Words Deferred

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

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

The Other Side — 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 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.

Fifteen Years — 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.

Fifteen Years

He’s one of the most successful CEOs in history, turning a small business into a corporate behemoth in a little over a decade. Every industry he touches is revolutionized. Every decision proves prescient. He keeps the prices low. He takes care of his workers and their communities. He puts people over profits, but the profits still roll in. The business analysts don’t understand how he does it. Nobody does.

It’s easy though. Easy when you can travel backward in time exactly fifteen years. Easy when you can try every strategy, make every mistake, and then start again. How many times has he started over?

What’s hard is the long cycle. Fifteen years to recharge, and then back again. No way to go further. No way to escape that event horizon of the past.

So many days are too far back now for him to visit. They exist only as memories. The day he met the woman he loves. They day they married. The day she got her diagnosis.

She’s still back there, in the past. He can still visit her hospital bed. He can smell the antiseptic, see the sunken hollows of her cheeks and eyes. Hear the wheezing rhythm of the machine that helps her breathe. Two weeks before she passes on. Two weeks by her side, every fifteen years.

He knows he should let her go. That’s what she would want. He has tried. But he’s so afraid to lose those last two weeks. Then she’ll really be gone beyond his reach. And what will be the point of this empire he has built? What will be the point of anything?

The date is blocked off in his calendar, among the meetings and events. It’s nearly time again.

Fifteen years.

Week 20 — 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 week of May 18 – 24.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out:8
Submissions Total: 20
Rejections: 16
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

I had one story come back to me this past week—a form rejection for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. So I sent it back out.

The rejection and new submission were both publications that don’t accept simultaneous submissions (that is, submitting the same story to several places at the same time). It used to be like this almost everywhere, but explicitly allowing simultaneous submissions has become more and more common. Generally a good thing for writers. The remaining sticklers tend to be the more prestigious or higher-paying markets.

Some writers will say that nobody can stop you from submitting all you want, and it’s unlikely any publication will catch you. That is generally true. If you are lucky enough to be accepted by more than one publication—well, Lucy, you might have some ’splainin to do. Accepted stories do sometimes get withdrawn, though it’s unlikely to ingratiate you with any editors.

As someone who likes to spend some time vetting publications and submitting to those where I think my stories have the best shot, I don’t necessarily mind some of my stories being submitted to a single publication at a time, so long as those publications don’t have annoyingly long turnaround times. I sometimes find it hard to keep up with submissions anyway. I can spend that time working on other stories instead.

** Goals and Results

Last week’s singular goal:

Continue revising F-TIB.

Here’s where I sound like a broken record and complain that I haven’t had much time to write over the past week. A couple hours on the weekend doesn’t feel like it goes very far.

I have gone through all the critique feedback for F-TIB and decided what to address and what to ignore. I then took that, along with my breakdown of the story structure, and used it to outline a new structure that I believe will fix the things that need fixing.

The result is an outline with twice as many scenes as the original, but that’s a misleading description. Certainly at least twice as much happening. The first draft only had a couple real scenes embedded in a kind of montage of description. It felt stylized when I was writing it, but it’s clear that many of my readers found it bland, messy, and too fast to earn the emotional payoff that I was trying to build at the end of the story.

In the current draft I’m building more traditional scenes and spending more time ramping into the key moments so they feel earned.

Next Week

It has been far too long that I’ve been slowly chipping at F-TIB, so I’m upgrading last week’s goal:

Finish revising F-TIB!

I might put in some late evenings this week, just to try to get this done.

Ted Lasso and Using Tropes Effectively

I’ve been rewatching Ted Lasso recently, and while there are many things to appreciate about the writing on that show, I found myself impressed by the tropes. Rebecca is the tough female boss, Higgins is her bumbling sidekick. Jamie is the fantastic young athlete who only cares about himself, and Roy is the old curmudgeon, past his prime. Many of the characters are shown in the first episodes as decidedly one-dimensional.

Normally, “trope” is a dirty word among writers—synonymous with laziness and lack of creativity. Tropes are things we’ve seen before; things we’ve seen so many times, in fact, that they are familiar and often boring.

But that familiarity can be an asset when used carefully. A trope can be a shorthand. It doesn’t have to be explained, because the audience already knows. A show with a big cast like Lasso needs these shorthands to introduce so many characters so quickly without confusing the audience. The show manages to get a ton of story across in the first few episodes, when it also has to build a world for these characters to live in.

