Samuel Johnston

Interpreting Short Fiction Rejection Letters

I recently crossed the threshold of 50 short story submissions, and I’ve decided to celebrate that milestone by talking about rejections! For most writers, rejections are a natural part of the submission process, and it’s expected for a short story to rack up at least a few before finding a publishing home.

Why Bother?

For most writers, feedback on a story comes through beta readers, critiques, or a writer’s group or workshop. The feedback found in rejection letters is usually paltry in comparison.

The one advantage of this feedback is that it comes directly from the editors and readers that you are selling to. Hopefully you submit to editors and publications you believe have good artistic taste, but if nothing else, these are the opinions that matter for getting a story to print (and money in the writer’s bank account).

Occasionally, this feedback might expose a flaw in the story, or in your submission process. I have a story that I submitted to fantasy publications, but it has only a single fantastic element and could be seen more as magical realism or slipstream. A helpful editor explained in a rejection, “your story has some interesting concepts, but on evaluation, it doesn’t fit well in our definition of the fantasy genre.”

This let me know that I needed to be more careful in submitting this story to publications that have a more “traditional” view of fantasy. It also gave me a better idea of what that particular publication was looking for. And since they finished the rejection with a positive note and a suggestion to submit again, I did exactly that—with a story that was a better fit—and got an acceptance.

Not every rejection will work out so well, but it’s still valuable to read the tea leaves of your rejections.

Form Rejections

These are the lowest tier of rejection, but by the probabilities of the slush pile, they are also the most common by far. Most publications (especially those that pay) receive dozens or hundreds of submissions for each one they publish, and they simply don’t have the time to give personalized feedback to each.

Unfortunately, form rejections differ slightly between publications. They typically follow a format like this:

Dear Author,

Thank you for sending us Story Name. Unfortunately the piece is not right for us at the moment. [Possibly additional sentences about how it’s not you, it’s us.] Good luck placing it elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Editors

A typical form rejection politely states that the piece is not accepted, and doesn’t offer any specific notes or ask you to submit again. However, I have occasionally received what appears to be a straight form rejection that encourages the writer to submit other work to the publication, so that shouldn’t necessarily be taken too seriously.

Some form rejections say something to the effect of “sorry for sending a form letter, we’re really busy,” which I actually quite like, because it removes any ambiguity.

Tiered Rejections

Some publications (usually bigger and more successful markets) have a tiered reading or evaluation process. They may pass each story to multiple readers, or have slush pile readers who recommend their favorites to editors for additional scrutiny. If you’re lucky, they will describe this process on their submissions page, and if you’re doubly lucky they will explain what kind of rejection a piece receives based on the “tier” where it was removed from contention.

Getting to any tier beyond the first reader already marks the story as highly-regarded by the publication. Usually the significant majority of stories get an immediate, first-tier form rejection. Since far fewer stories make it to the subsequent tiers, a rejection at this stage is much more likely to have a small, personalized note to explain why it was rejected.

In my experience, this type of rejection will almost always ask you to submit more work. Take note of this! If you get to this stage, you likely have storytelling sensibilities that align with the editors. There is no small amount of subjectivity when evaluating fiction, and for a story to get published it has to not only be well-written, but also match the vibes of the publication.

Personalized Rejections

If your story makes it into higher tiers of editorial evaluation, or you happen to submit to a rare, incredibly generous editor, you may get some personalized feedback in a rejection. This typically takes the form of a couple sentences of “what we liked and what we didn’t like,” since the story usually has some solid points that let it escape the slush pile and some weaknesses (or incompatibility with the publication’s sensibilities) that caused it to lose out to the stories that were accepted.

Some publications also offer an option to support them by paying for feedback on submissions. Use this at your own discretion. There is no guarantee that the feedback will be particularly helpful, and while most of these offers are an honestly-provided service that also helps keep the publication stay afloat financially, some less scrupulous markets don’t provide much for the fee.

I would suggest paying for a service like this only if you think highly of the publication and would be happy to support them even if you weren’t getting feedback. However, if you don’t mind dropping the money, you can always try these and see if the response feels worth it. In most cases, you’ll get considerably less than you’d get out of a writer’s circle, workshop, or critique group, so keep that in mind.

Holds

On rare occasions, you may receive a “hold” request. A hold is short fiction limbo—it’s essentially a notification that you’re going to have to wait even longer for a response.

