Story authors

It's October, and I thought we'd do something Halloween-themed, so I'm bumping my own stuff and sharing the first 👻13 chapters👻 of "What A Long Sleep You've Had" for free for the month. This is the first act of the book, and it wraps up on Halloween night.

fantasyfeeder.com/stories/view



Since I wrote a pretentious blurb, I might as well use it:

————/THE BLURB/————

Can dreams rebuild a broken childhood? What if it was one dream, one very specific dream that carried you like the tide out to sea, where there is peace in forgetting?

Claire frantically writes in her beaten-up journal, every morning after she wakes. Some entries are just fantasies or thoughts, quickly discarded. But others are dreams. Real dreams. Dreams that give her a glimpse of sacrifice, and secret, and grief. Was Claire forgetting something?

When Claire’s bright and artistic younger sister Lis moves into the spare bedroom, Claire’s life begins to change, and she starts burning through pages in her dream journal. As kids, Claire shielded Lis against the traumas of growing up with a nightmare of a mother and an absent father. The two share a secret bond, and it’s more than just sisterly love or sibling rivalry. They share scars that only the two understand. Maybe their coping mechanisms – drinking, getting high, decadent eating (so much eating) – hurt in the morning and stuck to their waistlines, but, maybe somewhere under the surface, Claire really liked that part, too. Lying in bed, her hands wandering over her new curves, her mind going over every excruciating detail of Lis’ equally delicious new softness – stop that, she can’t let herself feel that way.

From the end of Summer’s gold to the first green of Spring, “What A Long Sleep You’ve Had” (taken from one of the phrases Alice’s sister speaks to her in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) tracks Claire and Lis’ stumbles and new beginnings: a love that almost tears them apart, a love they know they can’t share, songs of sorrow, and dreams of peace. With a debt to Lewis Carroll, it blends a coming of age story with the fantastic, and ponders what happens when the dreamer wakes up.

————/END BLURB/————


CW: feedist behavior (gasp), siblings feeling romantic-like around each other and not knowing what to do about that except eat pie and ice cream, drinking and drug use, bad parents.

If you like it, the rest of it is on here, too! (If you don’t love these chapters, the rest of the book is a lot different, I think.)

I'd love to hear what people think, enjoy.

One of the things I get a kick out of every time I reread LS is how intensely sensory everything is, from the food to the weather to the experience of their changing bodies. It’s a read where the magic kind of creeps up on you, and you don’t notice until reality starts looking a little crooked.

On a less literary note, I also think it’s super funny, and they sound super hot in their Halloween costumes!

I’m gonna put that on the dust jacket! Thank you!

Happy Friday the 13th, story club!

I think the figurative language is great in this piece, aside from the too vivid ice spider part. I love all the references to the clear inspiration.

I am sure the magic stuff really comes to light in the rest, but I am left wondering about it. Are they communicating with gohsts, or legit witches? The crumbs were getting laid for sure.

I was a bit unconvinced on how they could be so large and yet also not that measurably large in their clothing sizes and weight. But I might have been imposing my own imagery onto the characters. Fat brain level 1000 sometimes.

Thanks for the free sample for the spooky time and organizing everything.

I’m really glad you liked it! And I hope you read the rest. I don’t give away the complete mystery completely but I hope I leave enough clues to follow that it comes together.

Just to wax poetic, this started out as a spooky Halloween kinky story last fall, so what you read is basically that. There might have been one more morning after chapter. But I liked the characters so I took it in a different direction. I think it really starts getting good with the next chapter.

I appreciate the feedback on their sizes. They’re definitely not meant to be very overweight (at least in the early chapters), but they’re big for them. Claire might feel bigger (or want to feel bigger) than she actually is. But I’ll look at that if it’s confusing. Thank you for the note on the spider, too. That’s a little on the nose, I agree.

And thanks for liking story club! I think it’s fun. Tell your friends! We need a November story too

Happy Halloween everyone! Thanks to everyone who participated in story club and I hope folks enjoyed the story.

I’ll post a new story for November, and maybe we’ll keep the Halloween season rolling for another month!