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 week of Aug 10 – Aug 16.
Stats
Stories Finished: 3
Submissions Currently Out: 9
Submissions Total: 29
Rejections: 22
Acceptances: 0
Submissions and Responses
One form rejection this week, for Taco Cat. I still have one other submission out for this story, but I may look for more places to send it.
Goals
My goals from last week:
Keep up with critiques
Finish Estate Sale revisions and submit for critique
I am back in the swing of doing a critique per week, so that’s an easy box to check.
I worked on Estate Sale, but it’s still not ready yet. I’m thinking about better titles, with Magpie being the current frontrunner. Ideally, I’d prefer something with a little more malice for a horror story.
Learn, Learn Again
I often find that many of my difficulties in life are self-inflicted. Few things are more irritating than thinking I’ve learned a lesson, only to realize some time later that I failed to internalize it and slid back into old behaviors.
I started this year with daily quotas for words written and revision per day, and my intent was to try to actually hit those numbers each day instead of cramming all of my writing time into the weekends. The quotas are small: 100 words and ten minutes, so they’re not hard to meet and it’s possible to catch up from missed days.
Now it’s August, and I find that I’ve slipped into old habits. I only write on the weekends, I have been revising with little new work, and my word count is weeks behind. I instinctively reach for the usual excuses: end of summer busyness and the imminent return of school, work, and my indie game project. Plus, it’s so hard to come home from work, cook dinner, do chores, and then find energy for writing, right? Never mind the folks in significantly harder circumstances who somehow find the time to bang out fine literature.
So, with that ritual self-flagellation out of the way, I’m going to try to relearn my lesson this week, and meet my quotas every day.
The Times, They Are A-Changin’
I’ll also mention that I think it’s a very interesting time to be a writer, and I mean that both literally and as the faux Chinese curse.
I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about the direct and indirect effects of AI on writing and publishing. Fiction, like everything involving written words, is in the midst of major disruptions, and these come on the heels of the e-book and self-publishing revolutions that have already caused major upheavals and consolidation of power in the industry. There are more ways to publish work than there ever have been, though it’s still not easy (and maybe getting harder) to be paid to do so.
Scandals around allegedly AI-written books are making it into the general news cycle, but I suspect short fiction is feeling the impact far more, if only because of sheer accessibility of submissions and comparatively lower effort. I’ll have a post or two on these topics in the near future.
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 week of Aug 2 – Aug 9.
Stats
Stories Finished: 3
Submissions Currently Out: 10
Submissions Total: 29
Rejections: 21
Acceptances: 0
Submissions and Responses
No new submissions or responses this week.
Goals
My goals from last week:
Keep up with critiques
Revise Estate Sale
If time and energy allow – review T.I.M.
After last week’s reset, I’ve been blasting through critiques to get ahead of the game. Now I just need a story to put in the queue.
On that front, I worked on revisions for both T.I.M. and Estate Sale. This was the first time I’ve read through T.I.M. since the major rewrite, and since it has been a few weeks, I felt like I could give it an honest look. It was better than I thought it might be. The main problem is that it’s now 6000 words, and I’d like to really trim that down. It also has a weak ending that will need to be improved.
Estate Sale feels closer to done, but I’m going to try a new revision technique with it.
Externalizing The Inner Critic
The idea I’m going to try is pretty simple. Now that I have the story in a pretty good place, I’m looking at it, pretending I’m a critiquer, and trying to anticipate where the critiques might complain about the story.
The reason I’m doing this is because I have had a couple cases recently where I managed to convince myself that a niggling problem with a story is not a big deal, only to have critiques come back and call out exactly that problem.
Now, sometimes fellow writers will critique a story, and it’s clear that they want to make it the kind of story they like, rather than the best version of the story you want to tell. I try to avoid this when I’m critiquing. So it’s still important to not water down the story in hopes of making it “something lots of readers will like.”
I suppose I’m just trying a new tactic to try to separate my critical brain from my writing brain for editing.
Next Week
Goals:
Keep up with critiques
Finish Estate Sale revisions and submit for critique
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 week of Jul 27 – Aug 2.
Stats
Stories Finished: 3
Submissions Currently Out: 10
Submissions Total: 29
Rejections: 21
Acceptances: 0
Submissions and Responses
The only response I received this week was a single form rejection—the very first for my new story, Beneath the House at Caen. I’m never looking for a rejection, but I do appreciate a publication with a quick turnaround on submissions. Now Caen feels “broken-in.”
