Book completed! Fortune's Forge

[caper_est]

BOOOOOK!

I began this story early in the pandemic, whilst recovering from being run over by COVID. My idea was to write something that would make good comfort reading for myself, and replace some of the joy slowly but inexorably being sucked out of so many of my old favourites by the stately revolutions of the Dance of the Suck Fairy. It began as more than half a writing exercise - an attempt to write a quick-and-dirty pulp romp of about 60K written on the extended Lester Dent Master Plot model - and has, of course, mushroomed into the inevitable and not-quite-so-pulpish trilogy.

I don't remember any yarn I've had so much sheer fun spinning.

I'm currently about two-thirds of the way through my first pass on Book 2. That's how far I needed to get in order to understand how the last missing section of the first book actually needed to go. But it's done now, and I have a clean first draft of Book 1 at last!

A great bouncing is seen upon the face of the land.

It's rather hard for me to condense into an elevator pitch just now, so instead I offer the following slightly tongue-in-cheek Dreamwidth blurb, behind the cut...

FORTUNE'S FORGE

Book One of Levin's Hazard

An anti-Belgariad set in the sprawling archipelagan civilization of the Sixteen Seas.

Levin "Leff" Foster is an assistant village schoolmaster, who lives with his adoptive Nan and is just getting ready to marry the local priestess's daughter. A loyal and long-headed son of his sturdily egalitarian Commonwealth, Leff has no time for kings, prophets, or lying bards' tales of glorious battle. But now Leff has a problem that even his Nan's deep lore and wicked good sense can't fix:

"Through no fault of yours or even my own, you have come down with a bad case of Chosen One, spelled T-A-R-G-E-T, with some sort of pernicious Destiny, spelled C-U-R-S-E. We need to get out from under, find out who chose you and what they meant by it, and persuade them not to do it any more. That's usually spelled K-I-L-L, though I've had good results in mild cases with a stout batten to the side of the head..."

Pursued by shoddily constructed devils, Leff must flee his beloved home for the great and corrupt city of Bram. There - together with his Nan, his fiancée, a militant ploughgirl, and a penniless cavalier from the next island over - he must discover his destiny and baffle it before its glorious shenanigans can get his neighbours killed, damned, or reigned upon. But the companions run up hard against luck-bending master gamblers - undead demigods from the worst place in the world - the minions of a seemingly unstoppable foreign warlord - and the time-hallowed defences of the Commonwealth itself.

Surely, only a true fortune-favoured hero could hope to overcome such odds.

And that's the one thing Leff knows he mustn't ever become...