A hold will only be issued if the publication thinks they might want to buy the story, so this is a great sign. However, it can also mean the publication is hedging their bets in case they get a submission they like more, especially if there’s a long submission window for something like an anthology.

Holds can also be a way for a publication to collect stories while trying to suss out the overall tone or theme for an issue. They may like your story, but find that it doesn’t fit well with several other stories they want to publish. As a result, a perfectly good story ends up rejected because editors have to worry about the total package of what they’re publishing.

Non-Response

If you submit enough, you’ll eventually run into a non-response. Among the hundreds of submissions publications receive every day, a few are bound to fall through the cracks. These days, many publications use submission managers like Submittable or Duosuma to help with this, but some are still working with shared email inboxes.

Firstly, if you’re submitting directly through email, it pays to whitelist the address. It’s easy to miss a response that gets caught in the spam filter, and this is much more likely to happen when the publication uses a random gmail address. It’s also worth watching your inbox and checking spam regularly, although I’ll admit I’m not very good at this.

When submitting, make sure you follow the formatting instructions provided by the publication on their submissions page. Don’t rely solely on tools like Duotrope or Submission Grinder, which can occasionally be out of date or incorrect. If you use the incorrect formatting, or ignore instructions like removing identifying information from your manuscript for blind reading, some publications will toss your submission. This may seem callous, but editors who need to weed through hundreds of submissions don’t have the time to deal with submissions that aren’t correctly formatted. Correct submission format is a basic expectation to be taken seriously as a professional writer.

Finally, pay attention to information the publication provides about its own responses. What’s their expected response time? A few publications have a policy of not responding to rejected stories, so a non-response is effectively a silent rejection. Be aware of this when submitting.

If you’re beyond the expected response time, feel free to send a short, polite query letter asking about the status of your submission. Provide your name and the title of your story. If you received an acknowledgement of the original submission, there might also be a submission number or other identifier to include.

Sometimes It’s a Mystery

While there can be valuable tidbits of information to be found in rejection letters, not every rejection will be useful. Sometimes the value is only apparent in aggregate over a number of submissions.

As a writer, I would love it if all the publishers in the world got together and organized around some standard wording for rejections so I always know exactly where I stand. However, writing (and publishing) are creative enterprises, and there are no hard and fast rules. There will always be publications that buck trends and give strange or inscrutable responses.

The best way to develop a better understanding of rejections is to submit frequently and widely. I’ve accumulated dozens of rejections, but I still have a long way to go compared to some authors who have hundreds or thousands.

Finally, it’s important to remember that a perfectly good story still needs to find the right fit to make it into print. Being patient with repeated submissions may be necessary for some stories to find an acceptance.

New Year’s Writing Resolutions — 2026

Another year is in the books, and a new one looming on the horizon. Last post I recapped my 2025. In this post, I’ll get into my plans for 2026.

Another Year of Short Stories

Way back in 2024, I declared it my year of short stories (or YOSS for the acronymically-inclined). I focused on writing, editing, and submitting short fiction on a scale that I had never done before. Not only was this a lot of fun, but I feel that it really helped me improve a variety of writing skills.

At the start of 2025, I was hesitant to repeat myself. Well, screw it! I’m getting old and set in my ways, so I’m doing it again in 2026.

With 2024 as my baseline, I aim to make YOSS 2026 bigger and better. My goals are:

Finish and submit at least twelve short stories
Send at least 50 submissions
While I’m at it, post on Words Deferred 100 times.

Completing a short story per month will be the biggest challenge. However, I think it’s doable. I currently have four or five stories already written that need various amounts of revision. I have another three stories that are partly written. That gives me a decent head start.

In 2024, the original Year of Short Stories, I managed about 35 submissions. With a dozen new stories, getting to fifty submissions should be fairly straightforward. I expect that to be the easiest goal to achieve. I also have a few stories already out, and I’ll be keeping my eyes open for reprint opportunities as well.

One hundred posts on Words Deferred works out to slightly less than two per week, which is what I’ve already been aiming for over the past year. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of short fiction-related topics as a part of a second Year of Short Stories. Beyond that, as I mentioned in my most recent State of the Blog post, I’ve developed a number of series or templates I can use to keep things interesting: the Idea Vault, Games for People Who Prefer to Read, Reference Desk, Read Reports, and perhaps a few reblogs here and there.

The Enduring Allure of an Organized Schedule

I suspect that anyone going through my old posts can easily see that I have a love-hate relationship with organization and scheduling. Long have I aspired to the “write every day” mantra advocated by Stephen King and Dorothea Brande, but my attempts at keeping up that schedule rarely last more than a month. (Of course, it’s a little easier when you’re a full-time writer who can dedicate a few hours to writing time each and every day.)

