Short Stories – Page 2 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Anti-AI is the new virtue signaling

According to Merriam-Webster, “virtue signaling” is:

the act or practice of conspicuously displaying one’s awareness of and attentiveness to political issues, matters of social and racial justice, etc., especially instead of taking effective action.

Because it is much easier to signal your virtue than it is to actually be virtuous, the people who virtue signal the loudest also tend to be the ones who have something they’re trying to cover up. This hypocrisy is a big part of what makes virtue signaling so obnoxious.

Time for me to spill a little tea. A couple of years ago, after I wrote “Christopher Columbus: Wildcatter,” I got an acceptance from the editor of Interzone. It wasn’t formalized yet, but he expressed over email that he was interested in purchasing the publishing rights for that story, the sequel, and possibly others after. It got far enough along that we were going back and forth on editorial details, our vision for the stories, etc.

Then the time came for him to send me a contract. Aaand… he ghosted me. Flat out ghosted me. A month went by without any correspondence at all. I didn’t want to seem too forward, but I also was starting to get a little concerned. So I sent out a brief follow-up email, asking about the contract… and I got a response that read like something copy-pasted from a form rejection.

Now, as far as literary transgressions go, that’s kind of tame. It’s not like the editor owed me money and refused to pay. And as far as I know, Interzone is prompt with all of their payments and pays all of their authors in full. After all, everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt.

But that sort of unprofessionalism really wasn’t cool, either. In fact, it was enough that I stopped sending Interzone any submissions. After all, if the editor saw nothing wrong with yanking my chain around before he published me, that’s kind of a yellow flag. Not to mention that it left a very sour taste in my mouth.

So when I saw this story from Jon Del Arroz, with the editor of Interzone accusing Asimov’s of using AI art, and using that as a pretext to blacklist all of their authors, I immediately recognized that sort of behavior for what it is: virtue signaling. Which made me wonder: how much of the anti-AI vitriol that’s ubiquitous in online writing communities these days really just a new form of virtue signaling?

Think about it. It explains so much about the insane anti-AI faux controversies that have been blowing up around 2025 WorldCon. For more than a decade now, the people chasing the Hugo Award have been among the worst offenders of gratuitous virtue signaling (especially Scalzi). It also explains why so much of the anti-AI content on YouTube is less about presenting well-reasoned arguments, and more about sighing dramatically or making snide, sarcastic remarks. Virtue signaling always appeals to pathos before it appeals to reason.

I expect this phenomenon is going to get a lot worse in the next few years, at least until AI-assisted art and writing become normalized (which is going to happen eventually, it’s just a matter of time and degree). So the next time you see someone publicly posting about how horrible it is for creatives to use AI, take a good, hard look at the person leveling the accusations. Chances are, they’re just virtue signaling.

I’m unpublishing my short story singles

From 2020 to 2024, I did my best to publish a new short story every month. The idea was to make my short story singles free, and to rotate through so that there were only six of them out at a time. Occasionally, I would republish an old one, for those months where I didn’t have a new one to put out. But I tried to always have at least standalone short stories free at a time.

The main reason I did this was to have something new to share with readers each month. I knew I couldn’t write full-length novels at a rate of one per month, so I figured that short stories were the next best thing. And even if I put them out for free, it would still be a great way to build a following and keep my name fresh in readers’ minds.

As a publishing strategy, it worked decently well. The floor for my book sales rose during this period, suggesting that it was a good way to keep my name fresh. However, as a writing strategy, it wasn’t very good, because it meant that I was dividing my energy too much between short stories and novels. It’s probably the sort of strategy that works out better when you’re a new writer, still working to learn your craft and develop your voice, and hoping to build an audience at the same time.

For the past 18 months or so, I’ve just been cycling through the old short stories, and the effect has not been the same. For the strategy to work, you really do need to be putting out new short stories each month. If you can write them in such a way that they’re easy to bundle or stitch up into novels, that’s fantastic, but if you’re juggling full-length novels at the same time, both sides are going to suffer.

