Less than a week left to nominate The Fern and The Cross on KindleScout! 🙂 Still have no insights in the campaign, so I have no idea of how it’s going. Anyhow, if you have an Amazon account anywhere in the world, please log in and nominate, thank you! 🙂

Since not much is going on except writing writing writing (and some translating inbetween) while this summer it will be much more crowded, I thought I’d give you a preview of what’s to come. The next Heroine of Silvery Earth is a writer and a scholar, so I “recycled” one of my very oldest stories in the appendix.

Just for fun, I shall translate here the very first official story of yours truly, written sometimes in 1975 (I think, there is no date on that booklet), while I was living in Switzerland. I’m saying this because you might not be aware that the Swiss are very proud of their train service, and that’s what inspired this very short illustrated story.

The Lucky Train (and other stories)

Once upon a time there was an antique train who was very bored. He was very unlucky because he couldn’t go out and wander on the rails!

One day they destroyed him to make a new one. Finally he went out and had a lot of fun taking all those people inside him. Now he had become lucky and wasn’t bored anymore, quite the contrary, he was having so much fun that he almost cried for joy.

One morning he left as usual, but a man wanted to blow him up; he had put some dynamite inside a freight wagon that he threw against the train. The train saw it and changed rails. For once he was saved thanks to his luck! From that day he lived like all our beautiful modern trains.

The End.

There you have it. A ten-year-old first story. There are a couple more in that booklet, all two-pages long with an illustration on the blank page across, then I moved to notebooks.

The newsletter subscribers will receive a short story (written for the Anthology Workshop last year, but I used the cards of Old Silvery Earth that I drew about that timevas inspiration) with the cover made by more drawings from that period to show what Old Silvery Earth actually looked like before I added in Samantha and her sisters! 😉

So the story is recent, the cover illustrations are not, but if you’re curious about the Old Silvery Earth – which, like Samantha says, “It might have been created by a child with a wild imagination and an overdramatic story sense” (Ciaran&Harith) – and you’re not on my newsletter, you can subscribe here.

Have a great weekend! 🙂