It seems this piggery I'm working on has room for two writers. Yes, the newest member of staff to grace the lands of Dingley Dell Pork also likes to play with words, but in the form of small poetry.

He is the Bearded Bard, with an alias of 4offive, and a pleasant worker to have around. You can find him on Instagram, exclusively, I believe.

the_beardedbard

This is me, not the other writer who if I hadn't said so you might have believed looked the spitting image of me.

Here's the first paragraph of the newly rewritten novella.


​Morg watched from beneath the surface, unwilling to let her presence known. A human male walked the edge of the ocean, his form danced as she watched through the water. His short hair looked strange, and unattractive. Things clung to his body, covering his nakedness. How they did it, she had no idea, nor much cared. Why though, was another matter. They were a hindrance and had to be removed before the human could thrust its reproductive organ inside the mermaids who had been here before her, doing what now was asked of her. The thought of letting him put his thing in her made her want to vomit. It was wrong, just wrong. When she was ready for mating, it’d be with a young merman, not a land dweller. She watched his movements ripple with the current, watched his legs as he walked. She stared at them crossing one another. They were what this was all about. Leader Lyon had said they had to mate with humans, and this would allow their young ones to grow the legs they needed to leave the oceans and walk the land. It was their only hope of securing the future of all merfolk.

Throughout the past few months I've given out copies of The White Queen which has been met with varied comments coming back. One notion which has been existent in many of my reader's minds has been that the reading of it has met some confusion with all the made up words, or merfolk vernacular.

Initially when I published the novella in e-book format, I did wonder at how to make it easy for readers to flip to the glossary at the end, and had in mind to add many link jumps to the words' meaning throughout the text. But this was tedious work, and I thought it would upset the reading pleasure, so instead I tried to make it very clear what each word meant where they appeared, by means of description. I thought I'd done enough, evidently I hadn't. Therefore, I've rewritten The White Queen and The Mur of Aquithus without using the mefolk language.

I did this predominantly for the e-book editions, but have decided to change both e-book and paperback formats, and will be relaunching both early in January 2016.

Below is a link to the first look at the rewritten edition of The White Queen on Wattpad.