All right, friends, TESS IN BOOTS is finished.

It really ate my brain. I’m sorry I get so completely immersed in fantasy-world problem solving that I don’t have enough extra brains for this space, but alas that’s how it goes.

I did find a small amount of spare imagination in a very dark corner of my head, and was able to write this short story, out today at the Hanging Garden Summer Fling: The New One. Content warning: this is horror,  I’d say, and not my usual genre at all. You can’t tell from the title, I realize.

It’s fun writing stories full of your own childhood — toilet paper dolls, sundresses, ear of corn, family reunions — repurposed for something horrible. OK, toilet paper dolls were horrible to begin with (and they really exist, if you’ve never of encountered one on a dark night, in a great-aunt’s powder room) (she has to be the kind of great aunt who calls it a powder room, see). Anyway, it was fun to write, and really stretched me in a different direction.

And now to sleep for a thousand years…