A short story I started in 2023 has finally wrapped its first draft. The slightly altered current draft title is “Karma Is Dead.”

Weird experience writing a story over the course of more than a year, but even weirder that it just kept getting longer when I didn’t think there’d be this much meat to the story. I am used to my word counts getting away from me a bit, but in this case I was balanced between “I need to stay under X word count” and “I need the story to say everything I want it to say.” I didn’t want to cheat the characters out of satisfying interactions because I wanted a shorter story. So I figured to hell with it and let it do what it wanted. I’m sure I’ll slim it down in editing, but it’s just going to have to be one of the longer ones. It’s over 20,000 words.

I’ve sold exactly one story that was in the neighborhood of 15,000 words. 20,000 is going to leave you with options that are only for novelettes and anthologies that aren’t picky about length–I’ll have a lot more opportunities if I can trim this one down REAL good. We’ll see what we can do.

On the story itself, though, I found it really interesting to write a character who isn’t much like me in many major ways, but has some similarities to me that translate into me understanding what it’s like to be her. She’s not like me because she’s pansexual, writes fanfiction, and (frankly) is on the immature side (not in everything, just some things). She IS a lot like me because she writes a lot, had a mom who mocked and criticized the things that mattered to her deeply, and is a giant fan nerd (mainly about one thing). I do wish I had figured out what I deserve in terms of respect as early in my life as she did.

I’ll be hoping to get some beta readers who read and write fanfiction to weigh in on whether I did okay making the character authentic even though writing fanfic is a thing I have literally never done.

A story idea occurred to me today while taking the trash out and listening to the neighbor’s kids screaming while playing outside.

Fortunately, I can’t hear the kids’ screaming while I’m inside, but it reminded me starkly of the terrible experience I had living downstairs from a very loud family back when I lived in an apartment. They were incredibly inconsiderate and so catastrophically loud that my ceiling fan would BOUNCE because they were stomping and vibrating the floor (my ceiling) so much. I took videos and recordings of this (noting that they sometimes went until after 1 in the morning), and the apartment manager insisted that it “wasn’t against the rules” and “I can’t do anything because they pay rent.” (Literally what she said to me.) When I continued to complain and their final suggestion was that they could move ME to a different apartment, I said to hell with it and moved out of the apartment. Last thing I want to do is reward these people with more of my money. In my written statement of intent, I specified that the ONLY reason I was moving out was the noise disturbance; that I had tried to resolve it and they were not cooperative. I found out afterwards that they had entered my reason for leaving in their records as “resident is moving out to go back to school.” LITERALLY MADE UP A LIE so they wouldn’t have to say they were part of the problem.

It’s enough to make you wish you could set a curse on your neighbor. I guess.

I ended up writing a story in which a witch next door does just that.

For some reason my original conception of the story got away from me pretty quickly. I’d initially conceived it as two witches living next door to a loud family and each wanting to handle it differently, and having a philosophical disagreement about whether the family should be put under a curse or whether it’s better to just use magic to protect themselves from the noise. One witch thinks the family should be punished–that they should have consequences for their actions, and that it would be better for the world at large if these kids learn that their screaming affects other people, perhaps making them better people in the future. The other witch thinks it’s not up to them to bring that down upon them, and that punishing them with a curse now will teach them more about fearing witches than about learning to be kind.

I didn’t quite go that direction with the story, but a version of that philosophical disagreement did make it into the story. It’s just that it happens through text messages.

And the whole story happens through written correspondence.

It ended up being something pretty fun and special. I came up with community posts, handwritten door notes, text chats, forum posts, e-mail communications, and more to tell this weird little story of a witch’s curse and the fallout that comes from it–in a modern age where your angry neighbor might post about you on Nextdoor and you might have to go check your behavior on a witch version of “Am I the Asshole?”

It was fun and challenging to come up with different writing styles, chat aliases, forum signatures, profile pics, reactions, you name it. I wrote this thing in one day and more or less finalized its format over the next two days. It’s ready for beta readers, but because of the weird format, I don’t know how many options I’ll have for publication. We’ll see!

My short story “Aquarius” was accepted for publication in September 2022. The anthology had some work to do to get all the stories finalized and organized, but more than a year later in November 2023 the publisher issued the contracts and payments. In March 2024, the publisher contacted us to say they were finalizing it and getting ready to release. And then, as of today (September 15, 2024), the publisher officially notified all the authors that they were no longer planning to publish the anthology (or anything else by anyone but the editor, ever again).

