2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week seven: Feb. 15 – Feb. 22.
Stats
Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 2
Rejections:4
Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
The goals I set for last week were:
Finish Red Eyes.
Finish Taco Cat.
Continue writing Out of Towner.
Get a new story in the Critters queue.
This week felt good. I am finished with Red Eyes, and I think I can safely say that this is the most work I’ve had to put into a story to make it work. It’s a relief to be done with it.
Taco Cat Employee Manual v7.1 (a much shorter story) made it through the Critters queue this week, and I received 11 responses—a pretty decent turn-out. It was mostly well-received, and only needed some minor tweaks. Quite a contrast between these two stories. I trimmed it down to an even 1,000 words so I can submit it to most flash fiction listings.
I already had another story, F-TIB, ready for the critters queue, so I sent that off and should get feedback in mid-March.
Finally, I sat and stared at Out of Towner, a story comprised (so far) of a single introductory scene, and felt completely indifferent to it. So that was the one goal I didn’t meet. This week, I’ll have to decide if I can find a spark of excitement in it, or if I should set it aside and pick something else to work on.
Submissions and Rejections
I received a response to the light rewrite that was requested for Incident at Pleasant Hills. Unfortunately, it was a rejection. This was a bummer, but they had very kind words for the story so I can’t really complain.
I submitted one story, Tom, Dick, and Larry, to a themed drabble contest. It has been challenging to find publications interested in drabbles, and they frequently don’t offer payment. (It’s pretty funny, since pro rates on 100 words come out to only $8.) This contest pays and the theme fits the story, so it’s a nice find.
I haven’t yet looked through the listings with Red Eyes or Taco Cat in mind, but I plan to send them out in the upcoming week.
Next Week
My goals for next week are:
Submit stories – at least three
Submit some critiques
Continue writing Out of Towner, or start a new story.
Reading the four-part Ender’s saga left me feeling skeptical of big, philosophical, late-80s sci-fi books. Now I’m going back to that well with Hyperion.
I’ll be honest, Hyperion feels clever and stylish after Children of the Mind. Then again, Ender’s Game was the first and best book in the series. Hyperion is also the first book in a four-book series. So maybe I’m setting myself up for heartbreak all over again.
Canterbury Tales, in Space!
Hyperion opens with a frame story. A man we know only as the Consul is given instructions to go to the planet of Hyperion along with six others, on a mysterious pilgrimage. He goes, and meets his compatriots:
Het Masteen, captain of the spaceship that will transport them, which just so happens to be a giant tree.
Father Lenar Hoyt, a Catholic priest in a galaxy where Catholicism is nearly extinct
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, a soldier of the galaxy-spanning Hegemony’s military
Martin Silenus, a centuries-old poet who has journeyed between stars and across time via relativistic space travel
Sol Weintraub, a scholar, who brings his baby daughter Rachel
Brawne Lamia, a hard-boiled private detective
When the pilgrims arrive at Hyperion and introductions are made, they come to an agreement: they will each tell the story of why they came as they make the long journey from the spaceport to their final destination, the Time Tombs. There, they expect to find the Shrike, a mythic creature made entirely of razor-sharp blades. Supposedly, he will choose one of them to grant a boon, and the others will be sacrificed.
As the journey gets underway, each pilgrim tells their story in turn. Between the stories, they travel across the planet toward their destination. It’s a bad time to return to Hyperion. The planet is poised to be the first front in the largest war humanity has ever seen, between the Hegemony and the long-exiled Ousters, who live strange lives in their deep-space ships. The Time Tombs—in what cannot be coincidence—appear to be opening, and nobody knows what will come out.
A Slowly Woven Tapestry
The structure of the book allows Simmons to expand the scope of ideas slowly. The unexplained and confusing in one story is addressed and answered in another. It allows the reader to assemble these small pieces into a detailed and rich setting.
Through the pilgrims’ stories, we begin to understand the galaxy they inhabit and the ways their paths have crossed Hyperion and the Shrike to bring them to the current moment. From Silenus we learn about Old Earth and the Big Mistake, a man-made black hole that slowly (and then quickly) devoured the planet, forcing the Hegira to many worlds. From Father Hoyt and Saul, we learn about Hyperion, it’s inhabitants, and the Time Tombs. From Kassad and the Consul, we learn about the armies of the Hegemony; the many rebellions quashed and small wars fought by a supposedly peaceful and democratic government. From Brawne, we come to understand the vast web of farcaster portals that allow instantaneous travel between Hegemony worlds, and the mysterious society of AIs who control them and remain apart from humanity while ostensibly guiding and helping them.
