This is an appropriate season to mention Gott’im’s Monster and its connections to the craft of writing and making.

The narrator of Gott’im’s Monster is tasked with the destruction of a monster created by his former school master. He does not feel up to the assignment.

The school master does not think it wise to describe how he put his monster together and galvanized it to life. Perhaps he wanted to patent it? Actually, he’s terrified of his own making and does not know what to do with it on account of his lack of foresight unintended consequences of—shall we say?—his technological making?

The maker’s young scholar/poet in school would have known that he could make a poem about such a happening, while trying to work out what it would mean through the poem, but this young poet himself would never dream of making a real monster.

“Dressed in buckskin and woolen stockings made by my mother, I was on Jasper Mountain many a day, camping, writing in my diary (especially when staying in the old hermit’s camp), a failed young poet of eighteen winters in a harsh setting with privation.  I comforted myself with the thought that at least I wasn’t gone off on a Whaler—to get caught by the mad King and pressed into service in what was fast becoming the greatest naval empire ever known to man… unless Napoleon had anything to say of it.  But then I recalled that over to home the harness was frayed, the ax wanted a new handle and the scythe needed sharpening.  Instead I was writing in my journal, learning to live off what I could find in the woods, and making notes on medicinals.  My path on one of these forays crossed that of Victor Besiegt.  He was skeletal and wild, but half alive.”

The book itself is available on any platform you care to use, including orders from your independent book shop.

Gott’im’s Monster 1808. This is the abridged version of the science fiction novel. Plans are underway for an audio version, but this will not happen for at least a year.