Hello and welcome to the first ever edition of Enchanted Side Quests!

It's been a weird month for me, summer's over and school's back in, this year with my youngest starting kindergarten. I had such plans! I was going to have four or five novels written by the time this newsletter went out, but I failed to account for the SILENCE. To be honest, I thought the silence would be the best part, but here I am, sitting at my desk writing to you with Paw Patrol of all things playing in the other room so I can concentrate.

Among this month's side quests were my discovery of purple mushrooms. Not to eat, just to admire, I'm fairly certain they're poisonous. I'm not sure how I made it this far in my life without coming across these beauties before, but ecosystems do like to keep their secrets.  

The smaller of the two purple mushies is Laccaria amethystina and the bigger one is a Cortinarius violaceus, with many thanks to the Societe MycoNB Society for identifying these gems and helping me learn about them.

The major side quest of the month is MidJourney AI. I've tried most of the AI generators by now, but MidJourney's the one that makes me gasp when the images appear. One of the things I've been using it for is character generation. Especially as a fantasy writer where my characters aren't always human, it's wonderful to be able to mock up a physical representation to work from.

When I can study a picture of one of these nonhuman characters, I get to see weird details that I can use to deepen the character. Small things, like a notch in a pointed ear that suggests a fight in their past, or a strange glint in their eye that tells me a story I wouldn't have known otherwise. It's a delightful new tool and I am loving it.

In keeping with that, I starting mocking up some faerie selfies that go along with my current work-in-progress (the first book in a cozy fantasy trilogy!) around the same time MidJourney introduced their beta upscale and remaster options. That's when things got fascinating, because it turns out that using those buttons actually appears to build a faerie glamour (magic that faeries use to disguise their true forms from us so that they appear human) on top of my faerie. For what it's worth, I am using magical thinking here, I do realize the machine is just trying to make something weird look more human, but magical thinking is critical to my career and a little wonder is good for the soul.

Here, check it out, the first pic looking rather Fae and painterly, then the second, the beta upscale, sort of smoothing out, and finally the remaster where our faerie is just another sultry human gal taking a selfie. She loses her beautiful strangeness, most of her clothing, and becomes kind of... normal. Well, an idealized version of normal, anyway.

I am delighted by this! Something about this glamouring fascinates me to no end, so much so that it's sparked a whole book idea in my brain that I've been plotting.

And while the above photo progression seems to be the norm, every so often the glamouring doesn't work the way it's taught me to expect, and instead delivers the gift of a delightful creature like this:

Needless to say, I'm excited to see where these concepts lead me and what stories will form as I explore them deeper.

In the writing realm, I was asked to write a foreword for Andrew Marc Rowe's third installment in his Bawdy Bard series, entitled the Quest for Vagalon: Penetrating the Schlongomance. Rowe writes hilarious, bawdy fiction, and this time the Bawdy Bard is chasing fairy tail. This is most definitely adult fiction, probably tasteless, unexpectedly philosophical, and heck it's fun to read. The book came out last week and is available most places, including here. 

I'm hoping to reveal an imaginary writing desk, like the one below, for every issue of Enchanted Side Quests. Part of this is taking inspiration from author Joanne Harris' writing shed tweets (click here if this is new to you, I don't want you missing out) and the other part is just because I love looking at different writing spaces and imagining the stories that might be written there.

September's imaginary writing desk, generated by me with Midjourney AI

This one looks like it might belong to a scatterbrained epic fantasy writer who wears thick spectacles and is always losing his notes in the mess, but on the rare occasions when he takes the time to tidy his desk, he can't find anything for weeks and oh! The stories that might be lost in that week. Better to live with the mess.

That's it for this month, Enchanted Ones, I hope you've enjoyed my first ever newsletter and I'm looking forward to writing you again next month. Mind you, if you don't think this newsletter is for you, feel free to use the unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email. Likewise, please do share this newsletter if you have a friend who might enjoy it, and if you want to write back, just respond like you would to an email, I'd love to hear from you! I have a story coming out in Abyss & Apex on October 1st, so be sure to follow me on social media if you don't want to wait until the 21st to get that link.