The book paints rich portraits of a handful of specific worlds. Dan Simmons manages to make almost every setting in the book genuinely strange and interesting. A planet wracked with storms, a sea of grass navigated by gyroscopic sailing ship, a 1.3g planet where the people live in vast arcology-like “hives,” a bus-sized cable-car over snowy mountains, an ocean world where people live on island-sized migratory creatures, and a vast capital city where the rich live in houses where every room is a portal to a different planet.
This feels like a universe with a history, a big universe populated by billions of people across dozens of worlds, and all the diversity that represents. It’s full of beauty and weirdness. And yet, the same human sins and weaknesses are still there, still causing problems.
Each pilgrim brings a different perspective to their story, which allows Dan Simmons to shift style and tone throughout. Kassad’s story is full of sex and violence, a pastiche of military sci-fi, while the Consul’s story is more of a historical documentary. Brawne’s story is a cyberpunk noir where the detective inevitably falls in love with her dangerous client. Sol’s story is that of a father desperately trying to save his sick child. These different styles help to keep the book constantly fresh, and each reveals new pieces in the puzzle of what’s really happening on Hyperion.
In the Ender Saga books, the relativistic effects of space travel were a promise that never really delivered. Nobody apart from the main characters traveled between worlds, and it seemed that nobody could even imagine that someone might live for hundreds of years by traveling between stars while time passes by.
In Hyperion, relativistic space travel is a part of life. The Web of Hegemony worlds are connected instantaneously via farcasters, but each world starts as a colony whose inhabitants took a many years to arrive, and even longer to build their first farcasters. Conflicts often arise between the original settlers, or indiginies, and the flood of tourists that inevitably come with joining the web.
Style Plus Substance
Ultimately, I think a lot of what I enjoy about Hyperion comes down to Dan Simmons’s writing style. It incorporates literary flashes and delightfully crafted language, while maintaining the workmanlike plotting and characterization that a mainstream science-fiction audience would expect…especially in the late 1980s.
For a thirty-five year old novel, Hyperion still feels fresh and interesting. It’s doing a lot, and doing most of it well. If there’s anything to critique, it’s that the book sets up some big mysteries and leaves the biggest ones unresolved. I believe the four books in the series are really a pair of duologies, so I expect to get most of the answers in the sequel, The Fall of Hyperion.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week six: Feb. 8 – Feb. 15
Stats
Stories Finished: 1
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 1
Rejections: 3
Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
My goals from last week were:
Finish revising Red Eyes.
Start the first draft of a new story.
Although I’ve been generally keeping up with my self-imposed quotas for writing and editing, this week marks the first time where I’ve gotten ahead on both.
I started a new story with a working title of Out of Towner. I hate this title and it will change. I’m not sure how I feel about the story itself. I’ll give it another week to see how it shapes up.
I made a couple of breakthroughs with Red Eyes revisions this week. First, I found a motivation for my main character that connects several aspects of the story and helps to explain why he finds himself in his current predicament. This also gave me a reason to make a change to the ending—not really changing the outcome of the story, but replacing some dialogue between two characters that I always felt was not up to snuff.
In the past couple weeks, I’ve addressed about two pages of bullet point notes, with some content migrating across several scenes. I believe I’ve reached the point where I added and clarified everything I wanted to. Unfortunately, that process added 600-700 words to a fairly long story. I’m refusing to call it done until it gets another one or two editing passes, mainly to trim, trim, trim.
As I finally wrap up this story, it’s really apparent that I’m just not as good at editing as I’d like to be. It’s slow, painful work to slog through. The writing is breezy in comparison. I’ve been able to get away with it, to some extent, by writing shorter stories that don’t have as many complicated, moving parts.
This isn’t a point of shame, but it does reinforce my determination to do a lot of editing this year so I can get better at it.
Critiques
It will be a relief to have Red Eyes done, because I’ve got another story coming down the pipe. Taco Cat Employee Manual v.7.1 went out for critique this week. The Critters week runs Wednesday to Wednesday, so it still has a couple days to go. I’ve gotten seven responses, which is not bad, but I’m hoping to get a few more.
