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.
Words Deferred 