Month: June 2026

Week 24 & 25 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the weeks of Jun 15 – Jun 28.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 2
  • Submissions Currently Out: 5
  • Submissions Total: 22
  • Rejections: 19
  • Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

Two submissions came back to me over this two-week period.

One was for The Incident at Pleasant Hills, and was a very pleasant personalized rejection that said several nice things about the story before the usual “we get 1000 submissions each submission period and only have 10 slots” let-down. The one piece of feedback was that the beginning was too slow, so I might review the story and see if there’s anything I can tighten up next time I send it out.

The other response was an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest for my story, Red Eye. This is the second time I’ve submitted, and the second honorable mention I’ve received. So that’s something.

I do not know how many submissions they receive for their quarterly contests, but I am sure that a paying contest with no submission fee receives quite a few. They have a multi-tiered system: honorable mentions, “silver” honorable mentions, finalists, and 1st/2nd/3rd place. Judging by Duotrope stats, I would guess that something like 10-20% of entrants fall into all those categories. So I’d say an honorable mention is about on par with a tier 2 rejection from a paying publication. More or less.

I still narrowly meet their “new writer” criteria, so I’ll likely send more stories their way as long as I am able. Being an L. Ron Hubbard joint, they are at least nominally associated with Scientology, something I am certainly not a fan of. But all that Tom Cruise money pays for a free contest with good prizes. I figure the cult cash might as well go to me, rather than all the other shady things they get up to.

Goals and Results

Last time, my goals were:

  1. Finish T.I.M. (Formerly F-TIB)
  2. Start working on Beneath the House in Caen revisions.

I “finished” T.I.M., clocking a little over 2,000 more words, and bringing the total to 6,000. That’s a significant bump from the original 2,300-word story. It’s also not surprising since it went from 5-ish nebulous short scenes to eleven. It still needs significant cleanup, and maybe another Critters run, and will hopefully shed words along the way. However, for the moment I am happy to let it rest.

Meanwhile, I collected all the Critters feedback for Beneath the House in Caen into a single document and started creating a bullet list of things to work on.

I have to say, there are a lot of things I like about Critters, and the fact that Andrew Burt keeps the enterprise going year after year when he undoubtedly loses money on it makes him a saint among writers. But dear God, the website and the email infrastructure feel like they are from the 90s, and the critique emails come in with bizarre formatting. Every time I submit a story, I think about creating some scripts reformat the critiques for readability. Maybe I’ll get around to that some day.

Beneath the House in Caen feels to me like a story that needs much less work than T.I.M., and I think the feedback bears that out. I’ll try to bounce back and forth between this and T.I.M. over the next week and see what I can get done.

Next Week

My goals for next week are flip-flopped versions of the previous weeks:

  1. Revise Beneath the House in Caen to completion, or close to it.
  2. Clean up and trim T.I.M., consider whether it needs another round of Critters.

Next week will be Week 26—the halfway mark of this Year of Short Stories. I plan to review my goals and see how they compare to my current progress. Spoiler: I’m a bit behind. However, I’m not that far behind, so I suspect I picked my goals well. More on that next week.

Adventure — The Story Idea Vault

It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Adventure

Life in the preserve is peaceful. It’s not very big—you can walk the perimeter in a day—but there are only a few of us and we don’t need much. There is plenty of good food, and for the most part we all get along. If any of us feel the need to explore, there are other preserves the Robbies can take us to.

I was happy where I was. I didn’t plan my adventure; it happened to me. One day I woke up sick, the first of us to know “illness” in 194 years. The Robbies were very kind. They explained how my illness could spread, so I had to be taken away from the preserve. That’s why I became the first person to see the world outside the preserves.

The Robbies have cities filled with gleaming spires of silver and glass. Machines fly among them like beautiful insects. They brought me to a tower and told me it had been built just for me, a “hospital” where they would examine me and try to understand why I was sick.

They haven’t found the answer. My body hurts so much I can barely get out of my bed. I do not blame them. They know much more than I do. If they cannot find the answer, who could? They are always kind, and they seem to be working very hard.

One of the Robbies visited me yesterday to tell me I may be the first human in centuries to go on another kind of adventure. He placed a silver hand on mine and explained that the illness would stop my body from working. Then, I will embark on an adventure called “death.” Just as we left the preserve to come here, I will leave my body and go somewhere else. Even the Robbies don’t know where.

It sounds frightening, and I am very tired, but I have learned that we cannot always choose our adventures. Sometimes they choose us.

