Wyngraf #3

By Nathaniel Webb

The beloved magazine of cozy fantasy returns with its biggest issue yet.

Curl up with heartwarming fiction in the tradition of Legends & Lattes and The Hobbit. Wyngraf #3 includes ten all-new tales of magic, romance, adventure, dragons, and lots of food, plus an essay from the editor on cozy fantasy tropes.

~~Contents~~
* “Windows and Walls” by Nathaniel Webb. This essay surveys the field of cozy fantasy, organizing its tropes into essential base ingredients and optional seasonings, and offers perspective on the role of tropes in genre fiction.

* “The Rose Quarter” by Samantha Rich. Professor Lineth Tyl isn’t known for being warm and caring with her students, but she can’t turn down an interesting legal puzzle, especially when love is involved...

* “The Third Spell” by Rachel Friedman. The Librarian of Sirens’ Cove likes everything about her job except the patrons. And the pay. And the food. And the magic.

* “The Founders’ Homesteaders” by Matt Evans. Polly Thistle and her adventuring crew thought a golden dragon egg would be enough to save the orphanage—now they have to win a tournament!

* “High Pasture” by Liam Hogan. Minding goats on the Arkhan Heights can be a dull job. Good thing there are knights and dragons around to liven things up.

* “The Four-Copper Box” by Dean Corbin Griffin. When Seldon is caught shirking his chores, his father rushes him off to Yerth for axle pins. A mysterious traveler offers a shortcut, but at what cost?

* “Worth Her Salt” by Anne Paschkopić. Sue just wants to make Alina, the new baker, feel welcome in town. There’s no way Alina would return her romantic feelings—especially not while dealing with an inexplicable string of oven disasters...

* “Familliar” by Fiona Mossman. Alice is thrilled to be home from Witches’ Academy for her first holiday, but she can’t seem to leave her academic worries behind, nor is her old life without cares of its own.

* “Goblin Stew” by Hannah Hulbert. Rotney’s grandmother is gone, he’s hosting the entire community for her memorial, and the stew is getting dangerously low. But there may be some hope left at the bottom of the pot.

* “The Ink-Stained Pilgrim” by Michael Martin. In this special epic-scale novelette, Nicolai Canto abandons the life of an accountant for adventure and uncertainty on the open road.

* “Blightmage” by Alexander B. Joy. Nothing brings Rustine more joy than giving life to golems. Less appealing is the prospect of delivering one to the uncanny Lady Eglid—the woman known as the Blightmage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyngraf
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215749630

Nathaniel Webb

Nathaniel Webb (aka Nat20) is an author, musician, and the editor of WYNGRAF, the magazine of cozy fantasy.His novels include the geek mystery A CONVENTIONAL MURDER, the GameLit adventure EXPEDITION: SUMMERLANDS from Level Up Publishing, and the Veil of Worlds urban fantasies from Vulpine Press. His music biography MARILLION IN THE 1980s was a bestseller for Sonicbond Publishing. He has published numerous short stories and novellas in such genres as litRPG, steampunk, cozy fantasy, mystery, and sword & sorcery.As a lead guitarist, Nathaniel toured and recorded extensively with Grammy-nominated soul singer Jana Mashonee, played on Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Beth Hart's 2010 album MY CALIFORNIA, and co-produced and played guitar on Colombian pop singer Marre's 2013 album SOMBRAS DE LUZ. His band Talking to Walls toured up and down the east coast, and their 2010 release WE WERE NOT SO TALL reached CMJ's Most Added chart.His game development credits include adventures and supplements for the tabletop RPGs SHADOW OF THE DEMON LORD and GODLESS.A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Wesleyan University, where he was editor of the humor rag THE AMPERSAND, Nathaniel lives in Portland, Maine with his wife and son under a massive pile of cats. He can be found at @nat20w on Twitter, where he mostly talks about cats, writing, and obscure progressive rock.

Book preview

Wyngraf

WYNGRAF

Volume 3 - Spring 2023

MATT EVANS RACHEL FRIEDMAN DEAN CORBIN GRIFFIN LIAM HOGAN HANNAH HULBERT ALEXANDER B. JOY MICHAEL MARTIN FIONA MOSSMAN ANNE PASCHKOPIĆ SAMANTHA RICH

Editor-in-Chief

NATHANIEL WEBB

Cover Artist

ALICIA RAMOS CASTILLO

www.wyngraf.com

Wyngraf copyright © 2023 Young Needles Press, individual stories copyright © 2023 by their respective authors.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover art by Alicia Ramos Castillo.

