Friday, May 23, 2025

This is the forty-sixth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Today is the day! Salty & Sweet Don’t Mix is the latest entry in the Frontier Flora saga, and one of my favorites. By the time this post comes out, the story post has been in your inbox for a while. If you missed it, just click above. This story represents a lot of firsts for the series, like the first narrated story with music and sound effects, the first Florabeast artwork in full color, the first appearances of a Gast and a Gobblin (previously only alluded to), and the first story that isn’t part of an anthology.

Every story so far has been written for a collection in one of the writing groups I belong to, and the first two made it in handily. I went for the hat trick with this one, but you don’t win every game you play. Ultimately, that was just fine. It gave me more time to get all of the pieces together to make it better than it ever could’ve been otherwise.

This story has nine new articles riding alongside it, which brings the total Floradex completion to 47%! For Generation 1, anyway…

It also marks the first appearances of Jenie and Tolliver, the intrepid investigators who will end up appearing in future stories. The ultimate plan for Frontier Flora is to have four different storylines all making up the full tapestry of the tale. There have been lots of things mentioned in stories but never explained, like the Blight, the nature of the Gasts, and the mysterious southern “homeland” that some characters come from.

Jenie and Tolliver are traveling north, to find out the truth about her missing parents. Ace, Boone, and Ed are driving cattle and Cloverhoof east to feed the settlers who keep arriving from the Old World. A band of unlikely heroes will be journeying south to fulfill a prophecy made by a shaman of the People. That leaves only one direction, and it looks like there’s a storm blowing in from the west. Stay tuned to find out more, and enjoy today’s release!