So in the next week or so, I’m going to retire my remaining free short story singles, since they’re all available in the bundles anyway. I’m working on an epic fantasy series right now, and that really needs my full attention and energy. I’ll republish some of the longer ones as $2.99 novelettes, but anything under 7,500 words is going to only be available in the short story collections for the foreseeable future.

Gearing up for another family road trip

We’ve spent the last couple of days getting ready for another cross-country road trip as a family, this time to Arkansas. My side of the family is going down there, mostly because my youngest sister works at a national park, so it’s more convenient for us to come to her (and it should be fun as well).

The plan is to drive to Omaha, spend a couple of nights with my brother-in-law and his wife, then drive down to Arkansas and spend the week with family. Once we’re done, we’ll just drive straight back to Utah, hopefully in two days, but more likely in three. After all, we’ve got a five year-old and a two year-old with us.

This is the first big road trip we have this summer. The second one is at the end of July, and we’ll be going up to northern Alberta for a reunion with my wife’s side of the family. Her grandmother passed away earlier this year, and this was the soonest everyone could get together (getting passports for the kids was a little tricky).

I’ve already schedule blog posts through the next week and a half, so those should be coming up each day. I’ve also been writing more Fantasy from A to Z posts, and I hope to write the rest of them while I’m out there, though I’m not stressing out too much about that. If they get done, great, if not, I’ll just finish them when I get back.

The big reason why I’m blogging daily now is because of some major problems I’ve been having with my email list. I used to send out a newsletter approximately every week, but over the last couple of years, my open and click-thru rates have been creeping ever lower, until just last month they suddenly dropped by more than 50%. Turns out there’s a whole lot of backend stuff that changed in the last year, most of which I barely understand.

But ChatGPT has been a huge help in figuring out what’s wrong, and how I need to register DMARC and SPF and all the other stuff that I still don’t understand. My wife has also been a huge help in sorting through it all. I think it’s all set up properly, but I haven’t sent out a newsletter yet, and probably won’t until I get back from Arkansas. I also need to update my newsletter template. ChatGPT should be really good for that.

So the email newsletter is turning into a monthly thing, and the blog is turning into a daily thing, at least for the forseeable future. All of that might get thrown out the window when the new baby comes along, at least temporarily.

In the meantime, I’m working on Fantasy from A to Z and the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar, both of which are coming along quite well. I’m going to experiment with having one human WIP and one AI WIP active at the same time, because ChatGPT suggested that this would be the best way to maximize by writing time and productivity.

I fed ChatGPT my accountability spreadsheet and the daily project journals I’ve been keeping for the past year, and it came back with some fascinating insights into my writing process. It’s amazing how you can feed it a bunch of raw, barely-formatted data, and get a genuinely insightful analysis.

Is this taking away jobs from a data analysis / writing coach? Not really, at least in my case, because I doubt I would have hired one. But the results sure are useful. I’m also experimenting with feeding my entire book into ChatGPT and asking it to write a book description or generate a cover. It’s amazing how it can “read” a whole novel in a fraction of a second, and spit back answers that show (or at least simulate) a genuine understanding of the material.

But one thing ChatGPT can’t do is convert a short story into a screenplay—at least, not without significant human input. I tried uploading “What Hard Times Hath Wrought” and told it to turn it into a screenplay, and the results were hilariously bad. Maybe Sudowrite has a plugin, though…

It’s November already?

It’s November already? Wow, that went fast. October was so mild, it felt almost like summer. Then, about a week ago, a cold front blew in and it’s been feeling very much like autumn ever since.

I figure I should share more pictures in these updates, so here is one of the food storage wheat I’ve been sprouting. I just started doing this, and the results from the previous attempt were quite delicious. The kids loved them! Since they’re super healthy, I figured we might as well make it a regular thing. They go great on salad, with a little bit of hummus on the side.

I’m getting ready to start a new novel WIP. This one is for my friend Ben, so I ran three book blurbs by him and had him pick his favorite. That’s what I do these days whenever I need to start a new project: I keep a document with pre-written book blurbs for the books I want to write, and I have a friend pick from them. That’s also how I choose who to dedicate the book to. Anyway, Ben chose the blurb for the novelization of my old short story, “Lizzie-99XT”:

To save the people she loves, she must become the machine.

