Never fear! I’m working on A Babe in Winter. I just had to adjust the story’s priority because honestly, I wasn’t too keen on telling Mouse’s story at all, much less wrapped up in a quest. And I didn’t want the quest to become a series of vignettes, side-quests, and other such clichés. But now that I have abandoned Mouse back to his own mind, I can pick up where I left off in Black as Knight.
But this post isn’t about A Babe in Winter. It’s about an idea I had in 1996 and put away. And the idea I had in 2016. And the two in 2017. And the one in 2018. And the one in 2019. I doodled, knowing Idea 1996 would be essential to each of the others, which could exist independent of each other. But then I got to thinking: What if I put all of them together? Intertwined them? Set them in my favorite city with my favorite themes?
Fairy tales, myths, urban legends, angels, demons, gods, demigods, theology, philosophy, medicine, and science all coming together and conflicting, where they live in a world that views them as a little off, forced to coexist and live under the same bureaucratic restrictions as humanity, with twists and turns made possible because bureaucracy is unyielding.
Now, look. I don’t read fantasy or scifi. I could be reinventing the wheel. I could be trampling all over genre conventions. However, to me, this is a challenge: To write a world that may or may not have been written, explored, or hinted at with absolutely no regard to what’s been done.
It’s a world where the quasi-immortal mortal sorcerer isn’t the chosen one. He’s the help.
He came to Kansas City during Prohibition to get a decent shot of whiskey without having to sneak around. He couldn’t go home for it. Europe was at war. He only went to South America for one reason. He didn’t want to make the trek to Asia, Oceania, or Africa. So he stayed in the U.S.
He stumbled over a magical creature, then found an entire underground community he never knew existed, one that was starting to have legal and bureaucratic problems with the rise of the IRS and social security numbers: Papiere, bitte. He was asked to become the intermediary.
He wasn’t doing anything at the moment, he was happy to find a community that could expand his magical horizons and enhance his power, he was dating a beautiful lawyer for the mob and wanted to make his next family (#5) with her, so he agreed without too much thought to the long-term ramifications.
So now a hundred-plus years later, he’s a lawyer, stuck in a place he’d never have chosen to stay, becoming the locus for magical and mythical beings who need his help. There’s nothing magic about Kansas City other than Warre & Locke, PC, established by Wolfhart Tadius in 1930-something. He employs so many of the magical and mythical that his practice’s nickname is The Island of Misfit Toys. His only living son is ninety-something and sliding into memory care. His only living daughter is eighty-four and pissy about the fact that he’s forever thirty-eight, but she moves back in with him anyway because she’s tired of being the matriarch of her family. His mortal colleagues are starting to wonder why he doesn’t age, and everybody wants to know the mechanism of his youth and vitality, and where he goes about every sixty or seventy years.
But Hart’s not telling. That’s one secret he’ll take to his grave—when he decides to need one.
His current concerns include finding a missing Christmas icon because the Krampus is afraid her counterpart won’t be found in time; helping a newly widowed ex-faery godmother whose mortality is starting to catch up to her in the form of Machiavellian godfae politics; dealing with a frumpy middle-aged perimenopausal vampire with no guidance and no idea how she got that way or why; sniffing out a budding evil mage who’s tearing up the D’n’D world; keeping his community out of 4Chan and Reddit sleuths’ crosshairs; and struggling with a billionaire surgeon because of his tendency to exploit anything if he can make a profit and puts ketchup on well-done steaks. His grimoire is sorely neglected, his magic isn’t sentient so it can’t index them, and he trusts no one to transcribe his voice notes.
That’s not to mention the delightful and beautiful conservation and restoration librarian who specializes in medieval and renaissance alchemy texts, the first woman to intrigue him since his last wife died in 1960 and the first one to whom he might be able to divulge his secrets.
And worst of all, he still can’t conjure food that tastes right, even after over four hundred years.
He could leave anytime, but he won’t. Because he’s not an asshole.
Where is the rest of this book/series?! You know what I want. (As long as you really want to write it.)
Whether you’re talking about the further adventures of Grimme and Brighde, or Hart, Lilibet, Scarlett, Breezie, and Bossy, well, I mean, I’m busy writing them. A quest sequel (possibly #2 of 3, not sure) and five interlocking stories in a genre I don’t read or write don’t just leap out of my brain onto the page, yanno.
They do, actually, but it takes a while for my fingers to catch up to the movie in my head.