Friday, August 29, 2025

This is the seventy-eighth installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Whew! Friday is here again, and it is very welcome. Monday is Labor Day, so I’ll be enjoying a three-day weekend, not only with no work but also with no school! Transitioning into a regular school schedule after homeschooling for seven years has been a little rough, to be sure. The benefits definitely outweigh the detriments, though, so for now we are just continuing to keep our heads down and work.

This week’s Florabeast isn’t much of a worker, it’s more of a desert hunter. But it’s still in that seed packet somewhere, so check it out!

In other Frontier Flora news, I’ve completed the first draft of the latest short story, currently titled Bad Weather on the Prairie Sea! It’s about a family of settlers moving west to escape that as-yet-fully-explored world element, the Blight. It’s been mentioned several times in previous stories, and so far all I’ve really revealed about it is that it’s bad. Where does it come from? What causes it? You won’t find out in this story, unfortunately, but you will get to have some more adventures in your favorite Wild West creature-taming series.

It’s also going to be some time before you’ll be able to read it. Like every other FF story so far, it’s an entry into a short story anthology, this time for the Inkwells & Anvils Sore Must Be The Storm contest. The winners will be announced on October 1st, so one of two things will happen:

1. I get into the anthology, which is scheduled to come out in November. That means you’ll have to wait three months after that for me to release the narrated version of the story. Or, you could just buy the anthology, which I’ll share the details for later.

2. I don’t get in, which means I’ll post the narrated and annotated version on October 3rd. Why then? Because it’s a Friday, of course.

Until then, there are still 3 published stories, along with 57 revealed Florabeasts, 5 Gasts, and 7 other general articles all available for your perusal. With over half of the initial Floradex revealed, which one is your favorite so far? Reply or leave me a comment and I’ll let you know what mine is. Enjoy the weekend!