But a show full of tropes will bore a smart audience quickly, so Lasso pulls off a second trick. The trope isn’t the end state, it’s the opening move. Each trope is quickly deflated by a scene or two where the character shows a surprising attribute—something that directly contradicts what the audience is expecting from that trope. Suddenly, those characters feel considerably more like real people.

These rounded characters also play directly into one of the core themes that makes Lasso such a heartwarming show. The audience finds that they’ve pre-judged these characters, but everyone has a reason for their weaknesses. They’re good reasons, and easy to sympathize with.

The characters are cold to protect themselves, they’re angry because they’ve been hurt. They are never excused their bad behavior, but they are forgiven for it, because they’re human.

So don’t discount tropes. They can be extremely effective when used carefully.

Weeks 18 & 19 — 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 May 4 – 17.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 8
Submissions Total: 19
Rejections: 15
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

In the past two weeks I had a single rejection for Taco Cat Employee Manual. It was one of those where it’s either a very brief personalized rejection or a very positive form rejection.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the last open submission for The Incident at Pleasant Hills had come back, so I spent some time scouring Duotrope and submitting. The end result was one new anthology submission for Taco Cat and three new submissions for Pleasant Hills.

I’m still pretty much on par or slightly ahead on my goal of hitting 50 short story submissions by the end of the year. Now, if I could just finish a few more stories, that would help me blow that goal out of the water.

Goals and Results

Last week’s goals (well, technically two weeks ago):

Submit The Incident at Pleasant Hills
Continue revising F-TIB.
Outline Arbor Grove (and maybe start on the next version)
Review critiques for Beneath the House at Caen.

Between work and my kids school activities, life has been busy. As usual, I’ve made progress, but perhaps not as much as I would like. I submitted Pleasant Hills and did a cursory read-through of the critiques that came in for House at Caen.

I’ve now gotten a couple notes from critters who mentioned that they liked some previous story I had submitted, so they picked up one of my newer stories when it came up in the feed. It’s nice to hear that the quality on rough drafts was at least high enough to pique some interest, and a good indicator that it pays to submit regularly so the more prolific critters have a chance to notice you and submit useful feedback.

The main downside of Critters compared to a traditional writers’ group is that it’s less personal and harder to get to know others. It’s nice to see that there is some community to be found in the group if you’re active enough.

Arbor Grove was really the one goal that I didn’t work on, although it has been in the back of my mind. This week I’m thinking that I’d rather just fall behind on my word count goals and spend my time working on the drafts that are closer to completion.

Then again, I’ve never been very good at sticking to any one thing for long, so I may go back to it if I get the itch.

I rewrote a couple scenes in F-TIB (or rather made scenes out of the messy montages). There’s still more work to be done there, and I haven’t quite gotten it all to fit together in my head in the way that tells me I’ve cracked it. So I’ll continue.

This Week’s Mini-Topic: Revisionary Disassembly

As part of my work on F-TIB this week, I broke the story down into its scenes and characters, which really helped to show that a good chunk of the story didn’t have discrete scenes (as well as highlight the problems critters pointed out with two of the characters).

The pattern that I noticed is that major revisions are often a process of disassembly and reassembly.

I often find that once I’ve finished a first draft and done some polishing, it starts to feel like a single unit with no seams. It’s easy enough to deal with line edits, because those don’t typically change the shape of the story, but when problems revealed in characters or scenes or anything that cuts across the story as a whole, they feel much more overwhelming. When the story is a contiguous sequence of A then B then C, how can anything be significantly modified?

This is where I’ve found it effective to break the story back down into individual components. Look at the scenes and what happens within them. Look at the characters and see how they interact and how they drive the plot.

These smaller pieces are discrete components with interfaces to other components of the story. If you modify one of them, you just look at the linkages to other characters and scenes, and make the necessary adjustments to make them fit. Sometimes that means a changes in one place necessitates a cascade of changes, but those can be identified and addressed one after another.

So, next time you’re having trouble with revisions, consider making a reverse outline or listing out your characters and what their purposes are within the story.

Next Week

I’m going back to focus mode, with a single goal:

Continue revising F-TIB.

Musical Writing Prompts

Fine. I admit it. I hate most writing prompts.

Why? Well, that’s a good question. I enjoy thinking up ideas for stories. But I rarely find that “traditional” writing prompts help me do that. I suspect that the skills for creating a good writing prompt are further from the skills for writing a good story than we might expect.

