Thursday, September 18, 2025

This is the eighty-eighth 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 eighth installment, check out yesterday’s if you missed it.

Last year was when Frontier Flora really started to get rolling, and it’s definitely gathered a lot of moss during these past months. The second published story was an entry into the Inkwells & Anvils anthology titled There’ll Be Scary Ghost Stories, and the whole thing was pretty much based on the pun in the title: A Christmas Corral. 

Since everything mythological or cryptozoological in the world of Frontier Flora is real, it stood that ghosts would be real too, so why not show how they factored into things? Especially at Christmas, one of the spookiest times of the year. Isn’t it?

In the story, the three amigos Ace, Boone, and Ed try to play a trick on a miserly old ranch-hand and end up having a trick played on them instead. The book A Christmas Carol, In Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, exists in the alt-history of the world, because why wouldn’t it? I imagine that Scrooge would have a small, unobtrusive Florabeast like a Pamplemouse, since he can’t abide anything being inefficient, even though Florabeasts don’t take up any more resources than a houseplant. The book was published in 1843 IRL, so it would definitely have had time to make it across the ocean to the New World.

The original version of my tale was quite a bit different, though. One of the characters was a sort of apothecary, and decided to use some of the pollen in the tail of his Lilytiger to essentially make Sal hallucinate the ghosts of the family that he lost in the war against Britannia all those years ago, thereby scaring him straight. That ended up being way too depressing for the more positive, singing-cowboy style that I wanted to focus on in the series. So many Western properties are dark and gritty, and I definitely wanted to make Frontier Flora brighter and fluffier.

So, the boys were cast as an homage to America’s Favorite Cowboys, and a real, much gentler ghost was brought in to do the spookery. And the rest is (alternate) history!

You can still get a copy of the anthology that the story appears in, or you can read and/or listen to it on WorldAnvil. If you’ve taken a tour around the Christmas Corral, what did you think? Reply or comment to let me know. Tomorrow we’ll be staying on the Frontier, because… it’s just how we do it around here.