TALES AND EPHEMERA

From the Editor: Windows and Walls

About This Issue

The Rose Quarter

Samantha Rich

The Third Spell

Rachel Friedman

The Founders’ Homesteaders

Matt Evans

High Pasture

Liam Hogan

The Four-Copper Box

Dean Corbin Griffin

Worth Her Salt

Anne Paschkopić

Familiar

Fiona Mossman

Goblin Stew

Hannah Hulbert

The Ink-Stained Pilgrim

Michael Martin

Blightmage

Alexander B. Joy

FROM THE EDITOR: WINDOWS AND WALLS

Hello, friends, and welcome to the third issue of Wyngraf!

This time around, I’d like to break from my traditional editor’s note and offer up something along the lines of an essay. If you want to skip my philosophizing and get straight to the fiction, go right ahead. I’ll also be sharing this essay on the Wyngraf blog a few weeks after we’ve gone to print, if you prefer your pedantry confined to the screen.

In the months leading up to issue two’s October debut, I was in a state one might charitably term pre-burnout. My day job had taken a turn for the drastic, and I was helping editor Oliver Brackenbury finish assembling New Edge Sword & Sorcery #0, a free proof of concept for a magazine that carries pulp fantasy toward an inclusive future—and which launched mere days before Wyngraf #2. And I was drafting Bard City Blues, my cozy fantasy novel. And I was in grad school. And parenting. And, and, and…

So once our second issue arrived (on time, thanks!) it was time to sit back and take stock. I made a few tough calls right away. The publishing rhythm I hoped to establish, alternating between issues of Wyngraf and Rakehell, had to go. (Lesson learned: if I could do it over, I would have published Rakehell as an anthology under the Wyngraf banner, rather than its own mag.) Putting the Friday Flash series on indefinite hiatus was harder, but the right move.

But that’s all right. Things come and go. Not everything works—not everything works forever. Change is natural. And while I made these changes in my little corner of the world, the world kept changing, too. Having been snapped up by Tor, Legends & Lattes showed up at Barnes & Noble… and airport bookstores… and the New York Times bestseller list.

It’s hard to overstate how great this is for cozy fantasy. Legends & Lattes gives us all something we can point to and say yeah, it’s kind of like that! Or, as I put it on Twitter when L&L cracked the bestseller list, When one of us wins, we all win. (Plus Travis Baldree is a great guy who deserves the success!)

But the book’s breakout status means it casts a huge shadow. As cozy fantasy continues to define itself, Legends & Lattes will be the ten-thousand-pound gorilla in the room. Readers who loved it may mistake the brightest star for the whole constellation. Authors looking to share in its success may copy its surface features without capturing its heart—or, worse, cynically churn out shovelware books that ape its aesthetic in hopes of riding its coattails.

What I’m really interested in today, though, is tropes. In a recent interview with Hugo-winning blogger Cora Buhlert (I always introduce her that way because she’s a Wyngraf flash contributor and I think it’s so cool she won a Hugo) I quipped that I sometimes feel a bit like Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales or Michael Moorcock at New Worlds.

If those references don’t mean anything to you, they were the editors who defined weird fiction and New Wave sci-fi in the thirties and sixties—but don’t worry, I have no delusions that Wyngraf is operating on the scale of those epochal movements! All I mean to say is that in our tiny little way, we’re helping to sort out what cozy fantasy is, by dint of what stories we run.

Sometimes it looks like Legends & Lattes and sometimes it doesn’t. I hope you’ll forgive a further pulp-themed digression, but I promise it’s relevant. In Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery, Brian Murphy lays out what he considers the seven base elements of that genre. In his words, they are:

• men and women of action

• dark and dangerous magic

• personal and/or mercenary motivations

• horror/Lovecraftian influence

• short, episodic stories

• inspired by history

• outsider heroes

Importantly, Murphy doesn’t claim every S&S story must contain all of these. Rather, these are the guiding lights, the core tropes of the genre. The further you get from them—the more you’re missing—the harder it becomes to justify your story as sword & sorcery.

THE BASE INGREDIENTS OF COZY FANTASY

So are we starting to see some base elements—I’d rather call them ingredients, it sounds cozier—of cozy fantasy? I can think of three that I would raise so high.

The first two might be mistaken as synonymous, but their distinction, while subtle, is meaningful. I speak, of course, of cozy fantasy’s low stakes and small scale.

