Wednesday, September 10, 2025

This is the eighty-second installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. As Summer draws to a close, I’ll be showcasing one of my published stories each day, because there are getting to be quite a few! This is the third installment, check out yesterday’s if you missed it.

It’s time to celebrate the Euphony of the Seasons! Paper & Feathers is the first book in that series, and a great way to start things off. The world of Laviere is pretty unusual and has a lot of unique elements that don’t really map to other fantasy systems. You can easily write that an elf, a dwarf, and a goblin entered the room, and readers will get what you mean. If I write that a Lehvoki and a Veliagos came around the corner suddenly, it would take some familiarity with the world to know what I mean.

Way back in the day when Michelle and I first began this whole co-creative journey (meaning shortly after we met in high school) the plan was to create an illustrated webcomic with the various tales in the nascent world that ended up becoming the Euphony we know today. The visual media would have eliminated any confusion about who was what or why.

The first batch of stories included The Train Robbery, which ended up becoming Paper & Feathers; A Traveller or Two, which got reimagined into Counterbalance; Boundary of Fate, which still has the same name and basically the same premise; and a multi-book epic fantasy with the working name Heroes, which by way of the prelude “Year Before” stories ended up leading all the other stories into the pastoral, rural fantasy genre, and will eventually be reborn as the Wind in the Valley tales. Series within series, what to do?

Those plans haven’t been completely abandoned, but will likely not see completion for a while. Some artists are capable of handling a job, a family, a social life, and creative endeavors, all at the same time. We are not those artists. Our children are getting closer to independence every day, and we’re focusing our efforts on developing their faith and character. We won’t be one of those retired couples that struggles to find things to do, that’s for sure. But today is about P&F, isn’t it?

Spoilers ahead! If you haven’t read Paper & Feathers yet, and would like to, be warned that I’ll be discussing the major plot points and reveals. Then use that button below to undo your previous limitation!

The original version of P&F, rather unoriginally titled The Train Robbery, was very different than the story you can read today. Ahlden was much fussier and snotty, Jhaina was much more insensitive and self-centered, and Reya barely factored into the story at all. Oh, and everyone was human, animal people were still relegated to demi-human status as in Breath of Fire and other series. Ahlden still has an encounter on the train with a certain red-haired, pistol-toting ne'er-do-well, and in his mania he decides to abandon everything he has and try to live a life of crime, only to find her in the stocks instead of ushering him into the seedy underworld. It was a different vibe, that’s for sure!

If the description of the rogue sounds familiar, you’re correct that the Sunset Sniper survived the limbo of unused ideas and found a place in the universe of Frontier Flora. The Dragonfruit Express actually borrows a lot of elements from TR, most prominently the sassy robber Nicolina Suliette, renamed as Nicole Sullivan the Pityvern planter.¹ Her place in P&F was taken by Marlyse, a green-feathered Strigider, back when Strigider were more crane-like and not owlbears with wings. Her role was recast as Marlius, the deceptively devious and slightly daft thief that you know and love today.

The themes of despair at the futility of life turned into the cost of transformation and change. And we’re all better off for it! The old stories were pretty bleak and had some hard endings, but I was trying to be cool and edgy. That’s one of the reasons it took me so long to publish, because I needed to wait until God had turned me around in the right direction. My stories followed along just like they do.

So the moral of the story is never delete anything you write, you never know when you’ll be able to use it later. That’s enough for now! Tomorrow we’ll go from being serious to being very un-serious.

1  The term Sniper came from the old Class System that held sway in the pre-Euphony world. The eight (!) classes were Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Rogue, Summoner, Engineer, Psionicist, and Heretic. Snipers were dual-class Rogue/Engineers, because you couldn’t use a gun unless your membership card allowed it.