’t really have time for him or his younger sister. When his parents die suddenly he’s left with the job of cleaning up the mess they’ve left–including an obscenely large hoard of Post-it-Notes–and dealing with his own response to people who were never there for him until it was too late. Unfortunately, now that they’re dead they won’t leave him alone.
Closing Arguments is a story about the family you make when the family who raised you wasn’t enough. It’s about love, and sacrifice, and doing the right thing because it’s right instead of easy, and it’s for everyone who ever felt weird or out of place being just a normal “guy.” Part occult mystery, part domestic comedy, Closing Arguments plants the quest for enlightenment and immortality in the suburbs of the Jersey Shore. |
Read an excerpt.
Buy the book.
About Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply +/-
| It’s hurricane season on the Jersey Shore, and Jane can’t even bring herself to save her old wedding china from the storm that’s blowing up the coast. Her covenmates have been doing their best to help her recover from her disastrous marriage–heck, Sophie took her in as a boarder, and Jane’s not easy to live with. Rugosa Coven works magic, not miracles, so even though Amber convinced Jane to put up a profile on a dating website, she couldn’t persuade her to be any more diplomatic or optimistic than:
Divorced Wiccan Female, 32, seeks realistic rebound guy. Petite and trim brunette. Enjoys the ocean, 19th century novels, long Sunday mornings with the New York Times. Atlantis cranks need not apply.
Seems like something there scares the guys at pagansingles.com.
Anyhow, it’s just as well Jane’s not ready to date, because her roommate/landlady/coven sister/whatever Sophie has her eye on the mysterious young man the coven finds washed up on the beach after their last “skyclad” ritual of the year. What is he, really? An Atlantean, or just a lost Greek sailor with, um, gills? Complications like that, Jane doesn’t need.
She needs Hurricane Nora to leave her sandbar town unscathed. She needs the guy who might be from Atlantis to go away and take his worldview-disrupting gills with him. Eventually, she needs to meet someone sensible, someone kind, someone who can cope with a woman who’s damaged goods.
And she needs the help of her coven, definitely to get through storm season, sometimes just to get through the day. That, at least, she can always count on. |
Read an excerpt.
Buy the book.
About StereoOpticon +/-
| The stories in this volume are fairy tales in split vision because they’re not quite the fairy tales of childhood, but they evoke that same sense of wonder. A handful are re-imaginings of old favorites, such as David Sklar’s Little Red Riding Hood, “Red ’Hood”, which could have happened—be happening—in any major city today; C. S. Inman’s lyrical Beauty and the Beast, “The Castle of Masks”; Cindy Lynn Speer’s regency-flavored Bluebeard, “A Necklace of Rubies”; and Imogen Howson’s futuristic “Falling”, a retelling of Rapunzel. |
Read an excerpt.
Buy the book.
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About the Author: Deena is the Founder and Creative Director of Drollerie Press, which she juggles along with many other duties, but no geese. She's never stopped reading fairy tales.
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