So this is an odd one. I got an acceptance for my short story “A Shadow to Light.” I’ve received a publishing offer from a nice little anthology called The Mystic’s Pen, Volume 2, put out by The Edge.

I wrote “A Shadow to Light” in 2024 because I wanted to try writing in a world that was already established in some of my other work. In this case, I did something unprecedented: I pulled from a weekly webcomic called Negative One that I’ve been writing since the year 2005. And Negative One in turn is developed from novels I wrote in college. (I turned them into a webcomic for a low-pressure way to love on the characters and their situation without trying to bend them into the constraints of the publishing industry.) The relatively (well, for me) complex worldbuilding of the otherworldly dimension was featured in the comic for such a short time because the protagonist left and she doesn’t remember it. I wanted to do something else with all that work I’d done.

So I adapted a situation originally referenced in the comic into a cool story about the protagonist and her teacher, and a new friend coming into the mix. They argue about shadows and dimensional travel and who’s the boss of whom. Sometimes you just need a vacation.

I’m interested to see how well the story carries over to print form. Considering that’s its distant roots, I hope it survives the transition very well.