Taco Cat currently stands at 1150 words, and a couple people have noted that it’s probably worth trying to get that down to an even 1000, the common cutoff for flash fiction. I expect the editing pass to be much shorter and less intensive on this one. Soon, I should have two more stories ready to submit.
As a speculative fiction writer, I tend to stay in the zones of sci-fi and fantasy. I don’t go across the tracks to horrorville very often. However, I’m currently writing a horror story featuring a monster who appears human. That got me thinking about monsters and how to write them effectively.
Despite my limited horror writing experience, I do read a good amount of horror and have analyzed a fair number of short stories through Critters critiques. As authors, we inevitably read far more work than we produce, so it’s important to learn not just from our own mistakes, but from others’ mistakes (and successes) as well.
In my opinion, horror is reliant on pacing and rising tension more than any other genre. While “conflict” and “tension” are sometimes used interchangeably, the difference is important here. Physical violence is common in horror (although it’s hardly the only form of conflict available). But too much violence runs the risk of verging into absurdity or action/thriller and losing those “creeping dread” horror vibes.
To feel like horror, there should be rising tension throughout, and outright conflict only at key “peaks” of the story.
Save the Reveal
Any connoisseur of monster movies knows that revealing the monster too early is a mortal sin. Mystery, uncertainty, and fear all build tension. So long as the reader and the characters don’t have a complete understanding of the antagonist, there’s always the possibility of something new and unexpected happening.
To this end, it’s important to slow roll the reveal. Dribble out information and understanding. The characters might think they have a chance against the monster when they discover that it’s blind. They’ll learn how wrong they are when they discover it has superhuman hearing and sense of smell.
The unknown is always more spooky. This goes for all aspects of the horrific. When describing the monster, give the characters and the reader glimpses, not straight on views. Show us a stray tentacle, a slime trail, a bloodshot eye through the crack in the door, or the sound of sharp claws scraping on the window.
If there has to be a full reveal, it should come close to the end. However, there doesn’t always have to be a reveal. Sometimes the story can resolve, and the characters can even win, without ever completely understanding the monster. Cosmic horror especially relishes the unknowable, and often outright refuses to fully explain its biggest bad guys. They are too horrific or mind-bending for mere humans to comprehend while staying sane.
Use All of Your Senses
Vision is the sense that able-bodied humans use most, and it’s usually the first mode of description authors reach for. Hearing is a distant second place. The rest of the senses are a lap behind on the track.
In any fiction it’s a good idea to shake this up. Hearing, touch, smell and taste can all add verisimilitude and depth to a story. For horror, this is even more important. Since mystery and the unknown are vital to creating tension, preventing characters from seeing the danger will ramp up that tension.
Since a lot of horror lives in the realm of speculative fiction, there may even be opportunities to include “extraordinary” senses beyond the standard five. Characters might get the feeling that they’re being watched, or the extrasensory certainty that something horrible is about to happen.
Using the full array of senses is an opportunity to make associations with things that cause discomfort—the feeling of bugs crawling over skin, dripping slime in an unexpected place, the smell or taste of rot, the sound of crunching bones. These kinds of sensory discomforts are another key way to ramp up the tension in a story.
Be aware that you may lose certain readers when you get into phobia territory. This is par for the course with horror, and audiences should expect a certain amount of discomfort, but you’re still going to encounter certain readers who absolutely can’t get enough axe murder and will still throw a book across the room when they get to the bit with the spiders under a character’s skin or the clown in the sewer.
Metaphor and Synecdoche
Another important way to maintain mystery and reveal without revealing is to use layers of indirection. Metaphor and simile can give a sense of what the monster is like, without providing the whole picture. Synecdoche substitutes a part of the thing for the whole.
We know the creature has a snout that snuffles like a pig when it seeks out its victims. We know that it has a slimy hide with bristly, needle-like hair. We know that when it was feeding on that old man in the shadows, it was all sharp claws and red-tinged fangs.
Twisted or False Innocence
Another tactic for introducing mystery and uncertainty is to start with something safe and known, and systematically show that this surface-level simplicity hides sinister depths.
The classic examples of this tend toward typical innocence and innocuousness: children, dolls, nuns, clowns. These cheerful, delightful, or inherently good things and people slowly reveal aspects that do not match what they’re supposed to be.
