Mint Phalanx: People Still Waiting In Line To Vote, Please Stay. Polling Stations Cannot Turn You Away

Reanna: To eat the fruit of wild strawberries again.

When I was a kid, I saw some wild strawberries growing around Westgate. (That's a school I went to.) I picked the tiny fruits and ate them. They were sweet. I wish I could find that plant again one day.

Reanna: I wonder if Le Prince and Disney will be our first novel. So far, our stories have been shorter.

Carnival is a novella, and so was Nightingale. (I pulled that one from publication.) The Murder After is a chapbook, and The Year After seems to be going in a similar direction. (At least people read romance novellas.)

Now, for Le Prince and Disney, we have the dark ride's sections planned: Three Precursors and the First Film, Animals, Animation, Trick Films, and Phantom Rides. That's five chapters. And they have a few films in them. There will also be five chapters that Terrance categorized as being outside the ride. So, that's ten chapters in all.

After the story, we'll list the films used. That might take a few pages. What if all these pages come together and make a novel?

SL: I still don't like that The Year After is going to be longer than The Murder After. If the first book were fifty two pages, I'd be fine with it.

I know there's more to say this time, but I worry readers won't see it the same way. What if they don't like that the first story is a chapbook while the second is a novella?

Or maybe, a potential reader will find The Year After on Amazon and want to know what happened first. Maybe they won't care that the first book is short.

Maybe I should worry once we gain readership.

New Project

Reanna: We're preparing a new project to work on once SL finishes The Year After. It's about a girl in charge of describing short silent films to make a dark ride accessible to the blind. All films we plan to use are in the United States' Public Domain.

We don't have a name for this story yet, so we're calling it Whatever Terrance is Doing. (It was his idea. We came up with the working title when he started bookmarking videos of old films with no idea what to do with them.)

SL: I added Terrance's notes to The Murder After, and now, it's 52 pages. I also changed the price to $5.95 because it sounds better. This is the last change I'll make, I promise. Now, it's ready to buy! I'm happy with myself.

Reanna: If we ever develop a fanbase, I wonder if it would primarily be fans with physical copies of our books or fans with digital copies we put in shadow libraries.

I wish we had a way of knowing if someone read our books. Let's try asking. If you have a question about our books, send it in the ask box.

Carnival: Profile

Title: Carnival (links to Amazon) Edition: second Genre: gothic horror comedy Year self-published: 2022 (through B&N Press), 2024 (through KDP)

Copyright status: CC BY 4.0 (do whatever you want as long as you credit the original work.)

Blurb: A car explodes while leaving Lakeside Amusement Park. Rebecca is assumed dead. After James and Chaz argue over what happened, they and their friends go there to look for her. Instead of entering Lakeside, our heroes find themselves in Carnival, the park’s Faerie counterpart. It is a backdrop which makes finding Rebecca only one of their worries.

Format: novella Page count: 76 (seventy-six)

MPA Rating: R (Restricted) Reasons: profanity, violence, child death, drama, spirit possession, and horror

Price: $6.50 (paperback), $13.00 (hardcover)

Note: This is the one we portrayed ourselves in. It was like acting in a movie. Chaz, Brian, and Rebecca are the only tulpas in this story that still consider themselves part of the phalanx. The rest chose to live in a place we call The Background to relieve head pressure (a sense of pressure, not actual pressure.)

SL: The flowers we got our mum yesterday have roses, so F.M. and I plan to remake the cover of The Year After with one of them. We already took the picture.

The current cover has a white carnation with pink stripes. It represents love that wasn't shared. We only used it because we got the flower on our birthday.

But a red rose represents true love. The Year After is a romance after all. Plus, we used a rose for The Murder After (a yellow one representing friendship.) Here's a link to that cover.

I'm glad we can use roses for both books.

SL: Does anyone else have preemptive rants for works you haven't shared yet? I keep doing that for The Murder After, which is going to be published on 8 October. From the very beginning, I would get really mad over the idea of readers wondering why the ending isn't considered a good one.

Carnival: Preview

From chapter one. This is the Call to Adventure. If you like what you read, go to the book’s profile below.

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Lakewood, Colorado. In an apartment unit, a dim lamp lit the upper right corner of the front room. Brain, Caleb, Jackie, José, and James sat on a grey couch right of that lamp. On the carpet floor lay Chaz, too sad to notice his friends. They glanced at him, then at each other, unsure how to comfort him.

“Why?” Chaz whispered to himself, “why, why, why, why, why?” A moment later, he said, “no use crying now.” He sat up, wiped the tears off his face, stood, and noticed his friends. They stared at him.

“Why are you staring, and how long have you—”

James stood, “you killed her, didn’t you?” Chaz blinked, “what?”

“You heard me.” He smirked.

“Phoenix is dead,” José whispered. He stood, but Brian pulled at his t-shirt. So, he sat back down.

“What makes you think I killed her!?” Chaz said. James shrugged, “I don’t know. Maybe because you don’t trust anyone—”

“I trusted Rebecca- “Chaz pointed at him- “and you know it!”

“Yeah, right. So, you decided to—”

“No, I didn’t.” He clenched his fists. “They said there was a leak in her car’s gas tank! I was here when it happened, and I didn’t know until Brian told me!”

“You probably poked a hole in it,” James said.

“I didn’t touch Rebecca’s car when she left!”

He pointed at Chaz, “you did something to her car to make it explode—”

“No, I didn’t! Why the fuck are you accusing me in the first place!?”

“You—”

“I DID NOT! WHY WOULD I WANT TO KILL HER!? I LOVED HER!” The room fell silent.

Chaz felt shaky, so he lay on the floor again. He cried again. James sat on the couch and lowered his eyes.

"Happy now?" Jackie whispered to him.

Brian stood and walked towards Chaz.

“Don’t touch me.” He found a box of tissues and placed it next to his friend instead, respecting his vulnerability.

Ten awkward minutes later, Chaz took a deep breath, sat up, used a tissue, stood, and turned to face Brian.

He said, “you said the police won’t investigate because as far as anyone knows, the explosion was caused by a gas leak from a bad fuel tank.” Brian nodded (as if it weren’t said earlier.)

“But they didn’t see any body!” Jackie kicked José's leg.

“Let’s go to Lakeside and find Rebecca ourselves.”