Still, as much as I try to cultivate a creative mind, I also have the brain of a lifelong engineer. I like order. I actually enjoy planning. I write outlines. It galls me a little bit to be so unstructured when it comes to writing. So I keep on trying.

This year, I’m going to start with a loose plan—a set of weekly checkboxes to tick off, but no particular order. I plan to use a very basic agile loop: setting goals at the start of the week, working through the tasks, and reviewing the results at the end of the week.

One of the things I really enjoyed about writing short stories in 2024 was that it requires the exercise of many different writerly skills: ideation, writing, revision, polish, and submitting the work (with all the little businessy bits that entails). It’s hard to get all that variety of experience on a regular basis when you’re exclusively working on longer work. I intend to set my goals across this full spectrum of writing.

What About You?

Do you have any New Year’s writing resolutions? Anything you found challenging in the past year that you’re looking to overcome? Or exciting new goals? Let me know in the comments.

My Writing Year in Review — 2025

I don’t say much here about my life outside of writing, and I won’t change that now, but writing never happens in a vacuum. Other aspects of life inevitably intrude and intertwine with our art. Life also provides plenty of things to do besides writing, and it’s never hard to find reasons to procrastinate and put projects off.

Family medical issues and the mental energy required for my day job were the big challenges this year. Thankfully, everyone in my house is now healthy, and I am grateful to have an interesting and well-paying day job in a world where that is becoming steadily more difficult to obtain.

I am incredibly lucky to be able to visit the emergency room or get an unexpected car repair without my first worry being my bank account, and I am able to put presents under the tree for my kids. I don’t take that for granted.

Words Deferred

I’ll try to avoid repeating myself from the State of the Blog 2025.

I was shocked to learn from my stats page that I had posted almost 150 times this year. Then I looked back and realized that I definitely haven’t. It looks like there’s a quirk in WordPress statistics where it counts updates to static pages as new posts. So in actuality I posted less than 100 times (and quite inconsistently in the first half of the year).

It’s strange to realize that this site is the majority of my word count. Sometimes that feels bad, because it’s not advancing my writing career in a tangible way. (Maybe some day it will check some box for a publisher’s marketing department. Or maybe that’s not something they care about anymore and they’ll make me start Instagram and TikTok accounts.)

On the other hand, the site has been the single most effective tool for keeping me writing—and thinking about writing—regularly. It’s hard to quantify, but I do think this site helps fuel my energy for other writing projects and endeavors. Plus, you know, I enjoy it.

In terms of blog stats, this has been my best year ever along most axes. It feels a little odd, since I didn’t do anything different to “earn” it. The will of the internet is mysterious. It giveth and it taketh away.

After three years of steady growth, it was admittedly a little disheartening to see a significant dip last year. Likewise it feels good to see it bounce back this year. However, I’m not playing SEO games or trying in any concerted way to turn this site into a money-making venture. The numbers aren’t really important, except that my words might be getting out to a few more people, and that’s nice.

Even if the numbers flat-lined, I probably wouldn’t stop doing this. I’m in too deep now; there’s no getting out.

Short Fiction

I submitted short fiction 35 times in 2024. In 2025, that number dropped to 18 submissions.

I only sent stories out in a handful of weekend sessions, but my numbers were boosted by sending more simultaneous submissions to semi-pro markets. You can send to a lot more markets when you don’t have to do it sequentially.

I wrote 3 new original stories this year, and utterly failed to revise any of them enough to send out. I also wrote two goofy little fanfic stories, which is something I haven’t done before, and may very well never do again.

My main short fiction takeaways from the year are that simultaneous submissions are great, even if the markets tend to be lower-paying and less prestigious, and I need to work on revising work to completion.

Long Fiction

I did no novel writing in 2025.

I occasionally think about spending the time necessary to revise Razor Mountain, but so far I haven’t. In one sense it’s a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. It was an interesting process to document here on Words Deferred. But unless I go back and really polish it to the best of my ability, it will always feel like an unfinished project.

I’ve talked about it before, but I have a hard time getting motivated to polish a book that is already “out there” online, and therefore is less appealing to send out to traditional agents and publishers. The idea of self-publishing a novel remains unexciting to me as well.

I fully accept that this attitude is a symptom of being an old man, and perhaps out of step with the state of the modern publishing industry. For now, at least, that’s just who I am.