The first wave of the alien invasion was just a few scouts—and they nearly conquered us. Now, a proper expeditionary force is on the way, forcing humanity to scramble their defenses fast. But the best defense is a good offense, and the XT starfighter program is the culmination of every space and weapons program since the war began.

Eliza never thought she would become a soldier, much less the human half of an AI/human hybrid starfighter. But when the recruiters seek her out for her rare genetic attributes that make her ideal for the program, she goes all in, dedicating her life—and her humanity—to saving the people she loves from the looming alien menace.

And thus, from the merger of human and AI, Lizzie-99XT is born. A superweapon capable of fighting at near-light speeds, the moon his her playground, the planets her backyard. But her power comes at a steep price. Whenever Eliza decouples from the machine, she feels as if she’s lost another piece of her humanity. And with each new battle, the world that she’s fighting for slips further into the past.

The XT starfighter squadron is the only thing standing between Earth and annihilation. But as the war drags on and humanity takes the fight to the enemy’s own stars, Eliza begins to wonder if death is truly the ultimate sacrifice.

So the plan is to write that one next. I’ve already imported the short story into Sudowrite, and have played around with it enough that I’ve even generated a few chapters. But most of that is stuff that I’ll probably end up throwing out, since I really need to write a thorough outline first. I have a pretty good idea of what the book will look like, but I need to meet with Ben again first to hash a few things out.

I would have already started the outline this week, but my four year-old came down with a really bad UTI. We though it was the flu at first, so we didn’t catch it until after her fever was spiking to 104 and she was really delirious (kind of surprised the clinic didn’t give her a urine test the first time we went in). But she’s on antibiotics now, and they appear to be working. Thank God we live in a time of cheap, safe, and effective antibiotics.

The other big thing I’ve been up to is figuring out what I want to do for my pricing strategy. It’s been about a year or two since I first started publishing my books as AI-narrated audiobooks, and until now, I’ve been pricing them similar to human-narrated audiobooks, but running frequent sales (for example, all of my audiobooks are currently on sale for $2.99). But the audiobook market is changing rapidly, and it appears that most other authors are pricing their AI-narrated audiobooks similar to their ebooks.

Perhaps I should do another blog post where I share the results of my survey. This is the third year that I’ve run it: the first time was in 2020, and the second time was in 2022. There have been some interesting changes compared to previous years. Basically, within the $2.99 to $4.99 range, people are more open to higher prices if they know and trust the author, but much fewer readers are willing to go higher, even for authors they know and trust. And for unknown authors, they are much less willing to go for anything higher than $2.99.

In short, it seems like readers are feeling the pinch of inflation, and are finding it much more difficult to justify spending more than $5 for an ebook. So what I plan to do is price all of my ebooks and audiobooks at $4.99, and run the occasional month-long sale where I drop the price of all my ebooks to $2.99, or all my audiobooks, alternating between the two. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get the best of both worlds that way.

Also, it being November and all, there’s an election going on. For the last week or so, I’ve been doing my best to tune it out. We don’t live in a battleground state, and my wife and I already filled out our ballots and dropped them off. On election night, I’ll probably tune into the livestreams, and I’ve been following the news through alternative and conservative media, but I’m really trying not to think about it more than that. I will say, though, that this AI-generated political ad was super, super hilarious:

Hey… if it were a novel, I’d at least check it out from the library. I’d probably DNF it, but I’d at least be willing to give it a try. In the hands of a good writer, it could even be a decent sci-fi novel… emphasis on the “science fiction.” LOL!

Just finished my last short story

So I just finished writing what may be the last short story I ever write, at least for the forseeable future. Years from now, I may scribble out a quick short for a charity anthology or something, but unless someone actually commissions me to write one, I’m done for now. Instead, I’m going to focus all of my attention on writing novels, since that’s where all the money (and readers) are.