I scoured the listings and sent out three more submissions this week, bringing my total in flight up to a healthy ten. Trying to find publications for Red Eye and Taco Cat once again drove home the challenge of selling a 6700-word story vs. selling a 1000-word story. Even though 1000 words is too short for a few publications, there are still far more listings than for the long story. Not only that, but the places that do take longer stories trend toward the bigger, older publications, and they often reply very slowly and don’t like simultaneous submissions, making the process even more arduous.
Remember kids, you have to write what feels right to you, but size does matter when it comes time to actually sell that story.
Goals
My goals carried over from the previous week:
Submit stories
Catch up on critiques
Clean up and trim T.I.M.
Other revisions: Estate Sale?
With the additional story submission this week, I’m in pretty good shape. Now I’m just keeping my eyes open for opportunities to submit Red Eye and waiting for responses.
I also reviewed my Critters admin panel and found that I was far enough behind to warrant a ratio reset. I’ll be working on a couple critiques this week to get myself back in the critique gods’ good graces.
I’m still not quite ready to come back to T.I.M., so I worked on revising Estate Sale this week. Having let it sit for a while and come back, I found it fairly readable. I don’t think this one will need too much more work, at least until I get some reader feedback.
Device 6 is a 2013 iOS release from Simogo, ostensibly a puzzle game, although “game” is a bit of a misnomer here. It could be called a visual novel or piece of interactive fiction. It is mainly text, enhanced by sound, music, images and formatting.
Mobile Game (Derogatory)
If you own a smart phone in 2026, there’s a good chance you’ve been exposed to the horrors of modern mobile games. The most popular games are boldly billed as “free to play,” but are typically riddled with ads or paid loot boxes, with micro-transaction systems and dark patterns designed with scientific precision to promote addiction and spending.
Companies like Zynga, King and Tencent spent more than a decade systematically enshittifying these ecosystems, and Apple and Google have largely turned a blind eye to it while taking a 30% cut of the revenues enabled by these practices.
Device 6 hails from a simpler time. Five years after the release of the original iPhone, ubiquitous touchscreens were still exciting technology. Most of us remembered the pain of texting on a 10-digit keypad. Mobile games were slowly expanding beyond Snake and Breakout clones.
The Nintendo Wii had introduced motion controls to the public at large, and Microsoft’s Kinect brought computer vision. Now we all had multi-functional supercomputers in our pockets, and touch interfaces that could morph to any shape. In certain circles, there was a feeling that mobile was the new frontier for experimental game design.
Device 6 feels a little like an artifact from an alternate universe, one where mobile games didn’t drown in an ocean of slop; one where the user is made to feel something more than the desire to play one more indistinguishable level or tap their credit card.
If I sound bitter, it’s only because I think we were cheated out of a more interesting, vibrant future. Device 6 is a game that manages to feel fresh and innovative despite being 13 years old.
Text as Physical Space
Device 6 starts with a face scan. (Fake, of course. phones didn’t have face recognition back then.) A scan line buzzes across the screen once, twice, and then you’re in, given a generic-sounding user name.
The intro credits sequence that follows provides cinematic weight. It’s James Bond by way of Archer, stylized 2D animation of a delivery truck moving toward its destination backed by a light bebop soundtrack.
Then:
The black-and-white picture of a radio within the arrow is layered with film grain and parallaxed as you scroll, giving it a sense of depth, like a a storybook with cutout windows that peer into the another world. The sound of the radio accompanies the picture, but it becomes muffled as you scroll, because the text takes you out of the room, into a hallway.
The text gives you only a phone-sized page or two of description, bristling with side-thoughts in italics and more windows into the world before bringing you to a stairway where the text itself
steps
down,
taking you
through
the house, the shape and formatting of the text bringing you into a physical space.
Then it tips onto its side, inviting you to rotate your device to read the long, narrow lines that take you down a hallway, expanding to fill the screen again only when you reach another room.
Device 6 presents as a multimedia House of Leaves: a trapped, semi-amnesiac character moving through a mysterious, empty island mansion as the text and pictures move across and around the page.
Reaching Through the Window
Device 6 is split into six chapters, each with a handful of puzzles that need to be solved to progress. These puzzles use text, audio, and visual components scattered across the chapter. Some of those storybook windows are interactive: locks, computer terminals, keypads and other machinery that can be pushed, poked, or manipulated.
Early chapters have fewer, more self-contained interactions and puzzles. Later ones tend to build on each other, requiring a cascade of solving one puzzle to solve another to solve another. Backtracking is at first helpful, and eventually mandatory, to find the necessary clues. This is where the format shines, because the layout of the story makes scouring the text feel like searching a physical space.
