The Beans

Fantasy author Jennifer Melzer enjoys spinning elements of the fantastic with strands plucked from the heart. She spent most of her life denying the romantic overtones sewn into her fiction, but awoke one more and realized every single tales she'd spun somehow revolved around the heart. She has since given into the whim, spinning yarns woven from heartstrings. Jennifer is an avid gamer in her spare time, and has written a vast number of fanfiction in the Elder Scrolls, Witcher and Dragon Age universes under the pseudonym Erica North (http://ericanorth.net). She currently resides in Northeast Pennsylvania with her husband, daughter and a houseful of dragons she must train regularly to keep them from setting fire to the curtains. Nightly she dreams she is laying on the beach watching stars burst over the Atlantic Ocean. To learn more visit her official website: http://jennifermelzer.com

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Flashy Friday: Ellorine's Dancing Feet

Flashy Friday: Ellorine's Dancing Feet #flashyfriday #flashfiction #flash #faeriecurses

Ellorine’s dancing feet are a curse upon all who wear them, but first that curse fell upon Ellorine, though they say it was not entirely Ellorine’s fault.

It wasn’t her fault she flirted with Mayavar’s consort at the ball, anymore than it was her fault he flirted back, and when he asked her to dance, what was she supposed to do? Turn him down?

In a rage over the humiliating slight, Mayavar cursed…

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Flashy Friday: Tempting Death #flashfiction #flash #amwriting #fiction Death played spectator to her sport, and she always felt him watching her, but they both knew the thrills she sought were far better temptations than the needle she used to sink into her arm. If Death was going to catch her, she wanted to embrace him like a lover and go down knowing she'd made the choice to live.

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Flashy Friday: Even In Death

Flashy Friday: Even In Death #flashfiction #flashyfriday #amwriting #dragons

The people gathered around her body, awed and heartbroken, dumbfounded and silent. She’d been their protector and guardian since well before a good many of them were even born. They knew not who felled her, for none was brave enough to confess to committing a crime so dark and heinous the punishment would be far worse than death. The truth would out eventually; braggarts rarely kept such horrific…

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[jennybeanses]

Flashy Friday: The Lady's Long Sleep

Flashy Friday: The Lady's Long Sleep #flashfiction #flashyfriday #flash #amwriting

And so she took back Excalibur, descending into the lake once more. She would sleep within the lake, guarding the greatsword until the next worthy king came to claim it, though she knew as she closed her eyes it would be hundreds of lifetimes before she woke again.

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NaNoWriMo: Day 13 and Why There Is No more

NaNoWriMo: Day 13 and Why There Is No more

I was excited to do NaNoWriMo this year, but not excited enough to try to find a way to push through the storm of unexpected crap that decided to wreak havoc on my life near the start of week two. If you’ve been paying any kind of attention, you probably noticed I stopped updating around Day 5, and haven’t updated since.

There are any number of excuses I could offer. Swamped with work,…

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[jennybeanses]

Flashy Friday: Sleeping Gods

Flashy Friday: Sleeping Gods #flashfiction #flashyfriday #amwriting

“Don’t give up,” Sissy said. She held out her offering to the old forest god, a part of her trembling inside, both in fear and anticipation. Every day, she’d come to encourage the god, to remind him that there were still people who not only believed, but needed for him to be real.   He didn’t reach out and accept her gift, he never did, but Sissy bent down and placed the flower on the alter…

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NaNoWriMo: Day 6

What happened to day six, you ask? I should have posted my update yesterday, you say?