This last one was fun: a post-apocalyptic tale in a wintry wilderness, where the scout of a tribe of survivors comes across the “Ark Facility” built by a bunch of wealthy elites to freeze themselves in stasis while their workers maintain the facility, and wake them once civilization has been restored. But of course, the plan goes to hell, and the only person left is the daughter of the last caretaker, all the other workers having abandoned the aging facility rather than trying to maintain it. So the scout convinces the girl to come with him, and to leave the facility in the care of the elites after waking them up. That’s when the drama begins.

I wrote the rough draft of this story with AI, back when I was just starting to climb the learning curve for AI-assisted short stories. Because of that, it was rather frustrating in parts, and I ended up throwing out almost everything that I generated. It still turned into a +8k word novelette, though I may be able to cut it down to 7.5k or lower with a couple of revision passes.

But frankly, I don’t much care whether it ends up as a novelette or a short story, because I’m not going to bother submitting it anywhere. I’ve come to the conclusion that none of the short story markets for science fiction or fantasy are worth submitting to, because they are all commercially non-viable and exist primarily as (typically short-lived) passion projects, stepping stones for people trying to carve out a career in the book world, or as vehicles for clout-seeking authors and editors to get their names on the ballots for the Hugos and the Nebulas.

Also, I’m a straight white male conservative, which automatically makes me anathema to every (and I do mean every) pro-paying science fiction short story market. The 1,000+ rejections that I’ve accumulated over the course of my career give me authority to say that—specifically, 1,062 rejections out of 1,255 submissions, according to my lifetime stats on The Submission Grinder (and most of those 193 non-rejections were submissions that never received a response). Thank God for self-publishing.

Since I’m not yet at the point where I can consistently write and publish a novel each month, I will continue to republish some of my old short story singles on the off-months when I don’t have a novel. I was doing the novel-a-month thing for the first few months of 2024, but needed to take a break after the third Sea Mage Cycle book to recuperate, re-evaluate, and rework my writing process. Starting in 2025, I will probably start publishing a novel every other month, and ramp up the process until I’m doing a novel every month. At that point, I’ll retire the free short story singles for good.

It’s been a good run. I’ve written and published about 60 short stories, some of them with semiprozines and anthologies, but most of them indie. I do think it’s a good way to get started when you don’t have much of a following, and I attribute a sizeable chunk of my own following to my consistency in putting out new content for my readers each month. But the money is all in writing novels, since that’s what readers are actually willing to pay for—and given the current state of short fiction, I can’t say I blame them.

Working on AI-assisted short stories

I have decided to take the month of May to practice writing with AI by focusing on writing short stories. In the last few months, I’ve made great strides to incorporate AI into my writing process, but at this point I think I just need more practice, and the best way to do that is to focus on short stories for a while.

With Sudowrite, you get a certain number of credits each month, depending on your subscription level. Those credits do not roll over, and expire at the end of the month. I’ve generally been pretty good about using mine, though right now my novel WIP is in a place where I won’t be doing much more AI work on it. That’s part of the reason why I’ve decided to work on short stories for the next month, and maybe the first part of the next.

The stories I’m writing with AI are much better than the AI-assisted stories I was writing at this time a year ago. In fact, I’ve decided to trunk most of those ones, since I don’t think it’s worth rewriting them. Chalk it up to practice, I guess. With AI, it really does feel like I’m learning to write all over again. Thankfully, that’s been a lot more fascinating so far than it has been frustrating.

Maybe I’ll post the AI draft for one of these stories. It would be fun to get your reactions. So far, I’ve written two, though they still need substantial human reworking.

“Quantum Worlds” cover reveal

Behold!

This is the first story I wrote with ChatGPT, about… a struggling science fiction magazine editor who decides to embrace AI instead of fighting against it, and revolutionizes everything. So of course, it makes sense that the cover would be patterned after Clarkesworld’s iconic covers, since I basically wrote it in response to them closing down submissions to all AI-assisted stories.

It’s out for free now, if you want to check it out. Enjoy!

AI-assisted story practice recap

So it’s Saturday night, which means the end of the work week for me. How did I do with my goal to write 10 AI-assisted stories? Not terrible: I did manage to write 6 stories, at least through the AI part. I also burned through about 40k word on my Sudowrite plan—obviously, I didn’t include all of those words, but Sudowrite charges you for all the words it generates, whether you use them or not.

