stonycroftpublishing

We’ve just been distracted. But that’s ok, because we’re also stretching our wings, getting ready to publish Cedar’s second novel, Pixie Noir, which you can find snippeted on her writing blog.

This past week we published a children’s story, our first, and coming up later this week we will debut a space opera novella. On the surface, they seem utterly different, but at their core, they remain about the same thing, an enduring quality, we believe, in most of our stories. Humanity with all its capacity for love.

Poor Gregory is a short fantasy tale of a little boy, worried about his mother, and his new friend, who is lost from her own family. The story was born from a family story about the father of the Farm, Greg, who when he would visit his grandmother was dismayed by her tendency to pull him onto her lap while stroking his hair and saying, “Poor Gregory, poor Gregory…” Over and over in her thick Russian accent. He felt at the time too old to be cosseted, and even now that he is a grandfather himself, that sense of injured boy dignity rings through when he talks about it. The story itself takes off in directions not related to reality, as Cedar explores that boyhood sense of chivalry that occasionally crops up in odd, protective ways toward those younger and smaller than themselves.

Plant Life is a short novella set on a planet far from Earth. The only humans to ever step foot on it are four Scouts, trained to explore and assess for colonization. The story begins as they realize they might not be alone, after all. During the course of the tale, the nature of humanity and love are explored, ending with the development of a friendship that is the best kind of partnership between a man and a woman.

We like the concept of Human Wave fiction, pioneered at the Mad Genius Club by Sarah Hoyt and Dave Freer and others. The idea that humanity will spread to the stars without losing that which makes us special, which leads to heroes, and the love that binds parents to children, friends to one another, and lovers together. The definition of love we learned in school was “wanting only the best for the one that is loved, with no expectation of anything in return.” Love leads to a sense of honor, chivalry, and duty to one another. It makes for great stories of triumph over all the forms of evil that this world of ours holds. It is, in the end, what makes life worth living.

This story came into being because Cedar was learning how to twist balloons, and had just started writing science fiction. From the reviews both public and private, we think she created a unique tale from those experiences. Click on image to buy the story, and we’d love it if you left a review after reading!

We publish stories, because we love to read. Stonycroft is a small farm in NH, and the publishing came about as an inevitable growth from the three generations of readers that live on it. At one point the farmhouse had a bookshelf in every room… the only reason it doesn’t temporarily is that the bathroom is undergoing renovations. The works you can expect from our house will range from children’s tales to fiction more fantastical, to the Old Beekeeper’s upcoming works on sustainable agriculture. All of our works will be primarily available as ebooks, because bookshelves take a lot of space. Good Reading!