Well, you see, what happened was I only wrote 251 words on day six because I found myself busy doing other things that were equally important to me that took precedent. I’ve discovered a lot about myself as a writer recently, and one of the things I realized is that this process shouldn’t be harrowing and…

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NaNoWriMo: Day 5

Here we are, five days in, and I’m still going strong, though today felt like a bit of a slog. I sat down this afternoon to get my writing done and it felt like it took forever just to write a thousand words. I managed to make my personal goal, though I didn’t surpass it nearly as much as I have been the last couple days. Today’s final word count was 1,769, and I’m just about done with chapter…

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NaNoWriMo: Day 4

Four days in a row, and each one I’ve done slightly more than I did the day before, which is looking promising. I’m not judging what I’m doing right now… well, mostly. I’m just writing every day, which feels kind of nice. Every once in a while, I ask myself whether or not a thirteen year old girl would think this way or that way, if she would say something like that or act a certain way, then I…

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NaNoWriMo: Day Two

NaNoWriMo: Day Two #nanowrimo2019 #nanowrimo #amwriting

One of the things I both love and hate about the first draft is how wordy it is. For NaNoWriMo, it’s a blessing because you’re likely adding a bunch of world-building, character-building fluff you’ll wind up cutting out in draft two. That stuff also helps you get to know your characters and world a little better, too, but sometimes I wish I already knew them well enough to get down to the nitty…

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NaNoWriMo: Day One

NaNoWriMo: Day One #nanowrimo #nanowrimo2019 #amwriting #ontrack

I didn’t do well with Camp NaNoWriMo, and I haven’t been writing nearly at all these last few months, but it is my hope that one sure-fire way to get the wheels spinning and turning again is to buckle down and hit the 50,000 words in a month trail. I spent several weeks plotting last month, preparing in hopes that I could dive in and start writing today without much issue, and so far that…

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Flashy Friday: Not a Harvest God

Flashy Friday: Not a Harvest God

Every day the people in the village brought offerings to the small shrine in hopes of appeasing the god they believed took up residence there. Good favor would mean larger crop yields come harvest, they said. It would mean fewer deaths during the long winters.

But Henrietta knew in her soul there was no god at that shrine. It was no benevolent deity who would reward them for their devotions, but…

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Inktober Day 30: Catch

Inktober Day 30: Catch

Man, I am starting to feel a little sad that Inktober is almost over. October has always been my favorite month of the year, and adding art to my daily October routine this month has been such an amazing experience. I feel like I’ve learned so much, and I can’t wait to keep creating art every single day and learning even more with every single thing I create.

Today’s prompt was catch, so this sad…

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Inktober Day 29: Injured

Inktober Day 29: Injured #inktober #inktober2019 #inktoberinjured #masseffect #garrusvakarian

I had no idea what I was going to do for today’s prompt, but I wanted to do something spacey because space is my jam. As I started thinking about injuries while driving early this morning, I realized Garrus Vakarian was a good candidate, especially after he got rocket-launched in the face in Mass Effect 2.

While working on this, it occurred to me that I still have so much to learn, but that is…

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Inktober Day 28: Ride

Inktober Day 28: Ride #inktober2019 #inktoberday28 #inktoberride

One of the things I love about art is also one of the things I don’t love about it. Sometimes, no matter how you see something in your mind, it doesn’t always come out that way on the canvas. Occasionally it’s impossible to create what you see, and other times it’s even more amazing than you imagined.

Today’s Inktober offering for the “Ride” prompt falls between those two parameters. I don’t hate…

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Inktober Day 27: Coat

Inktober Day 27: Coat #inktober #inktober2019day27 #dungeonsanddragonsart #drow #drowart #snow

Jevahn believes the reason I started making so much art in the first place was so I could capture his eminence and glory *insert half-hearted eye roll here*, and though he’s not entirely false in these assumptions, I have a lot of other things on my plate. I’m sure he’d like me to make lots of paintings of him being evil and murderous, as assassins are allegedly supposed to do, but if I’m going…

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Inktober Day 26: Dark

Inktober Day 26: Dark

I think when the Ancient prompt ended, the old gods had already infiltrated my soul because when I started on the “Dark” prompt for today, Cthulhu demanded to be front and center within the darkness.

I used a Tombow Mono 05 drawing pen and Tombow dualbrush pens.

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