Guest Post by A.E. Decker

Here we are: midway through the Moonfall Mayhem series.

Actually, readers, you’re midway. A writer’s perspective is somewhat skewed. It’s odd for me to be writing about book three, Into the Moonless Night, when I’ve recently sent a draft of book four to my invaluable editor, Laura Harvey, and am already looking forward to working on book five. Even though it was less than a year ago that I finished the “good” draft of Moonless—the draft that became the book you’re hopefully looking forward to reading—it seems an event far in the past to me.

So, casting my mind back...

Into the Moonless Night was a devil to write. I remember that vividly. It’s the midpoint of the series, and possibly the most serious of the lot. It deals with issues such as social injustice, fate, and PTSD. While the humor that pervades The Falling of the Moon and The Meddlers of Moonshine remains present, Into the Moonless Night asks weightier questions.

Part of the reason Moonless became a darker book stems, unquestionably, from the fact that the world has seemingly become a darker place recently. I don’t believe it’s correct to say racism is on the rise. It’s even possible that the reverse is true, that what we are witnessing is racism’s death rattle. I certainly hope that that is true.

But. But. There is no denying that recent political events have made the racists feel empowered. This includes the sexists, and the homophobes and transphobes, and basically everyone who wants the power to persecute those who were not born into the racial and sexual elite. Even if racism (and misogyny and transphobia, etc.) is dying out, it is not dying easily, and I fear many innocents are yet to be injured by its dying spasms.

All these ideas were in my head while I was writing Into the Moonless Night. The action of the book takes place in the Clawcrags, home of the shifters. Shifter society is highly stratified. The animal you transform into determines the role you’re allowed to play in society. Lion-shifters and other large cats get to act as leaders, while dog-shifters must be guards and vulture-shifters tend the dread. Unusual shifters, such as Tasmanian devils, have no place at all, and are subsequently outcast.

It’s a ridiculous system. Catch Starthorne, rogue, Smilodon-shifter, and protagonist of Into the Moonless Night, certainly thinks so. It’s part of the reason why he escaped from the Clawcrags. One of the beauties of writing fantasy is that you can set up a system whose flaws are so readily apparent. Many readers, myself included, want entertainment, not a lecture, when we read. It’s only after we put down the book that we start realizing the parallels between our escapist entertainment and events happening in the world around us.

And, for me, privileging a person who turns into a lion over one who turns into a weasel is no more ridiculous than giving preference to a person with lighter skin, or a man over a woman. If there’s anything I wish readers to take away from Into the Moonless Night, it’s the idea that people should be judged on their actions: who they’re trying to be, rather than what society says they must be.

It’s a lot to pack into a book, especially when I also had to keep it humorous and make sure my whole merry gang of Ascot, Dmitri, Rags-n-Bones, and Moony all had their part in the story, as well as Catch. I hope I succeeded, and I’m proud of myself for trying.

Into the Moonless Night was a devil to write. I love it all the more for that fact. It may be my best book yet. I hope you enjoy it.

I hope it makes you think.

A. E. Decker hails from Pennsylvania. A former doll-maker and ESL tutor, she earned a master’s degree in history, where she developed a love of turning old stories upside-down to see what fell out of them. This led in turn to the writing of her fantasy novel, The Falling of the Moon. A graduate of Odyssey 2011, her short fiction has appeared in such venues as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside Magazine, and elsewhere. Like all writers, she is owned by three cats. Come visit her, her cats, and her fur Daleks at wordsmeetworld.com.

The third volume of A.E. Decker's Moonfall Mayhem series has arrived! While The Falling of the Moon turned fairy tale tropes upside down, and The Meddlers of Moonshine played around in the worlds of Gothic and steampunk, Into the Moonless Night takes on the idea of The Chosen One.

Catch Starthorne has spent a lifetime running from the prophecy that names him as the one who will save the shifter race, but now that he has returned to his home in Clawcrags, he may have to face his destiny. Determined to slip through fate’s fingers, Catch sows confusion, making friends from foes, mixing up the occasional sleeping death potion, and matching wits with an overbearing lion-shifter, who appears to have plans of his own.
 