Many writing prompts start with a core idea that’s too specific. Most of my Story Idea Vault entries fall into this camp, sad to say. It can be hard for someone else to come up with their own spin on the monster beneath the monastery that kills the monks and whispers the future, or the student biologist who has to learn how to recognize thousands of deadly forms of alien life on sight. How do you find the twist on that to get you excited and feel like it’s now yours?

I think a good writing prompt needs to contain not quite enough information. For me, a good story idea starts with an unexpected leap of logic or connection between unexpected things. It starts in the gaps.

I like the Story Engine because it provides very small bits of ideas and shuffles them up randomly. Often, when I use it to generate story ideas, I find that the new ideas are inspired by the cards, but often don’t quite fit all the parameters. From a full sentence with characters and actions and setting, something like the phrase “architecture bomb” will lodge in my brain and grow into something else entirely.

An even simpler exercise that I like for ideation is to generate two long lists of words or phrases. Then align the lists randomly and start reading the combinations. What is a skeleton jar? A Rickroll engine? Sky games?

Again, it’s not anything like a full, coherent idea; more like a high-speed collider for linguistic nuclei. It’s that unexpected connection between unrelated ideas that tickles the muse.

Recently, I discovered another exercise in the same vein—something almost, but not entirely unlike a writing prompt.

Go into the music app on your phone (or your record collection, or a Spotify playlist depending on how old you are) and put on some music. For each song, try to come up with the “story of the song” before it’s over.

I don’t mean summarizing the lyrics (if there are any, and they actually tell a story). Those words might contribute. Is there a person on a bike? A mother? Jilted lovers? An old truck? A fast car and a gun?

You might find yourself picturing little scenes or images. They could relate to the lyrics, or they may be soundscapes. Check the band name, the song name, the album name. Look at the cover art.

Surprisingly few songs tell a straightforward story. They’re often full of loosely related tidbits with little gaps and dark voids in between.

If you look carefully, there are stories in those gaps.

Week 17 — 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 week of Apr. 27 – May 3.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 5
Submissions Total: 15
Rejections: 14
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

One response this week—a rejection for The Incident at Pleasant Hills. This included a little note with some kind words for the story, but they found it too bleak for the publication. This is a good note for future submissions, and another indication that the story is being read positively, even if it hasn’t found a home yet.

Goals and Results

Last week’s goals:

Revise F-TIB.

My horror/dark fantasy story, Beneath the House at Caen, went out to Critters this week. The critiques are coming in, and will continue until Wednesday. As usual, I’m only glancing at this feedback as it dribbles into my inbox. I’ll wait until the crit week is over before collecting it all into a new document, giving it an initial read-through, and sending out a brief thank you to the readers.

I think this was a productive week, but not in a way that helps my word count much. For F-TIB, I’ve been crunching down feedback into plans for revising the story. That involved mapping out the current scenes and thinking about new scenes, brainstorming a new title and new name for a major character, and deciding on some small changes that will still have significant impact on this relatively short story.

One nice thing about this planning work is that I can immediately see several low-level critiques of the story evaporate as the broader structure changes. That’s the main reason why I advocate starting with big changes and working down to the nitty-gritty, and it’s always nice when I can see that philosophy saving time and effort.

I’ve also been working on my foray into solarpunk, Arbor Grove. When I talked about exploratory writing last week, this is the story I was thinking about. I knocked out 2,400 words of Arbor Grove with only some vague ideas of an event that ties the beginning and end together. What I found was that the story had gotten bogged down in boring scenes and failed to do anything interesting.

So, much like F-TIB, I mostly spent my time staring at the screen rather than typing. I’m working through the things that excite me about the story and the things that are dragging it down, and just articulating those things really helps clarify the direction I should be going. I expect some sort of outline to come out of this process, and I will likely end up throwing most of those 2,400 words away, but they were worthwhile as a way to refine the story.

Next Week

My single goal last week was to work on F-TIB because it’s the story that’s closest to completion. Soon I’ll have critique revisions to work on for Beneath the House at Caen. But I’m also enjoying working on Arbor Grove, and I like to indulge the muse by following a project when it feels productive and fun.

At the risk of splitting my focus, I’m setting a few goals for next week.

Submit The Incident at Pleasant Hills
Continue revising F-TIB.
Outline Arbor Grove (and maybe start on the next version)
Review critiques for Beneath the House at Caen.