Looking Forward

It’s good to look back and reflect on the year, but now I’m ready to look forward. In my next post, I’ll talk about plans for 2026.

Firewatch — Games for People Who Prefer to Read

The job of a firewatch involves living in a single-room tower deep in the wilderness, monitoring the forest for fires. It’s a job that attracts those seeking solitude—the strange or socially awkward, and people trying to run away from their problems.

An Unorthodox Beginning

Firewatch begins with a blurred background and the audioscape of a bar. You play as Henry, a drunk college student, and you’re meeting your wife, Julia, for the first time.

A few paragraphs of text and a couple of life choices allow you to choose-your-own-adventure through several years of Henry and Julia’s relationship and marriage: their joys, arguments, and struggles. The choices start out easy, then problems arise, and the game presents more harrowing decisions where neither option is good.

Interspersed between these text vignettes are little snippets of 3D gameplay. As Henry, you load your truck in your apartment’s underground parking. You arrive at a trailhead in the forested wilderness. You hike, you camp. Eventually, you arrive at a huge, wooden firewatch tower.

On paper, I would never expect the opening of Firewatch to work. A rushed prologue in plain text? Front-loading a ton of emotional weight and exposition? When the game started, I was skeptical.

It’s a testament to the writing and design of the Campo Santo team that it does work. As a player, you become a participant by making tough choices with Henry in his back-story. You get a glimpse of life being good, then bad, and finally almost unbearable. It’s just enough time and detail to begin to sympathize with him and understand why he took the firewatch job.

Interleaving this backstory with the journey to the firewatch tower is oddly cinematic, a bit like voiceover, and creates the sense that all of this is weighing on him as he travels to the tower.

Exploration

Beyond this initial prologue, Firewatch sets aside the text and becomes a full 3D game. Your tower is your home base, but most of your time is spent in the forest. As Henry, you can walk and run, vault over obstacles and climb, but not jump. This is not a “walking simulator,” but the mechanics are simple and straightforward.

From the beginning, a surprisingly large area of wilderness is open to your exploration. More areas open up as you get further into the game and acquire new tools, the first of which is a backpack of ropes that allow you to rappel up and down shale slides and steep slopes.

You are given a compass and map, and the game doesn’t clutter the screen with big arrows, icons, and indicators. It’s easy to get turned around or take the wrong path, but this makes it feel more like real exploring and less like the game is holding your hand.

In reality, the game carefully contains the player, but it goes to great pains to make it feel like the world is wide open. For the most part, it succeeds.

Ten-Four, Boss

You are alone in the wilderness, and your only link to the rest of the world is your high-powered walkie-talkie radio. With it, you can talk to your boss, Delilah, in the next tower over, which is barely visible on the top of a mountain several miles away.

As your boss, she helps get you acclimated to the job and provides you with tasks to keep you busy. She’s been out here for years and knows her way around.

The radio becomes your primary means of interacting with the world. When you see something interesting in the world, an icon pops up and you have the opportunity to talk to Delilah about it. You soon strike up a snarky rapport, and she becomes your constant companion throughout the game. The two of you discuss your past, shoot the shit, and become close. Then everything starts to go wrong.

What’s Out There?

From your first day on the job, there is mystery lurking in the forest. Delilah tasks you with finding and telling off some camping teens who are launching fireworks in peak fire season. On your way back, you encounter a shadowy figure who blinds you with a flashlight and disappears into the night. Then you find that someone has broken into your tower.

At first, the strange happenings seem innocuous, but things get weirder and weirder. More and more clues point toward something nefarious (and perhaps science-fictiony) going on.

To make matters worse, a fire breaks out just a few miles away. Fire crews do their best to contain it, but it grows day by day, a looming danger that adds tension. If it spreads, you and Delilah will be forced to evacuate, and you’ll never know the truth about what’s really going on.

Storytelling

Firewatch is full of moral quandaries posed to flawed characters. Everyone here has made bad choices, and everyone can be blamed for something. The game doesn’t tell you how to feel, and doesn’t paint the world in black and white. It doesn’t provide a pat conclusion either.

Firewatch isn’t perfect—it was made by a small team, and they had to cut corners in some places to be able to finish it. But they did so very smartly. The graphics are not state of the art (even for a decade ago, when the game was released), but they have a painterly aesthetic that is often beautiful. There are few characters, but the voice-acting is impeccable, and makes the whole game work.