While Catch schemes, Ascot works to retrieve him with the help of a witch and a pair of madcap shifter rebels. But every attempt to reach him earns her fresh enemies and embroils her ever deeper in the conspiracies surrounding the prophecy. After five hundred years of repressed tension and social strife, the Clawcrags are ready to explode—and it sometimes seems someone’s working hard to see that they do!

Ha, see what we did there? Anyway, The Falling of the Moon is on sale for only 99¢ in ebook this week! You can also check out an audio excerpt of The Meddlers of Moonshine recorded by Tales of Sage and Savant to get a taste of A.E. Decker's fun writing.

A. E. Decker hails from Pennsylvania. A former doll-maker and ESL tutor, she earned a master’s degree in history, where she developed a love of turning old stories upside-down to see what fell out of them. This led in turn to the writing of her fantasy novel, The Falling of the Moon. A graduate of Odyssey 2011, her short fiction has appeared in such venues as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside Magazine, and elsewhere. Like all writers, she is owned by three cats. Come visit her, her cats, and her fur Daleks at wordsmeetworld.com.

We're excited to show off the cover for our next anthology, which features seventeen optimistic science fiction stories from authors around the world. GLASS AND GARDENS: SOLARPUNK SUMMERS will be available on June 5, 2018, and you can pre-order your copy now!

See the full Table of Contents and learn about the authors here:
[Table of Contents Reveal]: Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers

Sarena Ulibarri is Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press, and she is also a fiction writer who has been published in Lightspeed, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Weirdbook, and elsewhere. Her solarpunk story "Riding in Place" appeared in the anthology Biketopia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories in Extreme Futures. She lives in a solar-powered adobe house in New Mexico, and can be found online at SarenaUlibarri.com and @SarenaUlibarri.

World Weaver Press is celebrating six years of publishing fun fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal books! In those six years, we've published 55 books, including novels, novellas, single-author story collections, and multi-author anthologies. And you know what? We plan to be around for another six years, at least. Every time you buy one of our books, request it at a library, leave a review for any of our books, or recommend it to someone on social media, you help us toward that goal. Thank you!

To celebrate our sixth anniversary, we've re-released our very first title in paperback for the first time! Previously only available in ebook, Susan Abel Sullivan's story collection Cursed: Wickedly Fun Stories now has a print version. And boy, do we have a deal for you!

Order any paperback directly from the World Weaver Press website between now and April 15, 2018, and you'll get a paperback copy of Cursed for FREE! No coupons, no add-ons, just order whatever you like, and we'll slip your free copy of Cursed into the package along with it.

Just want a copy of Cursed: Wickedly Fun Stories by itself? Order it from us for $8.95, or from Amazon. Or check out the ebook for only 99¢ from us, Amazon, B&N, iTunes, or Kobo.

Wickedly fun short stories featuring witches, werewolves, limericks that can change fate, and a sinister vine bent on murder and the destruction of Alabama! Inside quirky settings with creepy plots, characters discover new and unsettling powers as their worst fears manifest.

Let these stories draw you in with their lighthearted tone — then delight you with their wickedly sly sense of humor. You’ll laugh, you’ll shudder, you’ll think twice about taking a deal from a bucktoothed woman.

Cursed: Wickedly Fun Stories features pieces previously published in such magazines as Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Beyond Centauri, and AlienSkin, as well as a never before published short.

Susan Abel Sullivan lives in the swamps and marshes of coastal Georgia with her hubby and a veritable menagerie of beasts both fantastical and mundane such as rabbits, snakes, chickens, cats, mice, parakeets, and a dog named Luna. When not writing, she works as a fitness professional teaching a variety of classes and workshops including sword-based fitness. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop for speculative fiction. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous online and print publications, including Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, ASIM Best of Horror: Vol II, Beyond Centauri, New Myths, AlienSkin, and Writers’ Journal. She is the author of Cursed: Wickedly Fun Stories and Fried Zombie Dee-light! Ghoulish, Ghostly Tales and the Cleo Tidwell Paranormal Mystery Series. Visit her website at susanabelsullivan.weebly.com or twitter @susan_abel.