Let’s begin from an illustrative counterexample: epic fantasy. A quest to save the world, set against a backdrop of clashing armies and soaring dragons, has both high stakes and a large scale. The whole world hangs in the balance and entire nations are at play.

Now remove one of those elements, the scale. Rather than armies and dragons, say the fate of the world depends on a baking contest. Add a little too much sugar and the Dark Lord wins.

Is this story cozy?

Well—maybe. It’s hard to imagine it being serious, and a little humor goes a long way toward softening even the highest stakes. But if the story were played straight, there would be no less tension during the climactic cake-tasting sequence than the usual final swordfight. Raise the stakes enough and a fun competition can induce plenty of stomach-churning anxiety. (If you find that hard to believe, watch an episode of Domino Masters with me sometime.)

How about the inverse, a large-scale story with low stakes? Aside from being notoriously dull—why read hundreds of pages of armies battling if we don’t care about the outcome?—it’s easy to see how such a story isn’t cozy. Large-scale fantasies tend to lean heavily on violent action and death. In some, intimate character moments and homely details are merely an afterthought, or entirely absent.

For our third base ingredient, I nominate the grand motif of food and drink. Fantasy’s love affair with mealtime goes back at least to Tolkien: in Middle-Earth, where the hobbits have seven meals a day, and Smith of Wootton Major with its once-in-a-generation cake. Brian Jacques’s Redwall series is also famous for its lengthy feast sequences, which culminated in a cookbook written by Jacques himself.

Of course, feasts aren’t exclusive to cozy fantasy—witness George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. But non-fantasy cozies maintain an equally powerful association with food, as in decades of cozy mysteries set in bakeries, coffee shops, and restaurants, complete with recipes in the back. Many even have a touch of magic to them, with witchy protagonists, talking cats, and other hints of the supernatural, despite being set on Earth.

By the way, we’re currently seeing these two worlds collide. Online cozy fantasy writers’ groups have drawn both Wyngraf-style authors and those from the modern-day-magic genre (and those who write both!). Luckily there’s plenty of room for everyone. And since both lineages love good food, its place in cozy fantasy is secure.

TROPES: SEASON TO TASTE

Low stakes, a small scale, and good food and drink may be the only themes yet to graduate to base ingredient status, but numerous cozy fantasy tropes have begun to gel.

Thematically, the leading contender is the found family. I haven’t been able to trace this to a source so far—Legends & Lattes? Howl’s Moving Castle? TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea? Is the Fellowship of the Ring a found family? Regardless, the found family appeals to readers for much the same reason as cozy fantasy in general. Community, home, and belonging have a powerful lure, offering steadiness and comfort in fractured times. Escapist? Perhaps, but I prefer to consider it aspirational.

Where sword & sorcery has heroes of action, cozy fantasy has protagonists who used to be. In Rebecca Thorne’s Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea, one of the heroines is escaping life as a deadly royal guard to follow her dream of running a combination bookstore and tea shop. The hero of S.L. Rowland’s Cursed Cocktails has just retired as a blood mage to open a tavern. In Morgan Stang’s The Bookshop and the Barbarian, both leads have checkered pasts. All three books were released in the last eight months, so I feel safe proposing a direct lineage from Legends & Lattes and its orc barbarian-turned-coffee entrepreneur. (Though Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk by Coyote JM Edwards, which features an eleven-foot-tall half-spider warrior who retires to open a coffee shop, actually predates L&L by almost three months.)

This raises the trope I find most intriguing in our growing genre: starting a business. Despite the obvious Legends & Lattes influence, running a successful business without all the long hours and municipal paperwork has long been a source of wish fulfillment in fiction. It forms another link to other cozy genres, too, since so many of those revolve around coffee shops, bookstores, hair salons, and so on.

Interestingly, this trope’s entrée into cozy fantasy seems to have been via LitRPG. Traditionally, LitRPG stories are set within video-game worlds and focus on characters training, improving their skills, and gaining new powers—leveling up, as it were. A number of recent top-selling cozy fantasy writers such as Travis Baldree and S.L. Rowland have ties to the LitRPG scene—I even wrote one myself, back in my salad days. I suspect part of the appeal of the business-building trope is that same sense of leveling up that we find so satisfying in progression fantasy.