Weirdly, this is the SECOND time that specific story has sold to an anthology and then the project ended up abandoned. The other one didn’t get to the point of issuing a contract, though.

The interaction with the publisher was definitely the longest drawn out process I’d seen, and there was a lot of confusion–rapidly changing website, placeholders that disappeared without notification, long periods of not answering e-mails and queries–so I guess I’m actually kinda glad it didn’t end up permanently placed there. Though I’m also sure it wasn’t anything they did nefariously or on purpose. Perhaps they just had too many balls in the air.

Anyway, disappointing, but the story’s got to go back on submission. I really like this story and I’d love for it to finally find a real home. Hopefully I’ll be placing it back on the “published” list soon.

New short story. I jotted down some ideas for this short story back in May when they first occurred to me but I was too tired or busy to actually write the story. And today I thought, welp, why don’t I write it.

I love when I write down notes for a story and actually do come back to it. It’s especially nice when all the notes come together into something relatively cohesive, coherent, and concise.

(Yes, concise. Your long-blathering author has written a 2,400-word short story for once.)

This one feels pretty personal. The details of the story all have their roots in something that happened to me, though as the details actually bloomed, they’re not the same colors or shapes as the real-life versions.

It’s about hypothetical questions, illness, sexism, disability, assumptions, and not being heard by a friend.

Tentatively titled “Karma’s Dead,” I’ve got a short story cooking. For once I actually did what I always tell myself I’ll do and did some writing while on vacation. I don’t know how much to pat myself on the back for it considering I didn’t finish it, but I have some notes and some thinking to do.

It’s a strange one about people finding each other at the end of the world. (And what happens if all you have is each other and it’s not enough.) I hope the markets I eventually pitch it to won’t be sick of stories that involve a pandemic, though it’s way more like the fictional one in Stephen King’s The Stand than it is like the one we’ve just been through.

So far it is sapphic fiction and involves something I’m not very experienced with: people who write fanfiction.

I have stalled out on writing it for the time being but I will revisit it when I feel like it.

I’ve been thinking lately about people who insist on asking invasive questions even when their subject is uncomfortable. It’s mostly in association with my asexuality awareness activism that I end up telling someone their subject matter or querying style is inappropriate for a non-consenting stranger, and almost without fail I’m then told they JUST WANT TO LEARN and if I’m HOSTILE to their curiosity, probably I just want to be offended, want to shame them, or hate science. Never do they acknowledge that they need a consenting educator if they want to ask intense personal questions about abuse, sexual experience, or physical health, and never do they recognize the damage they do by simply taking our availability and willingness to educate them for granted.

I once met someone at a party who said she was not on Facebook because stalkers had made it too dangerous for her. I didn’t ask. When a different friend asked me who she was in my photos and why she wasn’t tagged, I told him she said she had stalkers. And when he asked me for more of the story, I told him I didn’t know because I had not asked her.

He was FURIOUS.

He demanded to know how the hell I could possibly live with the curiosity of NOT KNOWING who is stalking her and why, and how could I be so cruel as to now pass that mystery on to HIM knowing he has no way to dig up the True Story of Stalkers of a Girl He Has Never Met.

“I just can’t believe you’re not a CURIOUS person,” he scolded me.

And when I said it had been clear to me in the moment that she didn’t want to talk about it–after all, she had been driven off a social media platform by STALKERS–he essentially said it didn’t matter if I hurt her by asking the questions this situation would NATURALLY raise–that she should have known if she told me the stalkers existed that I would want to know everything, and in fact she probably WANTED me to ask the question because why else would she leave that door open? Why, he needed to know, was I such an asshole as to burden him with the knowledge that there was something out there he now could never know? I had cursed him to wonder forever!

It’s this weird entitlement to information at the KNOWN expense of its source, in a general sense, that inspired me to write a new short story. It’s called “Her Experiment.”

The story has nothing to do with asexuality activism or stalkers, but it explores this type of person and the way they manipulate and control people who are harmed by their attempts to help (or satisfy their own curiosity).

To be honest, I’m not sure I like the story. I wrote it in a strange way, continuing to come back to it even at times that I didn’t feel like writing, and finishing it mostly felt like just getting through it. And like most stories I write, it just kept getting longer and less publishable every time I sat down.

I’ll sit with it a bit and then see if anyone wants ten thousand words of entitled curious person.