Tag: September Shorts 2022

Bowing Out

Back at the end of August, I blogged about how I was going to do a writing challenge in September to produce more short stories to fill out my publishing queue. At the time, I had a couple of stories that looked like they were going to be picked up by one of the major magazines: the editor had expressed interest in buying them, and we were going back and forth with an editorial discussion about the series.

Well, to make a long story short, all of that fell through, and it looks like I’ll be self-publishing those stories after all. I’m not really sure what changed, but to give you an idea of what kind of a short story market this is, it’s been around for decades and regularly gets written up in Locus Magazine’s year-in-review. The editor said that things had gotten crazy on his end, then didn’t respond for about a month, and when I sent a polite followup email asking for an update on the status, he gave me the standard “I’m going to pass on this one, but send me your next story.” Which strikes me as kind of weird, given how our previous correspondence led me to believe that the contract was just a formality and he’d be sending one over soon, but whatever.

So now that these stories are back in the publishing queue, I no longer need to write a bunch more to fill it out. In fact, I’ve actually got enough stories to publish one a month through next April, and after I finish the third Christopher Columbus story, I’ll have enough to get through June (one of my older stories comes out of exclusivity in May 2023). Here is the schedule as of right now:

  • OCT 2022: “Blight of Empire”
  • NOV 2022: “Christopher Columbus, Wildcatter”
  • DEC 2022: “The Freedom of Second Chances”
  • JAN 2023: “The Body Tax” (needs to be revised, but it’s already been workshopped)
  • FEB 2023: “Christopher Columbus, Treasure Hunter”
  • MAR 2023: “The Library of Fate”
  • APR 2023: “Hunter, Lover, Cyborg, Slave” (needs to be workshopped and revised)
  • MAY 2023: “Christopher Columbus, Wormhole Mechanic” (partially written, needs to be finished)
  • JUN 2023: “In the Beginning” (still under exclusivity, though I got a special exception to publish it in my third short story collection, The Stars Our Destination.)

Given that I have enough stories to fill out the next nine months, I’m going to bow out of the September Shorts challenge. This is really good for two reasons: first, it allows me to focus more attention on my current novel WIP, the sequel to Star Wanderers; and second, because I’ve fallen really behind on the Zedekiah Wight stories for my J.M. Wight pen name, and this should give me some space to work on the next few of those.

So that’s the plan: refocus on Children of the Starry Sea and work on Zedekiah Wight stuff on the side.

September Shorts 2022: Hunter, Lover, Cyborg, Slave

Whenever I do these short story challenges, the first one always feels like it’s super hard, and I end up spending way more time on it than I thought I would. It also usually ends up a lot longer than I would like. Hopefully the rest of them come faster and easier than this one did.

With that said, I’m actually fairly happy with how this one turned out. It’s kind of a cyberpunk space opera story, dark and gritty, but hopefully with some interesting twists and turns. Also, it’s not a nihilistic story at all, so it kind of breaks from a lot of cyberpunk with that. I really can’t stand nihilistic fiction.

Once again, I used the Mythulu cards to come up with the main story idea. Here are the cards that I drew:

  • JUNGLE: Supports a broad spectrum of life, so competition is fierce. Naturally brings out the strongest, biggest, brightest in everyone.
  • BIOLUMINESCENT: Light emitted by a living organism.
  • HUNTER: Searching with intent to kill. Draw +1 Relationship to explore motive.
    • FAMILIAR: Conduit for magic. Both parties are powerless and ordinary when alone. Represents how relationships transform us for the better.
  • MAN AND MAKER: Maker transforms a raw, useless thing into something extraordinary. Maker’s relationship with creation reveals narcissism or humility.
  • WANTED: Politically important and resisting subpoena or arrest. Authorities are willing to pay bounty to locate.
  • CYBORG: Trades a pound of flesh for superhuman advantage.
  • CHAOS: Source of evolution. Self-aware beings require background chaos for sanity. The amount needed varies.

That last card, CHAOS, got me to think about everything else in a certain way, but by the time the story was finished I don’t think I’d explicitly included that element in the story. That usually happens with at least one of the cards when I do this exercise: it influences how I think about everything else, but then I forget it while writing the actual story.

