This is a bit of an atypical post from the Inn. We’ve never really “featured” any new fantasy releases in the past, so some of our long-term readers might be wondering why we’re doing so now.
Well, The Wandering Inn is a bit of a special case. It’s pretty dear to our hearts, and there’s some history there. So with the first volume recently releasing on ebook, we wanted to do a little something just to highlight it.
Not so many people know this, but the name of our website is actually a homage to Pirateaba’s story. And when we first went live all those many months ago… one of the ten initial reviews we posted was for Volume 1 of The Wandering Inn.
Fast forward a few months, and Pirate was kind enough to give us a fantastic interview. It can’t be understated just how important that interview was for us in the early days. It boosted our readership, and to this day it’s still the most-viewed post on the site (with the exception of a couple of AI Mash-ups).
For those of you who are unfamiliar with The Wandering Inn, it’s a tale about a woman named Erin who finds herself in a fantasy world with some soft video-game mechanics, and decides to become an [Innkeeper]. It’s a web serial, meaning that the chapters are posted online at wanderinginn.com for anyone to read for free. Pirate posts these chapters every Tuesday and Saturday — meaning that they often write over 15,000 words every week.
The story has a very intimate, Slice of Life feel. The characters are likeable and relatable, the setting is well-crafted and full of fascinating little quirks, and the prose is digestible in a way that lends itself well to long periods of binging.
Being a web-serial, The Wandering Inn is more about the journey than the destination. If you’re looking for 400 pages of tightly-packed plot, you won’t find it here. This is more sprawling; it’s a continuous story that unfolds slowly, and which isn’t afraid to just enjoy the day-to-day happenings of life in a fantasy world. It’s the kind of book that you can read alongside something else, a chapter or two at a time. Though be warned… it’s addictive. Those two chapters can very quickly turn into forty.
And on a personal level (and this is where I drop the Royal “we”), The Wandering Inn is just one of my favourite stories. I pick it up when I’m feeling down. I go back and re-read old chapters just to spend time with Erin and the gang. I love this world. I love these characters. I want to call it “feel-good”… but while it fits that billing, it’s so much more than that. I can’t quite put it into words, and so I’m going to cheat and steal a quote from Pirate’s interview.
It’s when things go wrong, or something bad happens that the value of a Slice of Life story reveals itself; your favorite characters face hardships, and as we know, bad things can happen in The Wandering Inn. So you ask if it was deliberate for me to make the story happy. I say: of course! Happiness and sadness need each other. Tragedies only exist because bad things happen to people who weren’t in trouble to begin with.
After months of editing, The Wandering Inn is finally available for download on the Kindle ebook store. What this means is that everyone who made the excuse of “I don’t like reading on screens” now doesn’t have a leg to stand on. It’s time for me to shove this book in your faces again, guys!
If you’re a fan of Slice of Life stories, LitRPGs, books with friendly and likeable characters, or FUN, then I highly suggest that you pick up a copy of The Wandering Inn. If I haven’t convinced you yet, then maybe this awesome cover by the dream team of John Anthony di Giovanni and Shawn King will convince you…
I really hope that a few of you guys decide to pick up this fantastic book: either with the Kindle edition, or over on Pirate’s website. I’ll leave some links for you below for you to have a look over.
Oh, and if any of you guys DO pick it up, come and hit me up on Twitter so I have someone else to geek out with.
I love this story, and I really hope you do too.
Links:
- Amazon US / Amazon UK / Amazon CA
- The Wandering Inn website / Chapter One
- Our review for Volume One (awww, and it’s in my old review style!)
- An interview with Pirateaba
FINE, GEEZ, PURCHASED, GAW