The story can be completed in 3-5 hours, but it’s full of twists and turns, and contains a few laughs and a fair bit of heartbreak. Games, even story-centric games, often struggle with endings. Firewatch sticks the landing. It’s not necessarily a happy ending, but the mysteries are all resolved.

Henry, having run away from his problems, is confronted with an example of how badly that can go. It’s up to you whether he takes that lesson to heart.

As a wonderful bonus, the game includes a documentary mode. It turns the game into a sort of interactive museum with stations scattered throughout the wilderness. Each station has voice notes from the developers, and sometimes concept art or other notes pinned to bulletin boards. I wish more games would do something like this, although I can understand forgoing it when it’s such a challenge just to ship a game.

Where to Get It

Firewatch is a game by Campo Santo, published by indie powerhouse Panic, Inc. It’s available on just about every modern console and PC platform.

Exposure Therapy — 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.

Exposure Therapy

The Virtual Experience Technology was designed by neuroscientists and psychologists, manipulating magnetic fields at the brain surface without all of that messy wiring directly into the neural tissue. It could not only generate incredibly detailed sensory inputs, but could also modify the subject’s sensation of time passing. Coming from the sphere of brain science, it’s only natural that it would find its first use as a therapeutic tool.

No, of course it couldn’t modify memory. Not directly. But it could simulate real experiences, so real that they were nearly indistinguishable from life. Even better, these waking dreams could distill hours or days into seconds and minutes. Patients suffering from traumas and phobias could be walked through dozens of carefully designed scenarios in a single treatment session, physically safe at a clinic.

Corporations and militaries noted how effective the V.E.T. was for training. A few used it for interviews, condensing weeks of on-the-job observation into a few hours. And why not apply the same standards to those who were already hired? Why not condense more work into less physical time?

Advocates for justice reform suggested that prison sentences could be effectively commuted by living them out under V.E.T., completing them in a tiny fraction of the real-world time. Advocates for harsher sentencing suggested using similar techniques to stretch sentences into hundreds or thousands of experiential years. If a depraved serial killer was sentenced to a dozen life sentences, why shouldn’t they experience all of them?

Intelligence services quietly adopted the technology to trick subjects into revealing key information. And when the tricks didn’t work, there were whole suites of horrific torture designed to make people talk. No more messy real-world war crimes. These were invisible and undetectable, leaving only mental scars.

It was only reasonable and right that international tribunals put a stop to those horrible practices. Thank goodness they did. The CIA and FSB, MI6 and Mossad, and the Chinese MSS all pledged to shut down those divisions. Notoriously transparent organizations. Happy to let the inspectors double-check their work. They always followed the rules.

If You Care About Video Game Stories, You Should be Watching /noclip

If writing is my creative first love, video games are my second. Words Deferred is a site about writing, so I mostly limit my talk about video games to the story-centric, like my series about Games for People Who Prefer to Read.

Of course, not all games care much about story, and the entire medium has long been lambasted by serious artists for its weak storytelling. There’s a weird tension built into games, between experience and participation, the twin engines that make a game at least partly something you do instead of something you receive. That doesn’t mean there are no great stories in games, but it does mean that you have to go searching if you want to find them.

Games are also fascinating from the perspective of their construction. They are half art, and half science; programmers and engineers working side by side with artists, modelers and sound designers. The closest analogues are stage theater or TV and movies, where there is a certain unexplainable amalgamation of the magical and the mundane in order to actually put a finished product in front of an audience. Art constructed by a team is very different from the work of the lone artist.

There are plenty of documentaries on movie making; on the actors, directors, and myriad other craftspeople who put stories on the big screen. But there are comparatively few who do the same thing for games. Among the best are the small team at /noclip.

They are remarkably prolific for a core group of just four people, not only putting out multiple high-quality documentaries per year, but hosting a weekly podcast, building a game history archive, doing some indie game development, and recently creating a sort-of, kind-of online game magazine thing. They are also clearly a group who loves games as a storytelling medium, and that passion comes through in the documentary series where they give voice to the developers of some of the most exciting story-centric games.

Now is the perfect time to check out their work, because they’re right in the middle of releasing a multi-part series about Disco Elysium, one of the most critically acclaimed and lauded “story games” in the past decade, and the story of the people who made it is just as interesting as the game itself.