The feeling of understanding something, only to have to revise that initial impression naturally brings some level of discomfort and tension with it. It speaks to the primal parts of the human brain that are responsible for studying the dark jungle around us and noticing on the third or fourth pass that the ordinary shadow under that tree is really a tiger.
Reveal Through Reaction
Effective fiction requires a level of empathy between the reader and the characters. Luckily, most humans are natural empathy machines—when we see something happen to somebody else, we tend to think about how that makes the other person feel, and we can even generate a sympathetic response that makes us feel the same feelings we perceive in someone else.
In all fiction, and especially in horror, it’s the author’s job to help the reader activate that sympathetic response. Sensory descriptions are a great way to do this. Again, as a culture that’s immersed in TV and movies, we tend to think very visually, but other senses often are even better at eliciting this empathy in the reader.
Importantly, fiction offers an avenue that isn’t entirely possible to replicate in TV and movies: the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters. Of course, the POV of the story may be a limiting factor, but in first person, second person, and “close” third person points of view it should be possible to delve into the thoughts and emotions of at least one character.
Reveals are Climaxes
With mysteries and uncertainties providing vital sources of tension in horror stories, it’s only natural that reveals should be moments of excitement or relief. Major revelations should come at a point of maximum tension. This can be used as a pressure release valve before moving into a new part of the story and ratcheting up a new source of tension. However, the reveal is often closely coupled with a moment of violence, pain, or trauma, turning that inherent excitement toward terror.
Reveals are also sometimes opportunities to raise the stakes. What started as “I don’t want to die,” may become “I can’t let this evil be unleashed onto the world.” One of my favorite takeaways from Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story is that the character’s personal story should tie into the broader external action. What this means is that good stories have personal stakes for key characters, but those stakes are tied to the bigger events.
In Stranger Things, a group of kids has to fight monsters to save their friends, but those monsters also have bigger plans to wreak havoc on their small town and the world. In The Omen, fear of a monstrous child is heightened by the possibility that he may be the Antichrist. The Alien movies aren’t just about avoiding the Xenomorph, but about preventing it from spreading.
Most horror—or at least horror with monsters in it—ends in defeat, or victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. The climactic reveal may be the piece of information that is needed to fully understand the monster, and thus discover a weakness that can be used to defeat it.
The final opportunity for tension comes at the end of the story, just beyond the climax. The monster was finally defeated…or was it? Did that mangled corpse twitch? Did the eye open? Or is there a clutch of eggs somewhere cool and moist, waiting to hatch? Was the demon really banished, or is there a strange glint of red in that side character’s eye?
One of the hallmarks of horror is leaving the reader with an unsettled feeling even after the final sentence, and a great way to do that is to leave some tension unresolved.
Here we are, in the thick of a new year of short stories. It’s the perfect time to direct you to one of my favorite short-story-writing bloggers, Aeryn Rudel.
Rudel writes and submits short fiction in numbers that I can only aspire to. In fact, the title of this post apparently understates his case—he mentions that he’s had 120 stories published over the past 12 years! That much experience brings a lot of perspective on short story writing, and we’re lucky that Rudel shares it regularly.
Check out the post over on his site, Rejectomancy.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week five: Jan. 31 – Feb. 6.
Stats
Stories Finished: 0
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 1
Rejections: 3
Acceptances: 0
A New Kind of Rejection
I received one rejection this week. Sort of.
At first I thought it was going to be one of those rejections where the publication is so worried about offending anyone that they don’t even clearly say that the story is rejected. (For the record, these are my least favorite kind of rejection. Don’t treat writers as fragile little babies, even if we occasionally act that way.)
Around the fifth paragraph it became apparent what was actually going on. The publication was unable to keep up with the number of submissions, so they gave up, rejected everything, and changed their format to be flash fiction only.
My submission wasn’t flash, hence the non-rejection rejection.
Goals and Results
The goals I set out for this week were:
Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
Catch up on writing word count.
I have to admit I got distracted this week, but it was productive distraction. I ended up working on several blog posts, which should be a longer-term benefit when I have less work to do for the remainder of my February posting schedule.
I didn’t finish my revisions on Red Eyes, but I did make good progress. I’m now ahead on my self-imposed revision quota for the first time this year. I still have one more week to wrap up Red Eyes before critiques for another story, Taco Cat, start coming in from Critters.