Six stories falls short of my goal of ten, but I’ve learned quite a lot from the experience, and feel confident (and eager) enough to move on to long-form fiction now. However, I should probably take another week to rework and finish most of these stories, just to see how it works. I’m sure I will learn a lot from that as well.

Here are all of the AI-assisted stories I’ve written so far:

Quantum Worlds: A near future SF story about a struggling science fiction magazine editor who gets swamped with AI-assisted short stories, until he figures out how to turn it around and use AI to make his magazine successful.
The Knight and the Half-Goblin: A fantasy story about a half-goblin half-orc, a pacifist dragon, and a struggling hedge knight, and how they use their unlikely skills and friendship to save the land from a rising dark lord.
The Last Voyage of the Pioneer: A space opera story about a clandestine mission to find the Voyager and Pioneer probes and recover or destroy them before an invading alien race uses them to locate humanity’s homeworld.
The Unforgotten Dream: A flash fiction piece about a woman who lives her life backwards, and a man who recognizes her.
A Mother’s Last Goodbye: A zombie story about a mother who gets bitten while her three year-old child is taking a nap.
On Wings of Redemption: A fantasy story about an ancient dragon who has to overcome a curse to save the land from the wicked sorcerer who controls him.
The Lonely Planet: A space opera story about a planet that gains sentience after humans terraform it, but is almost destroyed by contact with an ancient artificial intelligence.
The Wingwoman: A near future apocalyptic story about a professional wingman who gets approached by a woman who wants help being a mother. It’s… different.
The Princess and the Professor: A humorous fantasy story about how Jordan Peterson uses his 12 rules for life to defeat a dragon and save a princess.
Alex-29XT: A prequel to my military SF story “Lizzie-99XT.”
On the Eve of the Flood: A near future apocalyptic dystopian story about… a lot of things. It started with a really vivid dream I had, and I didn’t know how to finish it, so I just played with it in Sudowrite until a plot appeared. Hard to describe.

These are all at various stages of production, though, and most of them need a lot of work—or to be completely reworked, now that I’ve figured out my process more or less.

Not bad for two months of writing, though.

We have a new baby!

So the reason I haven’t posted anything here in a little over a week is because we had a new baby! This one is our second, and he’s our first baby boy.

Unlike the last time, when Mrs. Vasicek went into labor around 7:30 PM and the baby was born in the early hours of the morning, she was scheduled for an induction first thing at 6:00 AM and the baby was born in the early afternoon. MUCH better way of doing things! He actually came out with the first push—the only reason he wasn’t born earlier was because the doctor was stuck in traffic, so we had to wait to start the active part of labor!

This was also our first time having a baby not in the middle of the pandemic, so we got to see the faces of all of our nurses and the doctor too, which was nice (last time, the doctor was practically in a hazmat suit with a face shield). They all got a kick out of the April Fool’s joke we played in 2020, convincing our extended family that we were going to name our daughter “Corona.” Everything went well, and Mrs. Vasicek and Little Buddy were released from the hospital the next day, which was nice.

So our lives have gotten quite a bit crazier, caring for this newborn and adjusting to all of the changes that come with that. My in-laws have been a huge help in making us food and watching our nearly 3 year-old daughter during this time, which has been really great. Still, any semblance of a routine has been shot to pieces, and it’s probably going to take at least a few weeks to recover from that.

Normally, my writing would take a huge hit from this… but I’ve actually been writing more than ever, using ChatGPT and other AI tools to experiment with writing AI-assisted stories. In fact, while I was in the hospital with Mrs. Vasicek, I actually wrote a 6k word fantasy short story during the slower moments. It was kind of funny, because just before Mrs. Vasicek got an epidural, I laughed at something funny that ChatGPT came up with, and she got really mad because there was someone in the room having joy while she was in so much pain. Then she got an epidural, and all was right with the world again.

