Author Insight: Sharp Sword, Dull Sword
I got the idea for this story while looking for places to submit my short story “Disconnected” to. One of the small publishers I looked at had what turned out to be the most comprehensive list of what they did not want that I’ve ever seen. There were something like twenty very specific types of story that this publisher did not want. What struck me as funny was how exact the guidelines were, like “we don’t want any stories about a group of children finding some magical something in the middle of a field.” How many stories did they have to receive where a group of kids found a sword, meteorite, magic jellybean, whatever, before they added this rule? Hundreds? Thousands? Or was there just one story that was so bad it turned them off to this idea forever?
Anyway, one of the specific types of story they didn’t want was a talking sword story. Up until that time I’d never even considered writing a talking sword story, but for whatever reason the idea stuck with me. I thought about a lot of different kinds of story that a talking sword could be the main character of. Maybe he’s in love with a cute little dagger somewhere and won’t allow himself to be drawn from his scabbard until his bearer finds it. Or maybe he is used for battle for the first time and realizes he has a deathly fear of blood. I finally decided on a story based on the idea that if you’re a sentient sword just waiting around to be picked up by an adventurer in a particularly dangerous dungeon, you could end up waiting for a very long time.