Author Archive: verdantanglepress

Out of the Darkness

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Months pass on the black side of the moon. It’s time to step back into the light.

It’s still no less true that SHELL is but the beginning (of something–but rather the middle or even a caboose of other things). We’ll venture next into a djinn’s lamp for a mostly lighthearted (though rather weighty and grim at times) journey to the Wizard Dremen’s tower–a bare spine wedged in the mountains at the eastern edge of the Lamp Land. This tale, like many before it and after it and alongside it, is one spun by curiosity–that of a young girl–and an equally curious mind with a pen. This reality will come out of the shadows sometime next year.

After that… it may be time to change the window into which we glimpse. For Fantasy and the Great Escape is great and all, loved and desired and needed by many, but the fact of the matter is that the World has forever changed: windows are closing. Doors are being bolted shut. Nefarious “keys” are becoming ever more required – expected – assumed. But the “keys” aren’t cheap. They’re the price of flesh. Of soul. So we might have to talk about that in a roundabout way in the City of Antwood. Or elsewhere, perhaps somewhere more accessible, like the pending Last of the Analogs blog-space.

This is a late night ramble, but one that needed to happen. For sanity. For a spark of light. To betray movement and let it be known that there are rumblings in the underground. To let it be known that the belly hungers and hibernation is coming to an end.

Autumn is the best season. As some things disintegrate and go to sleep, other things awaken. Things like the starving mind. Bless.

Shell: Now Available

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The task was to establish a foundation. To create something truly unique. Niche. Experimental. Well.

Deep, deep in the cosmos, in the core of some inconspicuous, hollowed-out asteroid, sleeps the Subject. Comatose. Seemingly inaccessible. And yet within her mind dwells a great fabrication, architecture stitched together from bits and pieces of her past into a (more or less) hospitable environment: the City. It is inside this City the mystery unfolds.

The laws of physics are failing. There’s a death. There are bad actors :.smile.:. There are those pulled in from afar tasked with making sense of things. There’s an insidious godlike substance driving everything along.

Uncover the godlike substance that makes up our universe. Accompany the inquisitors trying to put things right. Search for a semblance of Home・Place・Normalcy. And experience the dissolution of the City.

Enter the City. Enter Shell.

Get Shell HERE!

Upcoming Release: SHELL

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Shell, the debut novel by writer I. B. Hippe, is set to release on Amazon on August 8th, 2021!

It’s been a long and arduous journey getting to this point. So many rewrites, so many decisions, so many processes to learn and skills to hone, but we’ve finally reached the point where the final product is ready to launch!

8 / 8 / 21

It’s coming.

On the Horizon

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Prototype soon to be in hand, we are on the final stages leading up to the release of Shell — August 8, 2021. That’s 8 / 8 / 21. Significant? Significant in the way that 8s are upright infinities and shell has a tendency toward such a form.

Shell will be available exclusively in PRINT for the foreseeable future. The reasoning behind this is partly due to the time required to learn and implement the E-book formatting process, but mostly due to a deeply-rooted belief in the importance of physical media.

Once Shell goes live, our focus will turn toward our second novel set–ideally–to release in Q4 of 2021, Lamp Land. More on that later.

Hammer and Anvil

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Revisions and revisions. We rewrite and we refine and we hammer the manuscript into shape. We’re getting close to a polished product–our first! A statement. As some might say, a stick in the mud. Let the mud swell :.the floodwaters rise.: and the current take us where it may. The road is long and wearisome but at the end (the end? What end?) rewarding.

:.SHELL swells.:

Year 2021

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It’s rather funny how we humans view time cyclically–each revolution our Homeworld makes around the sun marks a new year and when we reach the same point we entered it at, we ourselves gain a digit. The numbers tick up, providing both reference and weight. Things (happenings, mistakes) tend to repeat themselves, and that too lends a cyclic quality.

But time isn’t really like that, is it? Its true form is likely something we cannot conceive with our dimensionally restricted minds. As a thought experiment, however, I sometimes like to try and imagine time as an incline we’re all marching up; somewhere along the incline is a sudden cliff. Where’s yours?

Welcome to 2021, a year of great, great things! SHELL will be coming out of its :.burrow.: and into the light of day. Will it stand? We’d like to hope so. We’re optimistic. But only time will tell.

On SHELL (1)

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Revisions and revisions. The process that began back on–excuse me while I consult the original, handwritten manuscript–August 9, 2016 is slowly coming to fruition. Each pass through the text, stitching, eliminating, altering, infusing, reveals a more polished exterior; the sculptor, once chipping away at a rough hunk of marble, now passes finer and finer grit sandpaper over its surface. The resulting work is much smoother to the touch, though not without its odd burrs and subcutaneous imperfections. Those may never go away completely.

Because nothing is perfect.

There will be a time when the sculptor will lay down his sandpaper and step away from the finished product and remark “Well that isn’t quite right, but it’ll have to do.”

It’s all an experiment of a grandiose degree–one which we are rather proud of (though humble).

And it’s coming.

Interconnectedness

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Though our works span several literary genres (some even pretty darn close to good ol’ plain, present day, present time literature), they are all connected–through characters referenced or appearing in the flesh, concepts, events :.Actions have waves.:, but above all by the substance that flows through the veins of existence itself: shell.

This is why Shell will be our first published work. Its concept is integral in all our works (a lazy literary device we think not!), a means by which all things past, present, and future are linked. In the words of the Sister: Everything stems from shell, returns to shell.

Still Beating

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After months I’m here to provide a long overdue update. What on earth is it that we’ve been doing? To put it simply: writing. We’ve been writing.

The final build process for SHELL (coming Summer 2021!) will commence this December. Until then we’ve been penning away at the draft of our fourth book, The Smith (release date TBA), and lemme tell ya that one’s a whopper. The Smith is a book about things lost and things found and other things just showing up unannounced. But why talk about The Smith when SHELL yet slumbers? We’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

SHELL is a tale of homogeneity and what happens when an alien substance is introduced into a comatose body. The body is a city, you see, a finite vessel being filled with something infinite. This grave imbalance poses many problems, as you can imagine.

More on SHELL next time, when I promise to be much more timely and a lot less cryptic.

Until then… Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel… what does it mean to you?