Novelist as a Vocation — Reference Desk #23

Book | E-Book | Audiobook (affiliate links)

Haruki Murakami is a bestselling Japanese author whose novels have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s one of those literary writers who lives in the borderlands of literary magical realism and sci-fi/fantasy. My first introduction to his work was the monstrous tome 1Q84, which is almost 1200 pages.

Novelist as Vocation is a book about writing, but if you’re hoping for a technical manual or detailed tips on voice or pacing, this is not the book for you. The closest analogue I’ve read is Stephen King’s On Writing.

King’s book is half memoir, half writing advice. Murakami’s book also has a memoir component, but any writing advice is almost incidental. Murakami seems loathe to put himself on a pedestal with the implication that his advice might be valuable, but he does describe his writing process in some detail.

The book is split into a dozen chapters, each one standing alone and covering a different topic. Half of these chapters started life as essays Murakami wrote years ago and set aside, eventually being published as a serial feature in a Japanese literary magazine. The rest were written later to fill out the book.

For those who are fans of Murakami, the chapters “Are Novelists Broad-Minded” and “Going Abroad – A New Frontier” provide the most history of his career and insight into the man and his view of the world. For those seeking concrete advice, the chapters “So, What Should I Write About?” and “Making Time Your Ally: On Writing a Novel” give an overview of the author’s entire process leading up to, writing, and rewriting a novel.

If nothing else, Novelist as Vocation reinforces the common view of Murakami as a successful author who never quite fit into the literary establishment in Japan or internationally. He comes across as idiosyncratic and sometimes odd, having never been formally trained, and making a start at writing much later in life than many of his literary peers. Getting a glimpse of the man through these chapters, it seems almost obvious that this would be the person behind these unusual novels.

Murakami is self-deprecating and self-important in turns, on the one hand brushing off some critics’ poor reviews of his works and style, but then bringing it up so often that I can’t help but think it hurts him more than he would like to admit. He knocks his own writing as nothing special, but also repeatedly calls back to the prize he won for his first novel and his broad success since then. If nothing else, the fact that he wrote this book about his own life and writing has a certain egoism built into it.

Murakami also serves as a good reminder for any writer who is worried about not having an MFA, worried about starting later in life, or simply feeling like an outsider in the literary world: there are many definitions of and paths to success in writing, and we should not be discouraged or afraid to forge our own way.

The Voice I Kept, by Juno Guadalupe — Short Report

Short Reports are a miniature version of my Read Reports: brief thoughts about small—often tiny—stories.

The Voice I Kept
by Juno Guadalupe
(Anomaly SF)

At 138 words, this is not quite drabble-length, so it needs to hit hard and fast. It’s a story about the loss of someone loved, with the sci-fi element being their replacement by an artificial duplicate.

The opening is a metaphor unfurling: salt as grief. The end is a callback to the title. Great structural choices for micro-fiction.

The mix of italics and quotes is something I’ve done myself, but it’s dangerously ambiguous. Is the robot speaking non-verbally? Is it the protagonist’s internal voice of their lost loved one? Any lack of clarity can be catastrophic in a story so short.

The theme is imminently relatable; we’ve all experienced loss of a loved one, by death or lesser proxy. I don’t quite get that gut-punch emotional reaction I want from a short story, but that’s always the biggest challenge of micro-fiction, where you are fighting for every word.

The 1799 Roanoke Valley Slave Revolt — The Story Idea Vault

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 1799 Roanoke Valley Slave Revolt

I first heard tell of Abraham when I was helping Miss Elisabeth with the cleaning in the big house. Two of the drivers had come in to get a break from the August heat. They had their lemonade, and then they hung around in the back hall to sneak a few sips of whiskey. If the missus of the house saw that, they’d be the ones getting a whipping.

I heard one of the drivers say that name, Abraham Arnaud. I didn’t know any French back then, but I could tell that name didn’t sound right the way he chewed it up. The other one only spat in response, and then he saw me and I ran on up the stairs with my load of linens before he could find a reason to do something I’d regret. The only Abraham I knew was the one from the Genesis.

Now, having heard that strange name, my ears were all perked up for it. The second time they caught it was when Old Jack was telling stories to the boys. He said Abraham Arnaud was being talked about in whispers all over Virginia and the Carolinas. He heard it from the new boy, Tom.

Word was that the bosses had paid top dollar for Tom, and they were mighty mad when he ran off the first chance he got. Must have hid like a jungle cat, because they never caught him. Usually nobody got away from our straw bosses; they had real sharp eyes and they knew every way to put a hurt on you without making it so you couldn’t work.

