I’m deliberately avoiding talking about what I’m working on.
-“Underlining the Ephemeral“, August 5, 2025.
… but in my newly copious free time, in addition to spending more time not doing so well the things I wasn’t doing so well when I wasn’t on this unexpected sabbatical, I’m crawling through the second draft of that rural noir I’ve been hinting at. I also just started(ish) brainstorming(ish) a post-apocalyptic fantasy, because I decided to participate in The Novelry’s The Big Write.
The ish is because the background material is from my Drowned Cities universe. I’m attempting a re-do of book one of my not-suitable-for-people fantasy trilogy with my antagonist and contagonist as primary viewpoint characters instead of just PITAs for the hero and his sidekicks.
We’ll see how it goes. Or at least I’ll see how it goes!
As part of prep for The Big Write, I’m working through some brainstorming exercises. One: “think about the first book that kept you up at night” (paraphrased) inspired this bit of blather.
Day Three — The Book That First Kept Me Up At Night
(originally posted at The Novelry Live, September 11, 2025.)
The first book that kept me up all night was the first fantasy novel I remember reading: John G. Kaufer’s The Amazing Land of Wew.
I thought I would be in trouble if my elementary school librarian discovered I had checked it out, even if she’d date-stamped it for me. I was in First Grade, and the assignment was to check out a book from the shelf of biographies approved for Kindergarten and First Graders. Someone had shelved the book there, upside down, so they likely thought it was The Amazing Land of Men.
To be fair, it was wrapped in a plain green library binding with the title typed on a label that was sealed with several layers of tape. If it had the original cover and dust jacket (or the scarlet and gold library binding I’ve seen on some editions), there’s no way it would have wound up on that shelf. By the standards of that library, it would have been shelved with Third or Fourth Grade fiction, if the “occult” subject matter didn’t get it sent over to middle school.
The book was published in 1954. It has … a lot of things, including a talking snowman before Frosty (the cartoon: the song predates this book by four years), a golden metal stiff-mannered mechanical man with a superiority complex decades before C3PO, acorns that grow into flesh-and-blood people, monsters with ordinary names (fire breathing dragons named Ruth and Rebecca!), royal courts of ants and birds, and shrubs that produce neatly packaged ice cream sundaes.
The story itself is pretty basic. Kirkus calls it out for lacking “the grace and originality of style needed to put it over”. Joen, the main character, doesn’t change or grow even as much as Dorothy Gale did, despite being similarly haunted by wanting to get back home to rural America; Texas, in this case. Frank Baum’s Oz books are better, but I might not have wanted to read them if I hadn’t stumbled across this book first. I hated the movie when I was a kid.1
I used to dream about what I would have done if I had gotten to visit Wew, not right away about getting mixed up in the politics of bird or ant monarchies (that came later), but about studying the ice cream shrubs to figure out how they worked, and seeing if I could talk someone there into letting me grow myself a big brother from an acorn.
When I didn’t get caught reading a book I wasn’t supposed to, I was inspired to volunteer to help our librarian shelve books, so I could make sure it got put back upside down in the wrong place so I could check it out again. And again. And again. I did cover my tracks by developing a love of libraries and an interest in biographies (and science and history books, which were shelved next to the biographies).
I wasn’t brave or stupid enough to steal the book when I went off to middle school, so I had to grow up to be someone able to track down and purchase obscure books.
This copy’s sitting on my bookshelf.
- And as an adult, I can freely admit that. The movie’s grown on me now that I’m not required to enjoy it because the grownups in the house loved it when they were little. ↩︎
Modus Dementi 