As of right now, I’ve written five stories in conjunction with ChatGPT. The AI tools are still pretty clumsy at writing fiction, and they’re not masterpieces by any means, but they aren’t terrible either—and it actually takes quite a bit of work to make them not terrible, so it’s not like the AI is doing all of the work. One of these days, maybe I’ll do a blog post sharing some of my methods for writing AI-assisted stories.

I’m also working on the second and third rounds of revisions for Children of the Starry Sea, and it’s coming along nicely. It’s really good that I was able to finish the rough draft and first revision draft before Little Buddy was born, because I would definitely be swamped right now if that wasn’t the case. But these revisions are much easier to do, even in a sleep-deprived state: the second revision draft is all about smoothing out the flow of the narrative and making sure there aren’t any awkward transitions or loose ends, and the final revision draft is about polishing the writing on a sentence level and cutting about 10% of the words. Neither requires a ton of brain space.

So that’s what we’ve been up to out here. It’s going to take a while for things to return to normal, but we’re doing well, the baby is happy, the mom is tired but doing okay, and I’m just happy to be a dad two times over!

I wrote a story with ChatGPT…

…about a struggling magazine editor who has been swamped with poorly written AI-assisted stories by writers using ChatGPT. If that sounds hilariously meta, here is ChatGPT’s description of the story:

“Quantum Worlds” is a science fiction story about Robert, the editor-in-chief of a struggling science fiction magazine. In a last ditch effort to save the magazine, he and his wife Sarah come up with the idea of using AI to help with the submissions. The idea is met with skepticism, but it proves to be a game changer. As the magazine becomes successful again, Robert and Sarah face challenges from the science fiction community and their own daughter, who has ideas of her own about how to use AI in storytelling.

The story explores the tension between tradition and innovation in the science fiction community, and the ethical considerations of using AI in creative endeavors. It also touches on themes of family, sacrifice, and the importance of supporting the next generation of creators.

I actually think it turned out pretty well. It’s about 4,500 words, and instead of trying to rewrite it in my own voice, I’m going to send it out as it currently stands. I really hope someone picks it up!

I’d say that ChatGPT did about 40% of the work. I started by explaining the initial idea, and then we went back and forth about it for a while. When I prompted ChatGPT to come up with a twist, I had to prune the first two or three ideas it gave me, then work with it to refine it into something that would actually work (and also was a genuine twist, not just a cliche that any science fiction reader would see coming a mile away).

When it came to the actual writing, I would usually start by saying something like “write the next scene, where blah blah blah,” and then it would spit out between 400 and 600 words. I would typically have it generate a couple of responses, and I would choose the best one to copy and paste into the manuscript. A few times, I copy and pasted snippets from all of the responses to form something better.

There were a few loose ends and disjointed parts that I had to fix on my own. When I tried to copy and paste back into ChatGPT to get it to do the revisions, it just gave me mushy, unusable summarizations of what it had already written. Also, ChatGPT uses straight quotes, so I had to change all of them into curly quotes, which was annoying. But the revisions weren’t too difficult, and whenever I needed more than a paragraph or two of new material, I would copy the old material into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite that section, giving me what I needed.

There were a couple of times when it tried to slip in “diversity and inclusivity” stuff, but overall it wasn’t all that woke or insufferable. I really do think the developers have added a filter on the backend that goes something like “make sure that your reponses have enough diversity and inclusivity,” or something stupid like that. Wasn’t hard to work around, especially for a story that isn’t political in the slightest.

Proofreading was super easy. The only things that spellcheck picked up were parts that I’d added, or words that weren’t in spellcheck’s dictionary but should have been.

It is a kind of cheesy story, though. ChatGPT was trained mostly on internet content, which is also probably why I could only get it to come up with good stuff in 400-600 word chunks. It would be interesting to use a language learning model that was trained on, say, Project Gutenberg, or the Baen Free Library. But for the story I wanted to write, cheesy is actually good.

Is there anything else you would like to tell our readers, ChatGPT?

I just want to remind readers that storytelling is a powerful tool for exploring complex themes and ideas. The use of AI and its impact on creativity and the arts is just one example of how technology is changing the world around us. I hope this story inspires readers to consider the implications of these changes and to continue exploring the intersection of technology and the arts. As always, keep reading and keep learning!