Free The Firefly Witch by Alex Bledsoe

 
    INTRODUCTION
     
    Many years ago, I read Barbara Paul’s 1979 mystery novel, The Fourth Wall , about a murderer picking off members of a theatrical troupe. But not every crime is the literal murder of a human being; instead, each event is calculated to do the most damage to the victim. The playwright, Abby James, has her carefully-maintained files destroyed: years of drafts, notes and potential scenes scattered and splashed with paint. I no longer own a copy of the book, but I recall a distraught Abby wondering something like, “How do you recapture a thought process from a dozen years ago?”
    At the time, I had to accept this plot point on faith, since my own “files” were decidedly less substantial. But recently I dug out some old stories that I wrote in the middle Nineties; suddenly I understood exactly what Abby James meant. Here before me were stories that were so different from what I write now, that they might as well have been by another person.
    The stories tell the adventures of Tanna Tully, a Wiccan priestess/college professor/parapsychologist with a magical tie to fireflies; in their presence, her psychic powers increase exponentially. I wrote them in first person from her husband Ry’s perspective; as a small-town newspaperman with a decidedly mundane perspective, he, like Dr. Watson, gives us a way into his wife’s mysterious adventures. The stories I dug out included the very first short story I wrote after deciding to become serious writer; it was also the first story I sold, in 1996, which I took as a sign I was on the right path.
    So I was relieved to find that, sixteen years on, they weren’t terrible. I expected them to be, or at least to be appalled at my technical ineptitude. But for the most part, they were solidly constructed and pretty well-written. I did some touch-up work, clarifying things and taking out hopelessly dated references (does anyone remember the Deadeye Dick song, “New Age Girl”? Nope, didn’t think so). Since I’d anticipated needing to rewrite them from scratch, this was all a pleasant surprise.
    So if they weren’t badly written, what was so different about them? They embodied a quality of innocence that the past fifteen years may have permanently driven out of me. These are essentially love stories, and my idea of what constituted “love” was a lot simpler back then. I had no trouble imagining characters drawn magically together, who easily filled the gaps in each other’s lives and met danger as equals. Even then I suspected this was wishful thinking, but I could at least countenance the possibility. Now, as the long-term husband of the smartest woman I know, and the parent of two rambunctious, vaguely sociopathic little boys, I recognize that the relationships in these stories were almost total fiction. Maybe even science fiction. The real world doesn’t work that way, at least in my experience since then. But of course we wish it did, which is why we read, and write, stories like that.
    They were also ahead of their time by about ten years. Now they fit comfortably into what’s known as urban fantasy (maybe even paranormal romance, if a married couple counts), but like so many things I’ve written, at the time they were impossible to classify. The more hard-edged ones were picked up by some horror ‘zines, and the ones with heavy neopagan plots found homes in New Age magazines (especially PanGaia , which took several of them over the years). But many simply didn’t fit anywhere, and were relegated to the “unpublished” files. It took this long for a genre to develop that could comfortable encompass them.
    Now I’ve spruced them up, packaged them, and now present them to you. I’m not sure what will happen next. But like Abby James, I’m sure I could never fully recapture what made those stories work, although I am looking forward to coming up with new adventures for the characters.
    And now let me introduce you to Dr. Tanita “Tanna” Tully,