I found paper and pencil to be helpful in the last two chapters, but veteran puzzlers with good memory could probably make do without.
A Layered Labyrinth
There is layer of meta-narrative in Device 6 that is easy to ignore at first. The story and the puzzles are designed to immerse you in the viewpoint of Anna, the protagonist. You quickly forget about the face scan at the beginning.
In between chapters, the game asks a few survey questions, then awards points to the player. Never mind the strangeness of some of those questions. Never mind that nice round 100 points you seem to get no matter what answers you choose.
Each chapter features a diagram somewhere alongside the text; schematics for a series of numbered devices that work in tandem and directly affect the human brain.
Even the seemingly random elements that flash across the screen during the credits sequence have meaning, much more apparent upon finishing the story and going back for a second viewing.
These extra layers aren’t required to follow Anna’s story or solve the puzzles, but they provide connective tissue and help to interpret the otherwise ambiguous ending. They add a pinch of ARG flavor by making the reader feel like a character in the story.
Where to Play
Device 6 is $3.99 and should take about 1-3 hours depending on how quickly you solve the puzzles.
It is available on iOS, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and Windows. Do yourself a favor and play it on a device you can rotate and manipulate with your hands to get the full experience.
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 week of Jul 20 – 26.
Stats
Stories Finished: 3
Submissions Currently Out: 8
Submissions Total: 26
Rejections: 22
Acceptances: 0
Submissions and Responses
I was fighting a cold this week, so I wasn’t able to log much writing time. However, it did turn out to be a fairly productive week for submissions.
I received one form rejection for The Incident at Pleasant Hills. Since my active submissions list has been dwindling, I sent out six new submissions, including three for my freshly completed horror story, Beneath the House at Caen. That bumps my submissions number back up to roughly where it should be for my goal of 50 submissions by the end of the year.
Most of these were to publications that accept simultaneous submissions, so I will likely spend more time combing through Duotrope to send out more in the upcoming week.
Writer Beware has long been a great resource for writers, calling out outright scams, questionable services, and bad publishers. Lately, they’ve been following the ongoing saga of the class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, and the proposed settlement.
For those who aren’t aware, the settlement revolves around Anthropic’s use of illegally downloaded works of fiction in training it’s LLM models. So while AI and copyright are involved, this is strictly about the means of acquisition and not around the training itself.
The number of books involved is staggering. Only holders of registered copyrights were allowed to participate in the settlement, but this still amounts to roughly 400,000 books. The maximum possible penalties would be $150,000 per case of infringement. In actuality, the settlement will be closer to $3,000 each, which might seem pretty weak in comparison, but still amounts to 1.5 billion dollars, by far the largest copyright-related settlement in history.
As of this week, the settlement has been approved by the judge, which means it’s very likely to go forward and the numbers are unlikely to change in a significant way.
There are also still a handful of authors who opted out of the settlement and have already filed lawsuits separately, presumably in hopes of getting an amount closer to that $150k maximum. So the finalization of the settlement doesn’t mean Anthropic’s woes are over for this particular case. And beyond that, there are dozens of other lawsuits against the big LLM companies still pending.
Check out these recent posts at Writer Beware for more details:
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 Jul 6 – Jul 19.
Stats
Stories Finished: 3
Submissions Currently Out: 3
Submissions Total: 20
Rejections: 19
Acceptances: 0
Submissions and Responses
I had two form rejections come back this week: a magazine submission for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug, and an anthology submission for Taco Cat.
Not much to say for these. The anthology was a rather specific theme that fit the story, which is a theoretical leg up, but by no means a guarantee that it’ll be read in a positive light.
My open submissions list in Duotrope is getting thin, so I will be scouring the listings and sending out stories again this week.
Goals and Results
Last time, my goals were:
Revise Beneath the House in Caen to completion, or close to it.
Clean up and trim T.I.M., consider whether it needs another round of Critters.
Happily, I have now worked through all the critique revisions on Caen, so that will be included in my next round of submissions. It’s a horror/dark fantasy story, which will be a nice addition to my stable, since there are a decent number of markets for horror that I wasn’t able to submit to before.
Now I ought to get back to T.I.M., but I’m still feeling burned out on that story, so I may work on one of my other drafts. Estate Sale another horror story, so I may work on that as long as I am in a horror headspace.
