Thou speak’st aright.I am that merry wanderer of the night.I jest to Oberon and make him smileWhen I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,Neighing in likeness of a filly foal.And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowlIn very likeness of a roasted crab,And when she drinks, against her lips I bobAnd on her withered dewlap pour the ale.The wisest aunt telling the saddest taleSometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me.Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,And “Tailor!” cries, and falls into a cough,And then the whole quire hold their hips and laugh,And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swearA merrier hour was never wasted there.
I think I need to write something in here to explain where I am at the moment with the Clay-o-the-Green stories. From the outside it must all seem such a mess. Put simply, I’ve built up so many distinct tasks that I’m having difficulty knocking them off in any kind of sensible way. As such, I’m trying to simplify my immediate goals.
Immediately:
- Expanding A Treasure of Bone and Promises (Book 1 of The King who Sings in Winter) into a full novel. Starting the series with a novella wasn’t terribly sensible in hindsight. Most fantasy readers are not very keen on reading shorter stories from unknown writers. The original novella will still be available (likely, under a different title). I’ll make the full novel available once it’s done. I’ve been having a lot of fun with the rewrite. I think there’s a good novel buried here, which is a big part of why I think it is worth doing.
- Continue posting A Charm for the Nameless Child (Book 4 of The King who Sings in Winter). This is ongoing.
Eventually:
- Get a professional editor to look at the full novel version of A Treasure of Bone and Promises, and subsequent works. Hire professional cover art. Set up physical print-on-demand. This is all waiting on finishing the novel length version of A Treasure of Bone and Promises.
- Perhaps expand The House of Snow and Apples (Book 2) into something closer to a full novel. There will be some threads that develop in the novel length version of A Treasure of Bone and Promises that will need to be dealt with.
- Restart The Kingdom at Midnight (Book 5) from scratch. I was never happy with the progress I made on it. I will be aiming to finish the series either with Book 5 or, possibly, with an as-yet unnamed Book 6.
Some very long-term goals:
I’ve been meaning to write a sequel to Old Dark Things forever. It will happen eventually.
I’ve two other stand-alone Clay-o-the-Green books in my head. One of them (The Wrattock Folk) even got to about 10 or 20,000 words at one point. This will be something I’ll come back to eventually.
Updated Nov 2021
You can contact Hob Goodfellowe at hobgoodfellowe@gmail.com.