Chronicles of Ytria Update

Tuesday, January 26, 2021 at 4:20pm

I find myself today with enough free time to get some small bit of writing in, but not enough time to make any meaningful progress against my new novel project, The Ghost King. This occurrence has happily coincided with my having just yesterday finalized the story line up for my upcoming collection Chronicles of Ytria, currently out to beta readers and which I plan to publish later this year.

Planet Ytria, Glissia Region, for *Chronicles of Ytria*; artwork by Robert Altbauer

The map above, beautifully rendered by Robert Altbauer, will appear at the beginning of the book, and shows a region of Planet Ytria called Glissia. Ytria debuted in my 2016 collection Transmutations of Fire and Void (available now as Transmutations) in a short story called “We Were Here First.”

Early in 2020, I began writing successor stories set on Ytria. The planet’s human population is operating at a medieval social and technological level. Crossbows and siege weaponry are new inventions. Social organization is hierarchical with kings and nobility ruling over peasants.

Unbeknownst to any of those groups, Planet Ytria lies within a region of space administrated by the Galactic Consortium. The Consortium, being a more or less functional governing body, has strict rules preventing its citizens from interfering with non-space faring civilizations. The issue in Ytria’s case is that the bureaucrat who entered the planet into the Consortium’s database mistakenly marked it as ‘unprotected.’ As a result, all manner of individuals have started showing up on the planet, some malicious, others merely careless.

Chronicles of Ytria begins with a reprint of “We Were Here First,” followed by eight brand new stories. See the full table of contents, in order, below. Sometime soon, I will write a detailed post about the genesis of each story and the themes running through the collection.