Since this is the first week of this website, I figured I'd publish the first actual chapter of the Cabbage Girl just to get the ball rolling.

As you can see, the Cabbage Girl's life is fairly grim.

One of my (many) motivations in the creation of this story is a sort of rejection of the weird class-ism that still sort of sits in a lot of fantasy -- this idea that only "great people" (i.e. kings and princesses and knights and wizards and prophesied saviors and people descended from them) have the ability to really do anything important.

Even George R.R. Martin's work seems to focus overly-much on the upper classes and their privilege and only cursorily pays much attention to the plight of the "smallfolk" as he calls them. And most of that attention is only to underline how unimportant the "smallfolk" are and how awesome the noble-descended protagonists are.

So the Cabbage Girl is "smallfolk". She's an orphan, a thief, an urchin. Don't get your hopes up. She's not the lost descendant of some noble line. She's not some shining knight waiting to happen.

She's practical, selfish, more prone to run than fight, and, as described in the prologue, distinctly not a pretty, pretty princess.

-- MJC
 
So this is my first blog entry on this website. Bits and pieces and various pages will be "under construction" for a bit, of course, as I attempt to perfect the layout.

To introduce myself: my name is Michael James Cullen. And I fancy myself a writer.

The primary goal I have in mind for this site at this time is to serially publish a story by the name of the Cabbage Girl. My aim is to kick out one chapter every week, until I bring the story to its conclusion and end up with a completed novel.

I have a small backlog of chapters that are "mostly finished" to give myself some weeks of leeway as I get myself up to speed. A few select people are giving me a short editing read-through before I publish a given chapter, mostly to catch the weird flaws and lapses that a writer is prone to miss in his or her own work.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how many chapters I'm going to need to tell this story. I'm already "off the rails" of the initial outline I created before I started writing, so perhaps a new outline is in order?

A secondary goal of this site is to discuss writing, in general, mostly by voicing my own thought process as I attempt to finish the Cabbage Girl and/or publish other bits of fiction and poetry. With the help of readers, volunteer editors, and other writers, I'm hoping that these discussions will help me find my "voice" and make me a better writer.

So welcome to the freak-show. Hopefully, you'll find something to pique your interest.

-- MJC

    Author

    I aspire to be a published writer. This is the first step in spreading that madness to the world.

    (All writings on this website are © 2011, 2012, 2013 and may not be copied, printed, or reproduced in any fashion without permission. Images belong to their original creators and/or owners.)

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