All enquiries to jbedvane@gmail.com
I spent over 50 years writing fairytales, fantasy stories and other fiction for myself, my children and primarily for my own pleasure. I am now curating that collection into two ideas. My first novel, whose world you can enter on Substack, Royal Road, YouTube, X, and Instagram. And my short story collection, which I present here.
So…
Welcome to my dark corner.
You arrive unbidden and unbarred. I offer no cheerful threshold, no lantern to soften what waits beyond it. If you remain, you do so by inclination rather than accident.
These pages are not diversions in the ordinary sense, though I sometimes pretend they are. They are records. Fragments. Transcriptions from a mind otherwise occupied with matters that refuse to settle. The affairs of the Marchlands persist. They press at the margins of sleep. They gnaw in the quieter hours.
So I unburden myself here.
What you will find are stories, yes, but not harmless ones. They are released as one might open a window in a room grown stale, hoping the night air will carry something away. Whether it does is another matter entirely.
I should caution you.
Words are not idle instruments. Once set loose, they move. They linger. They impress themselves upon the reader and, in so doing, enlist them. A story is never wholly contained by its author. It completes itself in the mind that receives it.
If you venture further, understand that you participate.
If something unsettles you, if a line returns at an inconvenient hour, if a thought once foreign begins to feel uncomfortably your own, do not pretend surprise. You were warned that what is written here is written with intent.
Enter, then.
But do not claim you were merely passing through.
April 2026 – I have made five of my favourite tales available as an audiobook on Eleven Reader. FIVE DARK FABLES