newt in the throat

You are welcome, I am glad I filled you with dread.

Also, I actually have a tune I made up (or subconsciously copied) for that song and I used to sing it to the bats while cleaning their night houses.

Unfortunately, since I couldn’t find the word written in the original Hebrew I can’t be sure, but based on how Englishified Hebrew is usually written, I believe it’s “fa-doo-ah.”

It is definitely a creature with an annoyingly long list of synonyms: along with fadua(h), I’ve seen it called fedua, jeduah, jedoui, yeduah, and Adnei Hasadeh or Adne Sadeh, among others. Confusingly, some of these same names are used to refer to the Jewish vegetable lamb (most commonly called a Barometz). 

The Adne Sadeh (aka “lord of the field”) variant is particularly interesting, because it refers to G-d’s first attempt at making a human, pre-Adam, but the umbilical cord of the Adne Sadeh stayed stuck in the earth, so it couldn’t move beyond the range of its tether. I don’t know if this is supposed to be why fadua from then on were supposed to be really mindless and aggressive, snatching and consuming any creature in their reach- because they were unfinished? According to at least one version of the myth there used to be a lot of them until the great flood drowned the majority of the population, and now the only ones remaining are high in the mountains, prowling around and around on their vegetative tethers.

Apparently there’s a story in Midrash Tanhuma about a man who was served a fadua for dinner, and though told it was a vegetable that had grown from the earth, ran away because he thought he was a cannibal. Beyond that, there’s not much further mention of fadua in Jewish mythos; the vegetable lamb just became much more popular than the vegetable man.

YES... my deepest, deepest apologies for the very long delay. I ended up uhhh finishing an entire semester of classes in between updates. However my classes are done!! I should have more time to write!! I’m gonna finish it dangit!!! I know exactly how it ends, and I think y’all will like it... soon!

And when I finally vanquish this beast, I will start working on the published versions. As things stand, I’d like to offer Earthcast as a single printed volume but Cannot, because no print on demand publisher will allow me to print a novel that is rapidly approaching 500k words. (Edging close to War and Peace length...) Maybe I can split it into two volumes, but we’ll have to see. Unfortunately the longer the books are the more I’m forced to charge for printing costs- that’s the trouble with POD publishing, alas.

Once I figure out how I’m gonna break up this monster, I’ll start looking into artists to commission for cover art. I’m thinking I will make an offer to @alizabug first because they did such gorgeous work on the Darkeye covers, but if they aren’t available I will open up an ad to the general public again. Speaking of ads, I may try out purchasing actual ads to sell the books this time around... we’ll see.

Finally, I want to mention I am also still working on Speak, Dog! Perhaps I’ll be able to give my Patreon supporters some more previews from it soon! I don’t plan on starting another long webnovel project until I’ve knocked it out.

Thank you thank you to everyone who has stuck by me throughout all this!