I also have some critiques to catch up on, so I’ll be ready when it’s time to send those out for feedback.
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.
Cordyceps Cosmicum
Grigory Romanslov has space mushrooms growing in his head. He knows this ought to worry him, but it doesn’t.
He knows there are mushrooms in there because his sinuses and ears feel plugged, and everything smells like portobello, and a delicate, thin-stemmed white cap unfurled just above his earlobe while he was shaving last week. Maybe he shouldn’t have breathed in the glowing green dust surrounding the crater he found in the south forty.
A Google search leads him to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which sounds much nicer than “zombie ant fungus.” It tells him the fungus controls the ants’ behavior. He doesn’t feel like the space mushrooms are controlling him, although he has been drinking salt water lately, and sucking on pennies.
He feels healthy, despite the fine white fuzz growing on his skin. He did puke up his breakfast on the front lawn yesterday, but he felt fine after.
When he wakes up and sees a dozen tree-sized mushrooms in the yard, it makes him happy. They look nice there. Decorative. And the spores twinkle a million shades of green as they catch the morning breeze.
A City on Mars is the perfect kind of pop-science non-fiction for science fiction writers. It’s no surprise they got blurbs from the likes of Mary Robbinette Kowal and Andy Weir. It’s easy reading, comedic without being too jokey, and well-illustrated (Zach is author of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal). It delves into a subject that’s core to science fiction, one we’re all familiar with, and makes it feel new and interesting.
This is a book about space colonization, but with a few unexpected twists. “Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?” asks the subtitle. Those might seem like silly questions when so much engineering and money have gone into space exploration over the last 75 years. And yet, the authors make a fairly convincing case that in some really important ways, we’ve only scratched the surface.
The Weinersmiths note that we seem to be at the beginning of a new age of space exploration. Unlike the Apollo era, there are more countries in the space game. There are private companies managing flights. And there is an awful lot of supposedly serious talk about space colonization, or at least space capitalism.
A City on Mars explores space colonization on multiple axes: not only engineering and tech, but biology, law, economics, and politics.
The Technology of Colonization
We have rockets. We have space stations. Space suits and space toilets. All sorts of advanced space technology. Hundreds of people have been to space, including Katy Perry. How hard could it be?
Of course, simply going into space is fraught with danger and wildly expensive, and this is easy to forget after watching a blockbuster movie or two. Living in space (or on other planets) is more expensive, harder, and more dangerous than living at the bottom of the sea or Antarctica. Orders of magnitude worse. And yet, those harshest of terrestrial environments often seem more fraught in our imaginations than the cold, airless, heavily irradiated void of space.
We have surprisingly little understanding of living in space—really living for years, or lifetimes—not just visiting and doing a little science. Practically everyone in space has been a well-trained, psychologically stable adult, in the prime of life and in incredible physical shape. The longest contiguous period ever spent in space is 437 days. Nobody has built anything approaching a self-sustaining environment in space. Nobody (that we know of) has ever conceived, been pregnant, or given birth in space. No children have grown up, way up there.
Despite all these unknowns, all these open questions and possible things that could go wrong, there are plenty of high-profile calls for “space colonization.” We could solve Earth’s population crisis. We could make trillions of dollars mining asteroids. We could make humanity a multi-planetary species, robust against catastrophe.
Don’t get me wrong, there have long been space nerds with dreams like this. I’m one of them, and so are the Weinersmiths. But now, space nerdery has been infected by the same Silicon Valley ethos that captured tech, finance, a lot of government, and seems to be rapidly becoming the villain of modern life. Its core tenet says that if we understand computer programming we can understand and solve any problems, probably very easily. It’s good to remember that is often not the case.
A City on Mars is in many ways a litany of all the problems that need to be solved to make space colonization a reality. It’s a long list, but also an interesting one.
More than Tech
The intersection of tech and law is rarely something that catches the zeitgeist. Where Silicon Valley interacts with the law, it often seems to be working under the famous adage of “move fast and break things.” And by pretty much any measure, it turns out that space colonization would be breaking our current space laws.
International space law is unsurprisingly limited. A handful of documents from 50+ years ago comprise all of it. That hasn’t been much of an issue while you can count all the space-faring governments on one accident-prone sawmill worker’s hand. It might become more of a problem when a dozen space programs and an equal number of private corporations are racing into space. Especially if they’re led by libertarian billionaires with certain ideas about manifest destiny.
The Weinersmiths look at the existing laws, where they are likely to be inadequate, and some international frameworks that might make good templates for new laws, including those that govern the deep sea and Antarctica.
