Another new short story has been born after an idea seized me on the night of April 19. Now welcoming my new completed story “In Your Favor” to the fold.

It’s been a while since an idea would not let me rest. I initially thought this one would be short because it’s a genre I have never written before and I was just testing the waters, but 23,000 words later, I have a novella on my hands. Churned out restlessly in eight days during a week I was otherwise very overbooked and busy. Quality of its first draft, if I may say so, is unusual. Especially considering how little I slept.

“In Your Favor” is about six aspiring adventurers whose last stop before shipping out on quests is a ritual to get their magic powers. One catch: Only five of the six will be given a talent, and traditionally the sixth member becomes a team manager who can’t go on the adventures. I’ve never written anything remotely associated with quest-fantasy plots and I don’t read much traditional fantasy, nor do I play any role-playing games, so I felt a little out of my depth doing something that others would probably read as essentially LitRPG (or at least LitRPG-adjacent). Not my thing whatsoever, but here I was writing it.

Premise aside, though, this completely plays to my strengths. It’s a character interaction piece. We don’t actually get to see a quest happen; it’s basically a bottle episode. It’s entirely about what develops when six friends who have been through a lot together have to face a huge change happening to all of them at once, how their relationships shift and endure, and how they pull together or fall apart when the final truths are decided.

And because it’s me writing it, of course half the team is queer. The main character is in a (poorly hidden) secret same-sex relationship with another character, and the cast includes a nonbinary member for no plot-relevant reason. I really appreciate incidental queerness and want to incorporate it into more stories.

I love my little group even though I just met them. I adore them with my whole heart.

New short story! This one is about two administrative professionals having epic disagreements about file organization.

The main character is not like me in most ways–she’s more aggressive, a little less compassionate, and gay–but we share the experience of working in a male-dominated field in an administrative capacity and being secretly queer at work. Her opposite–an outgoing employee who trains her before leaving THE FILES in her capable hands–is not based on anyone I know, and struggles with some mental health issues.

The story itself is not autobiographical, but nearly all of the examples of workplace bullshittery are things that really happened to me. I made the guys geotechnical engineers instead of the transportation engineers I work with, but there’s a lot of overlap.

It’s a little on the long side at 6,000 words (NO ONE HERE IS SURPRISED), but its length shouldn’t be too prohibitive in finding a place for it to live. I’ll start sending it out tomorrow.

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.