Five Ways
Subscribe to my newsletter and get a free story!
Share this:

WIP: The Wizard of West Seattle

photo of graffiti of a coffee cup
West Seattle graffiti from the Coffee Conspiracy.
This will be going out to Patreon supporters towards the end of the month. It’s urban fantasy, set here in West Seattle.

Being the apprentice for one of West Seattle’s main wizards ““ probably the main wizard, many thought ““ was not at all what Albert thought it should be. He’d been installed in the position two weeks ago and so far, all May Hua had asked him to do was walk her dogs, two elderly but still energetic Shih Tzus, three times each day. The rest of the time he studied in the workshop, but it was a self-appointed path and it made him itch, knowing that he could have moved so much faster if she’d been willing to guide him along it.

He said this ““ not for the first time ““ to Penny as they walked along. Penny was the housekeeper for Hua’s household, but like Albert, she was frequently at loose ends and so accompanied him on many of the walks. At first he’d been worried she was attracted to him, but it became clear soon that she was bored and he was a fresh novelty. “It’s been a while since May took an apprentice,” she said. She was appreciative of Albert’s presence, particularly since he praised her cooking vociferously. He’d learned a few things since his first, disastrous stint as an apprentice.

And that disastrous stint was what made him reluctant to speak up about his frustration. The closest he came was to ask May at breakfast, “What do you think I should be focusing on?”

She put down her fork and gazed at him. “Appearances,” she said briefly, and went back to her meal with no sign of desire to explain further.

“Oh,” he’d said, and returned to his own meal.

He grumbled to Penny now as they went down the slope at California Avenue’s northern end Seattle a distant postcard to their left. “Magic’s set up weird over here. There’s this screwy street system. At least back in Redmond they had genuine territories with boundaries, not this thing with a wizard for each of the main streets.”

“Not all of them,” she said. “It’s a pretty short list. California, Admiral, Alaska, the pretender of Avalon, Fauntleroy, and Mortie. And the allegiance system’s pretty much territories. Just territories with a lot of special exceptions and loopholes.” She shrugged amiably.

“Not Mortie any more,” he said.

“Therein lies the rub,” she said. “You’re complaining about a lack of action right now, but just wait. They’re still figuring out how to divvy up his sovereignty, that whole long stretch along the shore.”

“Not replace him?” Albert said, surprised.

The Shih Tzus pranced as they waited to cross Alki Avenue. “As I said, just wait.”

Enjoy this sample of Cat’s writing and want more of it on a weekly basis, along with insights into process, recipes, photos of Taco Cat, chances to ask Cat (or Taco) questions, discounts on and news of new classes, and more? Support her on Patreon..

2 Responses

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Get Fiction in Your Mailbox Each Month

Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.

Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.

 

"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

You may also like...

Recent Writing/Publishing Related Links, 3/13/2013

These are noteworthy writing or publishing related links I’ve found recently:

Writing Links

Publishing Links

...

An Armload of Fur and Leaves

In the last year or so, I found a genre that hadn’t previously been on my radar, but which I really enjoy: furry fiction. Kyell Gold had put up his novel Black Angel on the SFWA member forums, where members post their fiction so other members have access to it when reading for awards, and I enjoyed it tremendously. The novel, which is part of a trilogy about three friends, each haunted in their own way, showed me the emotional depth furry fiction is capable of and got me hooked. Accordingly, when I started reviewing for Green Man Review, I put out a Twitter call and have been working my way through the offerings from several presses.

Notable among the piles are the multiplicity by T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, and two appear in this armload. Clockwork Boys, Clocktaur War Book One (Argyll Productions, 2017) is the promising start to a fantasy trilogy featuring a lovely understated romance between a female forger and a paladin, while Summer in Orcus (Sofawolf Press, cover and interior art by Lauren Henderson) is aimed at younger readers and will undoubtedly become one of those magical books many kids will return to again and again, until Vernon is worshipped by generations and prepared to conquer the world. Honestly, I will read anything Kingfisher/Vernon writes, and highly recommend following her on Twitter, where she is @UrsulaV.

Huntress by Renee Carter Hall (Furplanet), which originally appeared in 2015, and whose title novella was nominated in the 2014 Ursa Major Awards and Cóyotl Awards, is a collection of novella plus several shorter stories. I’d love more in this fascinating and thought-provoking world, particularly following the novella’s heroine, the young lioness Leya, and the sisterhood of the huntresses, the karanja.

Always Gray in Winter by Mark J. Engels (Thurston Howell Publications, October, 2017) demonstrates one of the difficulties with furry fiction, which is the reader’s uncertainty where to site the fact of furry characters, primarily whether to take them as a given or have some underlying science to it, such as bio-modified creatures. Here Pawly is a were-cat, but the unfamiliar reader is forced to spend so much time figuring out whether this is something people take for normal or not that the story sometimes gets confusing, and with multiple POV shifts, the reader keeps having to re-orient themself. It’s tight, sparse military SF that readers familiar with the conventions of the genre will find compelling, entertaining, and quickly paced; newer readers may find themselves floundering a bit.

The Furry Future, edited by Fred Patten (Furplanet, 2015) is a solid and entertaining anthology that showcases how widely ranging the stories that use the rationale behind the existence of anthropomorphic beings as part of the narrative can be. Authors in the collection include Michael H. Payne, Watts Martin, J. F. R. Coates, Nathanael Gass, Samuel C. Conway, Bryan Feir, Yannarra Cheena, MikasiWolf, Tony Greyfox, Alice “Huskyteer” Dryden, NightEyes DaySpring, Ocean Tigrox, Mary E. Lowd, Dwale, M. C. A. Hogarth, T. S. McNally, Ronald W. Klemp, Fred Patten, and David Hopkins with illustrations by Roz Gibson and cover art by Teagan Gavet. This book is one that scholars writing about furry fiction will want to be including on their reading lists for reasons including its focus, its authors, the snapshot of the current furry fiction scene that it provides, and the variety of approaches to anthropomorphic body modification.

Along with the furry fiction, I wanted to point to an indie humorous horror collection that is one of the most specifically themed I have yet encountered, Ill Met by Moonlight by Gretchen Rix (Rix Cafe Texican, 2016), which features evil macadamia nut trees, including “Macadamias on the Move,” “Ill Met by Moonlight,” and “The Santa Tree” in a lovely sample of how idiosyncratic a sub-sub-niche can get. The production values of this slim little book show what a nice job an indie can do with a book and include a black and white illustration for each story.

You can read this review at http://thegreenmanreview.com/books/armload-of-fur-and-leaves/

...

Skip to content