Sounds and Legends of the Vaporous Realms

Pronunciation, geography, and a new option for lighter weekly snippets

A Holiday Note from the Author

Christmas is on the overmorrow and the days are inching longer again, Wright be praised. Here’s a Substack essay by Michael John Petty I keep rereading to remind myself to appreciate the season and all the gifts I’ve been given. Without intentional remembrance of the blessings, the things we lack in this vaporous realm of ours have a way of demanding we fixate on them instead.

Otherwise, I won’t claim to have read much this past week. But I did make two remarkable discoveries: (1) There is an entire subgenre of middling-budget feel-good movies devoted to Christmas in Louisiana, more than one of which feature, curiously, Virginia-born New Yorker Hilarie Burton. (2) Even better, there exist hours upon hours of YouTube videos in which the creator strolls around various German and German-adjacent Christmas markets. The food, the snow, the shops, the lights and greenery, the cathedrals—best background content ever for working in December.

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The Legends of the Vaporous Realms Are Coming!

I’m still working at Delfii’s Snippet 6.2, which I’ll post the last week of the month. Also between Christmas and New Year’s, I’ll share my other work-in-progress: the first, chapter-length snippet of The Legend of Len the Wanderer. [Update: I’ve since settled on Legends of the Vaporous Realms as the title for the younger- / wider-audience book series, while the serialized versions of those stories will take over the Songs of the Vaporous Realms name.]

The Legends of the Vaporous Realms series will be serialized here on Substack every week, like the Songs Chronicles of the Vaporous Realms. The difference is, the Legends snippets are lighter reads, suitable for older children and tweens as well as for teens and adults. Same world and characters as the upper-YA+ Songs, but more briskly paced, less dark, and much less detailed in its violence. The Legends will cover stories much faster than the Songs Chronicles.

Why branch out, instead of just writing the Songs snippets faster? 1) Because I can’t be rushed, writing the way I write for older audiences. 2) Because the Songs Chronicles [update: like the Songs snippets to this point] are overall darker in theme than I initially intended—which I don’t regret, but I can only sink myself into that so much per week. Mayhap it’s having little hobbitses about, but I need some lighter fare in my creative life.

The rest of this post offers some supplementary content adapted from the Into the Vaporous Realms e-booklet.

Merry Christmas, folks! Happy reading.