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I've got a new novelette up at The Barnes & Noble Sci-fi and Fantasy Blog! It's called If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again.
A hapless imugi is determined to attain the form of a full-fledged dragon and gain entry to the gates of heaven. For a long time, things don’t go well. Then, it meets a girl.
The story's about the imugi or Korean proto-dragon, the failboat of the mythological world and my newest favourite unreal creature. And it's about chasing your dreams and failure and what happens when life doesn't turn out the way you want it to.
As a writer I often feel like a failure (this feeling does not always correlate with anything that happens externally, but that said it's been three years since I've published any new writing so I've had plenty of external basis for the feeling). It was terrifically therapeutic writing this, and it fairly quickly took on a life of its own, independent of my neuroticism!
I'm grateful to Joel Cunningham for acquiring the story, Shirley Jackson for the fab cover illustration, and Miri Kim, Hana Lee, Perrin Lu, Kara Lee and Rachel Monte for introducing me to imugi, brainstorming names and Instagram hashtags, and beta reading the result.
Here's a bit from the beginning:
It was time. Byam was as ready as it would ever be.
As a matter of fact, it had been ready to ascend some 300 years ago. But the laws of heaven cannot be defied. If you drop a stone, it will fall to the ground—it will not fly up to the sky. If you try to become a dragon before your thousandth birthday, you will fall flat on your face, and all the other spirits of the five elements will laugh at you.
These are the laws of heaven.
You can read the rest, or download a free ebook for Nook, here: "If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again", by Zen Cho
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