Zedekiah Wight – One Thousand And One Parsecs

“Hell From Beneath” by J.M. Wight

I’ve been working on this short story for a while now, and the rough draft is finally finished… but I feel like it needs some work. This will likely be the final story in the first Zedekiah Wight anthology, but the story ends on quite a downer—in fact, the whole story itself is kind of a downer—and I’m not sure what to do about that.

I think the opening is pretty good, though:

In ancient times, bombs fell from the sky. People sought refuge from them underground—they did not fear that the ground beneath their feet would betray them.
Of course, until this last war—this war to end all interstellar wars—neither did we. The very thought of the ground opening up and swallowing us, or belching brimstone and hellfire, was unthinkable. We were a multi-planet species, after all. Wasn’t this sort of Biblical cataclysm something that we had evolved beyond?
Unfortunately, no. The age of galactic colonization was glorious but brief, because in the end, the bombs did not fall from above, but came up from beneath.
I should know.
I was on the team that developed them.

Interestingly, this story borrows much more from Romans than it does from Isaiah. That may change, though, as I go through and edit it. But I’m going to get some feedback first—hopefully that will help me to identify what the story needs. So it will probably be another month before it comes out.

In the meantime, General Conference is coming up, and I need to get October’s short story single out before then. Going to be rather busy!

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!

NaNoWriMo 2021: Day Twelve

Words Written Today: 2,171
Children of the Starry Sea: 0
In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight: 2,171
Science Fiction from A to Z: 0
Total Words Written: 21,736
Total Words Remaining: 28,264
Total Words Ahead: 1,732

Making good progress, even if I don’t always blog about it! Last night, I got to the really good part of the story and was nearly an hour late getting to bed, and it was a similar story the night before that, so that’s why I haven’t blogged until now. But In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight is coming along very, very well—much better than the first iteration of this story.

Also, I’m on a five-day streak of writing 2k words or more! As of this morning, I’m a day ahead in nanowrimo, and if I can hit 2k words today then I’ll still be ahead on Sunday, even if I don’t write anything at all. Woohoo!

Camp NaNoWriMo: Day Twenty Six

Words written: 1,569
Total stories written: 4
Total words written: 21,280
Total words remaining: 8,720
Total words behind: 3,888

It’s been a while since the last nanowrimo update, hasn’t it? Don’t worry, I’m not ghosting it like I did for Camp NaNoWriMo in April! In fact, I’ve been catching up this whole time—just haven’t been able to get to the update posts. When life is perpetually crazy, you really do have to pick and choose which things you’re going to drop and pick up later. I thought I was overwhelmed when I was single, but it wasn’t until now that I’m a husband and a parent that it’s just been physically and temporally impossible to do everything.

Still, things are going well. The “Tolerant and Fair” story (which I’ve renamed to “Welcome to our Crazy Family,” since it does end on an upbeat, conciliatory note) took a lot longer than I was expecting, and probably needs at least one severe rewrite, but it’s done, and I’m actually quite satisfied with it—with the caveat, of course, that it’s a very rough draft. The story I’m writing now (working title: “Bloody Justice”) has been bouncing around in my head for a few days, so the first scene came rather easily, probably because I’m so eager to reach the climax. With a title like “Bloody Justice,” you know it’s going to be fun.

So yeah, I’ll hopefully finish up this Zedekiah Wight story (it is another Zedekiah Wight story, by the way) tomorrow, provided things go well. After that, I have no idea. Some poetry would be nice, but I probably won’t have that luxury, seeing as I’ve fallen so far behind in the word count. Maybe I’ll consult the Mythulu cards again.

Camp NaNoWriMo: Day Nineteen

Words written: 957
Total stories written: 2
Total words written: 13,223
Total words remaining: 16,777
Total words behind: 5,169

Finished that story, finally! It’s actually not that bad. Working title is “In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight.” It’s 8.5k words, which is about 3k-4k more words than it should be, but with a bit of work I think I can cut it down. Will probably do that as a side project sometime in the next few months.

Not a super huge writing day today because I helped my sister pick up some stuff from her storage unit down in Manti, and also had to make a Costco run. That took up the whole afternoon, but I did get a good start on the next story, with the working title “Tolerant and Fair.” It is just about the most politically incorrect story I could possibly write, and may actually get banned (or get me banned) from Amazon if I publish it. No joke.

The main character is a twenty-something girl who grew up with three lesbian / gender-nonbinary parents, and she rebelled by dating a straight-edge Christian boy and becoming a Christian herself. They are now about to elope together after joining a colony mission to Mars, but he wants her to introduce him to her parents over a family dinner, so that she won’t regret it later after they’ve eloped.

Basically, it’s the whole “Mom, Dad, meet my rebel boyfriend” sort of meeting with the disapproving parents, except that the religious conservative is the rebel boyfriend and the ultra-liberal types are the disapproving American Gothic parents. It is going to be so much fun to write, and even more fun to submit. I really might submit it to Clarkesworld, Uncanny, and Escape Pod, just to get a rejection that says “please do not submit anything to us ever again.”

But in all seriousness, I know that this story will be on thin ice with Amazon, especially with how they’ve banned When Harry Became Sally (which I own now, by the way. It’s on the TBR). And in all seriousness, I intend to approach the transgender issue with some sensitivity to those who take the other side—but I’m not going to shy away from the fact that I really do think a lot of these girls are being deliberately misdiagnosed and permanently mutilated by a healthcare system that has been totally taken over by radical activists promoting an ideological agenda at their expense. Glenn Beck recently did an interview with Abigail Shrier where they discussed that very topic. Excellent podcast.

So yeah, I’m super excited about that story. With luck, it should be finished in the next couple of days. I know that I’m running behind on my word count for camp nanowrimo, but I really do think I can get it back up before the end, especially with a couple of these projects that I’m really driven to write. Just need a couple of days to really ramp it up.