The Cinderbound Archives

Once upon a time…okay, back in 2023…a story germ appeared in the subconscious of an author’s mind. Elements of a tale slowly emerged, one by one.

• A scheming mistress determined to build her own future where she ruled all of Uclandia as Empress.

• A young woman with a tormented past, horrible sword-wielding skills, and a hidden gift, and a pretty cool name.

• The youngest Shadow Guard ever, accused of a brutal killing she didn’t commit.

• Sheep, and the baby dragon forbidden from eating them.

The more I thought about all of this… you knew the author was me, right? The more I thought about all of it, the more details I saw! I named it ‘Anthem’s Ember’. I wrote madly, frantically, happy to lose myself to it. Sometimes writing two thousand words a day!

And then real life came, not with a polite knock, but with an ass-kicking I’ll never forget.

My dad’s health started going downhill. Diabetes he chose to ignore. COPD he ignored, except to smoke more, sleeping longer and longer. A fall, a concussion that I still swear to this day was something more, and then, all of a sudden, in a week, he could do less and less for himself. After trying as best I could to be a caregiver for him and my mom…I just couldn’t help him anymore. Hospitalization gave us no answers, only more questions. His health got worse. He was there for a month. One morning he simply…never woke up.

My mother, who had also been declining, albeit more slowly, was devastated. Her health went into freefall. Dialysis wasn’t helping much, her balance was shot, she was losing weight so fast, the she became sticks and bones. Where we live made everything more complicated.

Then my soulmate, the love of my life, got sick. She refused to go to the doctor for two months. Finally, she acquiesced and went to the emergency room. Breast cancer. She was admitted for testing, diagnosis and treatment planning. She lived six more days and died before ever seeing an oncologist. Also in the early morning.

A month later, also hospitalized by then, my mom gave up. Frustrated by a medical support system that refused to help in the best way possible, she stopped dialysis, went into hospice and a week or so later, she died.

Needless to say, ‘Anthem’s Ember’ had been put on the back burner.

I fell headlong into grief so intense and enormous, I still don’t remember most of the next six months. But I do remember closing the door to my mother’s room, and not opening it more than once in those six months…and technically it was my brother that opened it, collapsed in tears in the hallway, and didn’t touch it again for a year.

I remember being punched in the chest by grief every time I walked into my bedroom and looked at my wife’s side of the bed. I remember finally going to my own health practitioner with a blood pressure reading that we all agreed should have produced a stroke.

Which brings us to today. Three years after I first got the seeds of an idea for a story.

I don’t tell you this in a bid for sympathy. I’ve shared all this with you to provide a timeline for the roots of ‘Anthem’s Ember’. I find it remarkable that those seeds stuck with me, rooted firmly in the back of my mind. I didn’t forget the young woman with a gift for fire who rebuilt her life time and time again. Or Pud, the ewe who soaked up Anthem’s tears and gave her something real and warm to hold onto. Over the last few months, I’ve gotten the story out a few times, reread it and all my notes on the magic system, the lore behind the magic, and the little dragon who was forbidden to eat the sheep.

These days, my own story more closely resembles Anthem’s. I have rebuilt my life, rediscovered who I was underneath the skyrocketing blood pressure and years of caregiving (seven years, all told), and had a most interesting, (and positive!) development.

A few weeks ago, something unexpected happened. An agent reached out after reading one of my essays.

We talked about Fantasy. About worldbuilding. About stories and the kinds of books that linger in your bones long after you finish them.

And afterward, I found myself thinking about Anthem again.

About the unfinished manuscript. About the notes. About the girl with fire in her veins and a dragon egg in her future. So I went digging.

I opened old folders. Reread old scenes. The story was still there.

Waiting. Not finished. Not polished. But alive.

Which brings us to The Cinderbound Archives.

This corner of the newsletter will be devoted to the rebuilding of Anthem’s Ember. Not only the novel itself, but the world surrounding it.

Here you’ll find lore fragments, maps, magic systems, story journals, abandoned ideas, character notes, worldbuilding essays, deleted scenes, recovered scenes, and reflections from the long road back to fiction. Think of them like field notes from an archaeological dig.

Because that’s what returning to this story has felt like: uncovering something buried beneath ash and time, and discovering the embers were still warm. Pardon the pun, it’s entirely intentional.

In truth, opening these old notes again has felt less like “working on a novel” and more like sitting down with an old friend I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to.

So this little corner of the newsletter will be exactly that: a place to share the journey back into the story.

The worldbuilding. The false starts.
The dragons. The strange bits of lore scribbled in notebooks at two in the morning.
The things that changed. The things that refused to.

Thank you for being here at the beginning of it all.

Or perhaps, more accurately…at the beginning again.

Carolyn