New story launch at Adventurotica!
The Red Winter Queen, Chapter 1
We're starting something new! It's not typical for us, it's dark and weird and lyrical and literary, but I think that it's probably the best thing Sargon has ever written. I'm gonna let Sargon speak for himself, here, because I think he does a better job of it than I could:
So today we begin posting the new work, entitled The Red Winter Queen, my dark, dark retelling of a kind-of sort-of Snow White. Seems like everyone from Hollywood hacks to Cat Valente is working this one lately, and I don't know how I feel about that. I've never been much for trendy.
This has been a terrible time, this last week. It seems somehow appropriate that this story begins in a time of sadness, weakening, and pain. I had been feeling the pinch of the work we normally do here. I love our stories so much, yet the more bare-bones style we use for them had me feeling constrained. I wanted to push myself, work at the limits of my abilities for a change, and really go for it stylistically. Thus this story is darker, heavier, and far more florid in style than our usual works. I don't know if people will like it.
It was hard, even at the length it is. I resolved early on to illustrate it chapter by chapter, and to do it my way: paper and pen, only minor touch-ups in PS afterward, mostly to hide the pen-strokes. What you see is 95% what I did. Working on a chapter and an illustration every two days was exhausting, I won't lie.
Eleven chapters, no compromises. I was well into working on it when the whole Smashwords/PayFoe thing hit, and I found it suddenly amusing that here is a work that is not only, I think, the best thing I have written in years, but that also crosses every line drawn in that battle. Here we have incest, cannibalism, bestiality, rape, and even necrophilia all wrapped up in the best prose I can produce. To paraphrase de Sade, here you will find no act uncolored by some infamy.
And yet I did not set out to write something "transgressive", or try to make it horrific or gross or discomfiting. Here is myth, or rather Myth. Here is the primal story of the Dying God and the Eternal Goddess - devouring and immortal. Here is my tale of the passing of one legend and the birth of another. Here. Taste it.
Thus saith Sargon. He cut deep to get this one, and the results are extraordinary. I hope you'll give it a try.
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