By the way, a common LitRPG trope is to provide a character sheet showing the protagonist’s stats and skills. Whenever one is added or increased, the entire sheet is reprinted to show the updated version. In a genre about gaming, it makes sense to put the mechanics front and center (and it offers some unscrupulous authors a way to pad their Kindle Unlimited page reads by repeatedly copy-pasting the same block of text!). And you may notice in Legends & Lattes that whenever Viv changes or adds to her café menu, the whole thing is reprinted in full… or at least that’s my theory of the case!

There are two more cozy fantasy tropes worth mentioning briefly. I think we’ll see a majority of stories set in fantasy worlds akin to Dungeons & Dragons: European late-medieval aesthetics, commonplace magic, and humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings living in harmony. That’s a natural consequence of cozy fantasy spreading into the fantasy mainstream. As more writers pick it up, it will tend to reflect the fantasy baseline.

Last, cozy fantasy is showing a trend toward romantic plots, often queer ones. They may be background stories, as in L&L, or they may be primary, as in my own Bard City Blues. This issue of Wyngraf offers two romances and we recently released a Valentine’s Day special with two more. That they all feature queer couples is more or less coincidental, but I’d like to think cozy fantasy is a welcoming space for marginalized authors, and characters, of every sort.

WINDOWS AND WALLS

Whew! That’s a great deal of talk about tropes. Does all this mean that cozy fantasy is becoming reified, that the ground is now being marked out where walls will soon be built?

I certainly hope not.

Oliver Brackenbury, the New Edge editor, describes the base elements of sword & sorcery like the turnbuckles of a wrestling ring. They give shape to the thing, define its boundaries, but those boundaries are flexible. You can stretch the ropes between the posts, climb onto them, use them for leverage, even take the fight outside them every once in a while. We’ve run plenty of stories without food, family, retirement, romance, or entrepreneurship. The same Angelica Fiori who gave us a local blacksmith and a hint of romance for issue one’s Dragonsmith also gave us steampunk badland airships for Desert Dreams in issue two.

I prefer to think of tropes as tools, not rules. As readers, we should always be willing to stretch the boundaries of our comfort zone, even when we’re looking for familiar—cozy—reads. As writers, when we seek to emulate the works we love, we should try to understand how the author wields the tropes they choose. Why is food so important to the mice of Redwall Abbey? How does Diana Wynne Jones subtly weave romance into Howl’s Moving Castle? How does Travis Baldree make opening a coffee shop as gripping as a spy thriller?

Most importantly, we should never let cozy fantasy stagnate. When a genre hardens into a set of unchanging rules, it loses something vital. Too, it can become intimidating to curious and casual readers, frightened off by impenetrable jargon and inside jokes.

Every genre needs boundaries. When we define them, we build walls by necessity. I did this the day I wrote Wyngraf’s submission guidelines. We’ll never publish a story with graphic descriptions of people’s heads being chopped off: that’s a wall. I’ll never write a novel where a beloved character dies suddenly halfway through. That’s a wall.

But we should be careful how many walls we build, and where we build them. And when we do build walls, we should make sure to put windows in them.

So we can look out—

So others can look in—

And so, every now and then, we can crack that window open and let something new inside.

Nathaniel Webb

February, 2023

ABOUT THIS ISSUE

There’s something special about this issue.

Actually, there’s a lot that’s special about this issue, and I know you want to get to the stories already, so I’ll try to keep this brief.

For starters, we have not one but three new logos courtesy of the talented and gentlemanly Rick Byrne. Atop the front cover is our elegantly redesigned Wyngraf logotype (that’s the fancy term for a logo that’s just a word). Rick took what we had and applied his expert eye, coaxing each letter into its proper place until the whole thing flowed just right.

On the cover and spine of the book, you’ll see a beautiful tree logo, and on the title page you’ll see the same tree emblazoned onto a tome. These images, also courtesy of Rick, will appear elsewhere in the future—keep an eye out!

Now, about those stories… we had quite the open call this time around. With a hundred and twenty one submissions, not only did we shatter our previous record, we doubled the number of stories we read for Wyngraf #2. I read this as a sign of cozy fantasy’s incredible growth. Time will tell.

I would have been buried under such a colossal slush pile, only to be found months later surrounded by pizza crusts and half-devoured by cats, if not for the heroic efforts of Angelica Fiori. Not content to rest on her laurels as the only author to appear in both our first and second issues, Angelica set aside her pen (temporarily!) and helped read submissions. Her work ethic never flagged, and her assistance and insight were invaluable.

From such a deluge of submissions, you might expect we would find countless gems. So we did. We may be a tiny niche