Week 23 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the weeks of Jun 8 – Jun 15.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 2
  • Submissions Currently Out: 7
  • Submissions Total: 20
  • Rejections: 17
  • Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

We seem to be in the summer lull. No responses to any of my submissions this week.

Goals and Results

I continue the rework of T.I.M., finishing another 1500 words or so. I had a tough time figuring out the right way through one of my new scenes, but I think I cracked it. I have two scenes left. If I can get through those next week, I’ll do a cursory clean-up pass and set it aside to look at the Critters feedback for Beneath the House in Caen. The feedback for that story was fairly positive, so I don’t think I’ll have nearly as much rework to do.

T.I.M. has gone through enough of a re-work that I will probably submit the new version to Critters to see how it is received. This is unusual for me; I usually do one round of critiques, and then tighten the story with that feedback to my own satisfaction before sending it out to publishers. However, I’ve been doing more rework after the critique phase recently, so a second round is beginning to feel more justified.

I don’t know whether that means I’m refining my process, or if these last couple stories have just needed more rework than usual.

Next Week

  1. Finish T.I.M.
  2. Start working on Beneath the House in Caen revisions.

The Other Side — The Story Idea Vault

It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

The Other Side

We converted to green energy. We built the carbon sequestration plants. We started turning things around. We had the best of intentions. We were just too slow.

The result was widespread famine and death, unnatural natural disasters, and the worst refugee crises in human history. The die-off of species eventually slowed, but so many ecosystems had already been thinned out and strained beyond the breaking point.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. When the ecosystem is going to collapse anyway, you might as well get creative.

Enclaves of rogue gene-grinders sprouted up in places that were already supposedly uninhabitable, CRISPRing up new versions of old species to fill in the empty niches. It was an imperfect science, and every change caused its own cascade of problems, like propping up a collapsing building so they could live in the basement.

Instead of becoming wastelands, those places became new oases of chaotic life—riots of species that broke down pollutants, converted chemicals, generated energy, and regenerated resources.

The gene-grinders didn’t stop at other species. They had grown beyond taboos. They altered themselves to better fit their new ecosystems, and sometimes just for fun.

The world survived global catastrophe. Humanity survived too. But neither was the same on the other side.

Week 21 & 22 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is for the weeks of May 25 – Jun 7.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 2
  • Submissions Currently Out: 7
  • Submissions Total: 20
  • Rejections: 17
  • Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

Two weeks, and one form rejection for Incident at Pleasant Hills. All my stories are still on submission in at least one place, so I’m not sending out more at the moment.

Goals and Results

Last post, two weeks ago, I had a singular goal. Finish revising F-TIB.

Well, it’s still not done, but some progress has been made. Firstly, the story has a new name! It’s now called T.I.M.

After critiques came back, I did a lot of rethinking, which resulted in a whole new outline and roughly twice as many scenes. I’ve now written a couple thousand words of fresh or mostly fresh material toward that outline, and I’m approximately halfway done. It’s looking like the updated story will be a little more than double the word count of the original, at least until it gets its follow-up trimming.

I think I may be able to get this new version of the story written by next week. However, I have had…

A Distraction!

I don’t talk too much about my non-writing hobbies here, but something has been absorbing a decent amount of my time and attention lately. I’m making a game.

It’s not a big exciting game, and I don’t expect it to end up on Steam or consoles or anything like that. It’s a traditional roguelike, which is a very niche genre, and I’m currently making it strictly for fun. And perhaps surprisingly, part of the reason I’m enjoying the process is AI.

When it comes to writing fiction, I have a very cut-and-dry opinion on AI, one that seems to be largely shared by other writers: it’s pointless to use it. Writing fiction is self-expression, and if AI is mucking about with all the words, it’s inherently taking away at least some of that self-expression. If I read something, I want it to be written entirely by a human being. The words and their entertainment value are only part of the equation—I also want to feel that I’m receiving a coded signal from the author, a signal that tells me something about them, as vague and ephemeral as that might be. I want to make art and consume art, not just content.

So it might seem odd that I’d use AI for software development. However, I’ve always felt that there is a messy blend of art and craft when it comes to programming. There is certainly an aspect of self-expression, but there is also the purely mechanical part. A program is a machine that can carry out a series of (often incredibly complex) tasks. As of the past six months or so, AI has become quite good at building many of the mechanical aspects. Since I’m working with some tools I’m not highly familiar with, it has been a helpful assistant in building the machinery, while I focus on the design and the…gaminess of it all.

And that’s what’s been distracting me. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to split my time between game development and writing. We’ll see how it goes.

Next Week

That same dang goal, with a new title: finish T.I.M.