Old Jack said that Abraham Arnaud came from Haiti to New Orleans, and he had become a vodou priest. But he wasn’t no regular oungan, lighting black candles and sticking pins in dolls. He had the real power of possession, and he could bring strong lua into his own body or anyone else. To hear Old Jack tell it, Tom was convinced that Abraham Arnaud would tear down every planation house and free every slave. Tom said he had met one of Abraham’s followers, who had taught him a little magic.

That was about when my momma made Old Jack hush up and “stop talking nonsense, putting dangerous ideas in these child heads.” It didn’t matter though, because everyone started whispering about Abraham Arnaud after that.

Four months that went on. Tom never turned up, and when three new slaves came to the plantation, they brought their own stories: runaways all over. Vodou priests walking the roads at night. The Master up at the big house must have heard things too, because more men were set to guard the farm, and the big plantation owners all got their men together to patrol at night, with torches.

The night he came was dark as death, cloudy and a new moon. After midnight the drums started, first far away, then closer, like they were talking to each other. A shout went up, and we heard one gun, then all the drums went quiet. I never heard a quiet like that in all my life. Most of us didn’t dare touch the door of the slave house, but Old Jack opened it a crack and peeked out, and just about fell backward like he’d been hit.

That door swung open and we all saw it, the big house bright as day, sheets of orange flame rising up the walls like a waterfall of light. There were shadows of people running, but one stood perfectly still, outlined in that fierce firelight like the devil, long coat billowing and a straw hat cocked sideways on his head.

“That’s him,” I thought. Nobody else it could be. And that’s how we came to be free, and how I started on the road to real, honest-to-God magic.

Children of the Mind — Read Report

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Children of the Mind is billed as the final book in the “Ender Quartet.” In my opinion, that quartet is really Ender’s Game standing on its own, and sequel trilogy that is in many ways tonally different and mostly disconnected in plot.

The trilogy of Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind centers on the story of the planet Lusitania, thousands of years after Ender’s defeat of the buggers. The ticking clock of the series is the war fleet sent to destroy Lusitania. It has been delayed by the computer intelligence Jane, but now Starways Congress is aware of her presence in their computer systems, and has a plan to reset their communications network across the hundred worlds. This will not only prevent her from meddling, but effectively kill her as she’s reduced from millions of computer systems to only a handful.

The destruction of Lusitania would do more than kill the thousands of human colonists, because the planet is also home to the only other intelligent species known to humanity: the pig-like Pequeninos, whose life-cycle was heavily modified by an extra-terrestrial virus—the Descolada—and includes a worm-like larval stage and an eventual transformation into something like a psychic tree.

Ender has also brought the last of the Bugger hive-queens to Lusitania, where it is busy building enough industry to build starships and send out new queen larva to distant planets, ensuring the continuation of the species.

A final additional subplot is introduced, as if there weren’t enough. The dangerous Descolada virus has been neutralized on Lusitania, replaced with a harmless version that fills the needs of Pequenino physiology without the danger of infecting and modifying the genomes of other species. But it has become apparent that the virus is not natural. It was created, and the species that could and would send such a dangerous weapon into the universe is potentially the greatest threat humans, Pequeninos, and Buggers have ever seen.

Ender, once the titular character, has now been almost entirely sidelined in the story. As a reader, his perspective is barely present in the book, and he spends a good chunk of it effectively comatose. By the end, it’s apparent that the book is a send-off for him. His presence almost feels like an afterthought. Instead, the book focuses on Miro (his adopted son and Jane’s new favorite human), Si Wang-mu (genius emigrant from the planet of Path) and young Val and Peter, ghosts from Ender’s childhood that he made physically manifest on his brief trip outside the universe in Xenocide.

Tonal Shift

Analyzing the series as a writer, it’s interesting to see the transformation of Card’s style in the post-Ender’s Game trilogy. Ender’s Game was a relatively near-future hard SF story that focused on a single brilliant boy’s journey through military school, and the horrifying extremes the wartime government was willing to go to in order to defeat an existential threat to humanity. While there is a B-plot for Peter and Valentine, most of the story stays tight on Ender’s perspective.

The subsequent trilogy is much more scattered, and while it touches on plenty of interesting ideas, I think this lack of focus is somewhat to its detriment. The series becomes decidedly softer sci-fi, culminating in a deus ex machina mode of faster-than-light travel that also allows near-magical creation of a bespoke super-virus and several entirely new people.

