Tuesday, May 31, 2022

New stories and Eldshore Timeline

Hope you are all doing well and staying safe. I'm delighted to report stories forthcoming in the magazines Clarkesworld, Tales from the Magician's Skull, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The Clarkesworld story is a standalone science fantasy. The other two are new stories about Gaunt and Bone.

Speaking of Gaunt and Bone, I thought it might be fun to share my draft version of a timeline for their world. I'm getting into the habit of calling the whole setting "The Eldshore," after one of the more prominent countries in it. Its capital is Archaeopolis, home turf of Shadowdrop the black cat, who along with Gaunt and Bone is an important recurring character. Gaunt and Bone often pass through the Eldshore proper as well.

I've been making up most things about the setting story by story. That's just how my brain works. I admire people who can work out a detailed setting in advance but I seem to need a narrative first. By now the accumulated detail is substantial enough that a timeline will help keep it all consistent.

Dates in the Eldshore, and many of the surrounding lands, are reckoned since Eldshore's founding in 0 E.Y., or Eldshore Year Zero. I went through the stories and novels looking for date references. I started with some officially dated events:

313 E.Y. -- A meteor hits Archaeopolis. The immediate area becomes fascinating to alchemists.

744 E.Y. -- A great storm hits Archaeopolis.

797 E.Y. -- "The Lions of Karthagar," in which Eldshore's Empress Nayne leads an army into the far eastern Ruby Waste. Eldshore was never more powerful than in this year.

888 E.Y. -- A great earthquake hits Archaeopolis.

1096 E.Y. -- The Chart of Tomorrows, in which a great many events occur. What most people will have noticed is a balloon-enabled invasion of the region by the nomadic Karvaks.

1096. E.Y. -- "A Manslaughter of Crows," in which the Eldshore experiences a very strange election.

Aside from those dates what I've got is hypothetical, but I think it all fits.

Uncertain, perhaps 1000 E.Y.? -- The events of "How the Wicker Knight Would Not Move."

1091 E.Y. -- "The Thief with Two Deaths," "The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing," "To the Darkhouse" (forthcoming in Tales from the Magician's Skull), "Shadowdrop," "The Sword of Loving Kindness."

1092 E.Y. -- "Eyetooth," "King Rainjoy's Tears."

1093 E.Y. -- "Penultima Thule," "What Lies in Ice," "On Magog's Pond" (forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.)

1094 E.Y. -- "A Wizard of the Old School."

1095 E.Y. -- The Scroll of Years and The Silk Map.

1096 E.Y. -- The Chart of Tomorrows and "A Manslaughter of Crows."

That's not set in stone, and I've got more stories in development that might make me change things a bit, but that's the general scheme. I have a tendency to hop all over the place in the timeline, but I'm trying to be disciplined now and finish all my pre-novel ideas before zooming off past 1096! It's easier to keep everything organized if it's linear.

(Although writing out of order has let me do some fun things like having a little bit of the time travel from The Chart of Tomorrows influencing events in "Eyetooth," which I wrote afterward but is set before.)