They also look at the economic drivers for space exploration and colonization, or the lack thereof. Even with drastic improvements to the tech, the likelihood of making money in space seems slim. It’s so hard and expensive and slow to do anything in space that the payoffs would have to be outright astronomical to develop any kind of self-sustaining industry.
Space Livin’ Ain’t Easy
If there’s a broad takeaway from A City on Mars, it’s that space colonization is still a lot harder than it’s often assumed to be, and that it would be a good idea to take it slow and act thoughtfully rather than jumping in with half a plan and dealing with the consequences. It’s not a sexy position for a book aimed at space nerds to take, and the Weinersmiths are keenly aware of this.
They make their case well, and it’s hard to argue against it. This doesn’t mean space colonization is doomed, but it does probably mean that it’s a very long-term project, and one whose parameters may not jive with a lot of the current discourse. It means there are a lot of problems still to solve, and that throwing money at them won’t be enough.
Science has proven pretty good at solving some of these problems, given enough public support. That’s half the battle. The other half is purely social: can we work together and get along, as individuals and nations? The technology may be the easier lift.
Pessimism for Writers?
So why would a book that catalogues all the barriers to space colonization be good for science fiction writers? Simple: we need tension and conflict in our stories.
Practically every page of A City on Mars is a story waiting to happen. Every challenge, every difficulty or unsolved problem is just another seed for an interesting new plot.
Sci-fi can get bogged down in the land of technobabble solutions to technobabble problems. It’s not always satisfying when your dilithium crystals break and you solve it by reversing the polarity on the tractor beam to push your ship out of the neutral zone. A City on Mars offers a wealth of potentially fun challenges for characters to overcome: problems of technology and biology, but also of politics, law, and economics. If you want to write about near-future space colonization, it’s a fantastic place to start.
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 29 – Jul 5.
Stats
Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 5
Submissions Total: 20
Rejections: 17
Acceptances: 0
Submissions and Responses
All quiet this week. No new submissions or responses.
Goals and Results
Last time, my goals were:
Revise Beneath the House in Caen to completion, or close to it.
Clean up and trim T.I.M., consider whether it needs another round of Critters.
As usual, this was optimistic, but I did want to leave the week open to work on either of these stories, depending on what I felt like doing. In the end, it was Beneath the House at Caen that I ended up working on. This was productive revision, trimming about 200 words and cleaning up quite a few small things.
My process for dealing with workshop feedback has evolved into roughly three steps. First, I do the initial read-through of all of it, and copy it over into a single unwieldy OneNote document. Then I take a second pass through all of it, decide what I’m going to discount or ignore, and begin taking bullet-point notes. The result is a stack of bullet points and a few pages of little feedback snippets at the top of the doc, and everything else relegated to the wasteland at the bottom of the doc. The final refinement is to go through the snippets and either immediately change something in the story to address them, or convert them into a bullet point.
Similar feedback gets combined. If I’m clever, I come up with a fix that addresses several things at once. Eventually, what I’m left with is a long list of bullet points (about 50 in the case of Caen). Some are still easy fixes, some require more thought. Then I work through them.
The Halfway Mark
Week 26 means we are halfway through the year. I figured this would be a good time to review my goals and see where I stand.
Finish and submit twelve short stories — Current: 2 / Goal: 6
Send 50 submissions — Current: 20 / Goal: 25
Post 100 times on Words Deferred — Current: 43 / Goal: 50
I’m a little behind on all of these metrics. The biggest issue is actually getting those stories across the finish line so they can be sent out. However, even if I get the two in progress finished soon, I’ll still be behind there. I always knew that a story per month was going to be difficult for me, but I’d still like to get this number higher.
My submission count, on the other hand, is solid. I’ve been doing more simultaneous submissions this year, which helps a lot. If I can get a few more stories in rotation, that will make this goal easy to hit.
The state of the third goal can be clearly seen on my WordPress stats. All I have to do to meet that goal is two posts per week, and one of them is this weekly update. I absolutely hit that standard the first three months of the year, but I trailed off in the second quarter. Part of that comes down to finding something interesting to talk about. I have no interest in writing something that bores me and you. If I had to pick one goal to not achieve, it would be this one. After all, it’s the “Year of Short Stories,” not the “Year of Blogging.” That was somewhere around 2006.
Next Week
I’m a broken record:
Revise Beneath the House in Caen to completion, or close to it.
Clean up and trim T.I.M., consider whether it needs another round of Critters.
Words Deferred 