My daughter and I both came to the same comparison independently—the Golden Compass series had the same seemingly tight beginning before spiraling off into odd and confusing tangents. Both feel like completely different series at the beginning and the end.

A fair amount of Ender’s Game is dedicated to his own internal angst as he undergoes indignities and abuses at the hands of the adults in positions of authority over him. The subsequent books include even more angst, spread across a large cast of characters. Long internal monologues are par for the course, and I would be hard-pressed to identify any character experiencing any kind of happiness before the final two or three chapters.

Where Ender’s frustration and eventual desperation felt appropriate to his situation, I couldn’t help but feel that this modus operandi became oppressive with so many more characters, and continuing for three books. It was unrelenting and a little exhausting.

A side-effect of this feeling was that the problems posed to the characters became so big and so multitudinous that their inevitable resolutions at the end of the series felt too trite and easy in comparison. It’s a tough balancing act to set up huge roadblocks for the characters and then resolve them in a way that feels earned.

Welcome to Ethnic Planet

I am keenly aware that I’m reading this series 30 years after its original publication. One of the strangest things about these books is the way Card has built his universe. His characters and their personalities run up against each other in a variety of interesting and well-thought-out ways, but his settings feel like cardboard cutouts in comparison.

The planet of Lusitania is the most fleshed-out setting in the series, but that’s a little deceptive because it has been engineered for simplicity. The Descolada has ravaged the ecosystem, and only a dozen species have managed to adapt. There is a single human colony city, and it is Portugese Catholic through-and-through.

The common sci-fi trope would be to construct “Star Wars” planets with a single distinguishing feature, usually an environmental biome. The ice planet. The forest planet. The desert planet. The lava planet.

Strangely, Card has managed to at least partly eschew this (though Lusitania is a uniform mix of forest and plain and Trondheim is icy). However, he has very plainly replaced these tropes with a different sequence: planets that are each a uniform human monoculture. Even more strange, in my opinion, is how these caricatures hew to a myopic 1990s American perspective. Say what you want about some of the performative multiculturalism in the still-not-very-broad-minded modern publishing industry, but I am honestly a little surprised that Card’s blatant stereotyping made it into a series that was not only mainstream, but award-worthy in its day.

Speaker for the Dead introduced Trondheim, the stoic Scandinavian planet. Xenocide introduced uniformly Chinese planet of Path, dominated by a kind of luddite, vaguely Taoist folk religion. Children of the Mind adds two more: Divine Wind and Pacifica. Divine Wind is the Japanese planet, industrious and technologically innovative much as the US saw Japan in the 70s and 80s. Pacifica is the Samoan planet, and everyone that Peter and Wang-mu encounter there seems to be built like a linebacker, living a simple tropical life, and deeply invested in ancient, polytheistic religion.

There is an argument to be made that the book explicitly says that these planets are more diverse, and there is more to them than regions depicted in the main plot. However, I think this is a weak argument. It’s textbook telling instead of showing, and it seems to admit that the cultural caricatures, which are all we’re actually shown, are shallow and problematic.

Besides, the problem is not the lack of wokeness, it’s the abject unbelievability of a universe where each planet is almost entirely populated by uniform groups of people defined by a handful of simple traits that apparently haven’t changed over thousands of years. This is as absurd as the idea of a modern Italy that has adapted to our current world, technology, and politics while remaining culturally almost identical to the early Roman empire.

Even weirder, the term “western” is explicitly used, which is nonsensical in a far-future multi-planetary society. Of course, the core power systems of the Starways Congress and the military seem to be fully controlled by these “western” cultures, because who could possibly envision a universe where the US and Europe aren’t dominant?

The Dangers of Rereading

I have to admit, part of me wishes I hadn’t revisited these books. They didn’t quite live up to my fuzzy teenage memories of them. Those memories told me that Ender’s Game was the best of the set, and I continue to feel that way. But the sequel trilogy might have been better served by being further divorced from that book and getting a little more breathing room to explore other ideas.

In the end, I found the “Ender Quartet” to be an interesting series, but ultimately flawed enough that I had a tough time enjoying all the good bits without being reminded of the things that annoyed me. My current views are certainly affected by my age, my experiences, and the many fantastic books I’ve read in the interceding decades.

On the other hand, I might have reason to worry if I felt the same way about these books today as I did in my teens. For writers, rereading our old favorites can be a fun and useful exercise, but it’s also a dangerous one. You may find that those books were more enjoyable through the lens of nostalgic memory than they are in the cold light of a fresh read.