The thing that made everything come together was the idea of having an AI familiar, like a magic familiar, except with artificial intelligence. This AI is really just a projection of the user’s own subconscious, but augmented with artificial processes so that it interacts with the user like an intelligent, autonomous being.

My wife is getting her PhD in computer science, and she believes that we may never create a superintelligent AI because there appears to be a tradeoff between specialists and generalists. In other words, AI is very good at specializing in specific tasks or areas, but humans are very good at generalizing across all tasks or areas. It may simply be that to create an AI that is good at generalizing, you have to sacrifice its ability to specialize.

The idea of an AI familiar gets around that, because it piggybacks on the user’s own mental processes to do its generalizing, without the user being able to notice. That’s probably not how it works in real life, but this is a sufficiently advanced technology that I don’t feel bad about using a little hand-wavium to explain it. Besides, it makes for a pretty interesting story.

Final word count for the rough draft clocks in at just under 8,200 words. I will probably cut that down below 7,000 after workshopping it, making it a short story by SFWA’s definitions, which (unfortunately) are industry standard.

New Short: The Library of Fate

I actually wrote this one before September, but since I forgot to mention it then, I thought I’d blog about it now. The rough draft is only about 3,700 words, and is basically a time travel / alternate universe story set in a fantasy world, where the evil sorceror weaves possibilities in order to magically alter the timeline.

Once again, this is a Mythulu-inspired story, though instead of drawing a bazillion cards, I only drew six (one for each card type). The cards I drew are:

  • PROSTITUTE: Selling time, body, safety, passions, or dreams to make a living. A few aware of their vulnerability find honor in their work.
  • LIBRARY: Sanctuary for knowledge. Doesn’t necessarily have 4 walls.
  • EXPERIMENT: A controlled investigation where subject does not understand the test. Undertaken to resolve conflicting theories about the world.
  • DYING: Terminally ill, facing extinction, or on a trajectory of colliding beliefs that will rewrite identity forever.
  • WOVEN: Fibers lovingly tangled into a useful shape.
  • AETHER: Matter that is nothing yet, but can become anything. Pure possibility.

It was that last card that started to move everything into place. Others, like the prostitute card or the experiment card, kind of got overlooked in the formulation of the story, though they did serve as useful initial prompts to get me thinking. But once I figured out a way to relate those aspects to the rest of the story idea, they morphed into something else entirely—which is fine.

Got feedback for this one from my writing group yesterday. A lot of things about this story worked really well for them, but they were confused about how the magic works, which is something I need to rectify. Ironically, there was not enough exposition or info dumping in this one. Fixing that will probably add another 500 to 1k words, so I’m expecting the final draft of this story to come in somewhere between 4.5k and 5k.

But it’ll have to wait for a few weeks at least, as I work on finishing the first few stories for September’s writing challenge!

New Short Story Writing Challenge

I self-publish a new short story every month, and I try to keep at least six in the hole so that I have some time to send each one to the magazines and anthologies. Right now, I’ve only got three, soon to be two, so I need to write some short stories. Sounds like it’s time for a writing challenge!

So for the month of September, in addition to working on Children of the Starry Sea (though at a slower pace), I plan to write 40k words of short stories—enough for a small collection, which should fill out the buffer for a while. That comes to between 1,500 and 1,800 words a day, which honestly shouldn’t be that hard, since once I tend to get going on a short story, I’ll write it to the end, whether that’s 2k words or 4k words. I’ll spend the next few months workshopping them through my writing group and cleaning them up, then put them out on submission.

For purposes of this challenge, I’m going to include some of the short story fragments I have lying around, since those need to be cleaned up and turned into something useful. Also, I’ll definitely be working on some Zedekiah Wight stories, since I desperately need more of those to put out into the world. Also some Christopher Columbus stories, though it looks like those are going to get picked up by one of the magazines soon, so look out for that.

As an incentive, if I manage to accomplish this writing challenge, I’ll buy myself a couple of things on my Amazon wish list. I tend to put things on that list and forget about them, or else decide that it’s not worth spending the money, so it should be a good incentive. And I’ll post about each story as I write them. One of the things I want to do is to go through the whole Mythulu deck and write at least one story with each card. This would be a great time to do that.

So get ready! This should be a lot of fun!