Hi,
Welcome to the Hardihood Books March Roundup. I hope your spring is off to a good start.
In Case You Missed It:
We had our third guest post this month, Chance Rains’ “The Fallen King,” a fantasy tale of a monarch’s fall from grace. I won’t spoil anything for those of you who haven’t read it, but the ending leaves open a number of possibilities for what might come next. Please check it out.
As a reminder, if you would like to submit a story or essay, please read this. Earlier this month, you may have noticed I put out some further guidelines on formatting submissions. These will clarify what I’m looking for and will make my life easier (as well as streamlining the submissions process).
I published an essay for paid subscribers titled, “What Some Modern Takes on Measure for Measure Miss.” If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can still read part of it. It will make more sense if you have actually read the play in question, or seen it in theatre.
Next, I put out the latest chapters in “If You Can Keep It.” We’re closing in on the climax of the story, but it will still be a few months before we reach the ending. If you haven’t read the early chapters, please go back and do so. As a reminder, there are links to each of the earlier chapters at the beginning of every installment of every novella I write.
After that, I published, “Remembering,” the sequel to last month’s “Some Peanut Butter to Last a Couple of Days.” I took a fragment of an unfinished story I wrote last June and slotted it in with the story from last month, and then built from there to a conclusion. I’ll admit, the story got weird by the end (even for me), but I enjoyed writing it. I’ve never written a story that took me in such strange directions before (I think), and I liked having to stretch myself. It ended up being less funny than I’d expected, and perhaps even a bit creepy or at least unsettling. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you should probably at least check out the preview, which I think is worth a read by itself. If you’ve ever experienced the feeling I describe, you’ll know.
I also published another couple of chapters in “Civilization in the Wilderness.” Our heroes are still only partway through their journey, but I’m debating speeding them up. I might like to finish the story before the end of the year, so that I can begin a couple of other serialized novels. If any of you have thoughts on this, please let me know.
I wrote a very short free story, “Springtime,” which I consider a snapshot of a story. All we really have is an image, an image of a city and a king and a celebration. The city isn’t named, nor is the king, nor is their civilization, but the reader is made to understand it is a fantasy story, about a civilization at about the level of technological development of our medieval period. I had in my head Tolkien’s Gondolin and King Turgon, although in some ways the city sounds more like Rome, because I’m currently reading Livy’s History of Rome and some of the speeches given by various consuls and senators and tribunes during the early Republic have been on my mind. Still, the city would fit better in Middle Earth than in Italy.
My second essay, which is free to everyone to read, is a comparison of two epic fantasy series: A Game of Thrones and The Wheel of Time. You do not need to have read either series to appreciate the essay. In fact, I wrote it for people who hadn’t. There may be some mild spoilers, but if you aren’t a fan of unwieldy fantasy epics, you aren’t going to read either series anyway, so you don’t need to worry about spoilers. I use the comparison to draw out some themes to which I will return in future work, and which inform the writing that I do here at Hardihood Books. For the uninitiated, both series are famously long and tortuous. I enjoy these sorts of stories, but most people don’t like following hundreds (or thousands) of characters across millions of words. Still, even if you don’t like the genre, I think my essay will be of interest if you like books.
From the Archive:
I liked “Everyone Can Do Math,” from 2022. It’s written for people who aren’t naturally good at math, and it’s a bit of a nice break from my usual essays. I would be very interested in feedback from people who consider themselves bad at math. While I don’t focus on it heavily in the essay, I think the shift away from memorizing the times tables actually made math more difficult for a lot of people. Memorization is relatively easy at a young age, and as boring as it is, it makes everything else much less work later on, in the same way that someone who works to develop their muscles will not have to struggle as hard to move heavy objects. Still, even adults who never liked math can be better than they think they can be.
“In the Lunchroom” is extremely short and funny.
In Closing:
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Cheers,
Ben Connelly