First Story Now Available

I've just released my first story as an ebook for Amazon Kindle, titled "Jashur and the Splendor Duel," a tale about a man who must defeat his mentor in a high-stakes game of wits.

This is a story I had been thinking and writing about for roughly a year before its completion. I originally intended it to be my first professionally published piece in a magazine or anthology, but ultimately opted for an ebook release because of ongoing shifts in the publishing industry which now seem to favor digital distribution over dead-tree distribution, both from a reader's and writer's perspective.

This is the first of many, as I am always working on several novels and many short-story ideas at once. And though I intended this to be a stand-alone piece, it is the result of my effort to develop premises which can be continued easily. Thus, I'm planning a sequel to this story and may develop it into a short story collection.

Cool Little Portmanteau Generator

As wordsmiths, writers are often more pleased than most at the "magic tricks" of the written language, the special effects of texts.

Portmanteaus are conflations of two words, usually blended based similar on sounds, spellings, or letters in the two words.

You'll recognize these portmanteaus:
brunch = breakfast + lunch
Verizon = veritas + horizon
skorts = skirt + shorts

So I found a cool little website called Wordmerge.com that generates portmanteau's on the fly. Enter any word and it pops out a nice list based on that word.

Take the word 'tsunami'. Drop it in, and let's see if anything apt pops out: how about sweetsunami, vagrantsunami, jujitsunami. This works because a lot of English words end in 't'.

If we look at the other side of the equation, words that begin with 'tsunami' and append words on the end, we don't find as many interesting options. Here's one: 'tsunamead', which I suppose could be applied to some sort of English beer festival.

Now, I'm going to go look for a kenning generator.