I didn’t quite catch up to my word count quota this week, although I am within spitting distance. Those words were spent on finishing the first draft of the horror story I’ve been working on, currently titled Estate Sale. (I’ll be looking for a more interesting name when I come back to it for revisions.)
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.
Computational Literature
Early on, computer programming was valued for its practical uses. It overturned industry and transformed society. It was deemed a science, even if computer science wasn’t as rigorous as physics or chemistry.
There were always those who saw the artistry in programming, the code golfers, makers of esoteric languages, and high-minded software architects. But what does artistry matter in the face of trillion-dollar industries and socioeconomic upheaval?
That was before Gustav Nacht, classical painter turned web designer. In retrospect, it’s clear that his genius was on par with greats like Mozart, Nabokov, or Van Gogh. At the time, nobody took his School for Computational Literature seriously.
Nacht pioneered programming languages that were as expressive for humans as they were for computers. Ernest was a language as terse and evocative as the writing of Hemingway, while Faulkner was a language as verbose, complex, and non-linear as the stories of its namesake.
It took decades, but by the time of Nacht’s death, non-programmers reading computational literature had become commonplace, and the ability to program finally seemed destined to become ubiquitous, as more and more people discovered these accessible gateways into the practice.
Nacht’s best students carried on his work, and while some fans might suggest that nobody would ever attain the same artistic heights as Nacht himself, most readers found subsequent generations even more enjoyable.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week four: Jan. 24 – Jan. 30
Stats
Stories Finished: 0
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 1
Rejections: 2
Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
The goals I set for this week were:
Clean up another story (F-TIB) for Critters
Revise a story (Red Eyes)
Do just enough new writing to meet my self-imposed quota
My first goal went very smoothly. I usually don’t do a lot of heavy editing on a story initially, unless I get seriously negative feedback from my first readers or I feel like it has big structural problems. This particular story is fairly short—about 2300 words—and feels pretty good after some light cleanup.
My biggest concern isn’t a story structure thing, it’s the fact that one of the two main characters is trans, and their transition is an important plot point. I’m not trans, and I want to do right by the character and by that community. I haven’t worked with a sensitivity reader (formal or informal), but that’s something I might explore for this piece.
Goal number two is a work in progress. I won’t talk too much more about it. I’ve already mentioned that Red Eyes is a fairly long story (6600 words) that does need some structural adjustments, and that’s ongoing. I think this is an interesting example of the editorial process, so I may publish a longer post-mortem when I’m done.
Goal three was an abject failure. I barely wrote anything new this week. That doesn’t bother me, since I’m making progress on my revisions and that’s what I need to do to get more stories ready for submission. My word count goals are very reasonable, and I can still easily make up those words in a few hours of solid work.
Looking Back on the First Month
It’s hard to believe that January is over. One month down, eleven to go. I’m happy to report that I feel like I’ve struck a good equilibrium with my goals. I don’t feel overwhelmed, but I am getting things done.
So far, that isn’t reflected much in the stats at the top of these posts. I’ve been working on several stories, but haven’t yet pushed one over the line to be ready for submission. If we go by my goals for the year, I should be finishing one story per month. So I will necessarily have to ramp that up.
The number of submissions is also slightly low, if we go by the raw math of splitting 50 submissions over 12 months. This flows from completing stories, so it makes sense. Naturally, as I finish more stories I will be able to submit more, so I expect this to ramp up throughout the year.
My final goal for the year was orthogonal to writing short fiction: essentially keeping the blog active by posting 100 times. Conveniently, this works out to roughly two posts per week. So far I’ve remained comfortably on track.
I was struck by multiple ideas for the blog this week, which was a small distraction from writing fiction, but a welcome one. I was able to build up a small backlog of posts over my holiday vacation, and I’m happy to be able to maintain a healthy buffer for those inevitable times when the well of ideas runs dry. It’s a nice way to keep the writing muscles in shape while taking a break from fiction, and a good excuse to think about and discuss process.
Next Week
For the upcoming week, my goals are:
Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
Catch up on writing word count.
Taco Cat Employee Manual still has roughly two weeks in the Critters queue before I start to get feedback, and I now have F-TIB ready to submit for critique immediately after that. Red Eyes progress has been slow, so I’m mostly clearing my week to work on that. I’d really like to have it done by the time the critiques start rolling in so I can move on to addressing those.
Catching up on word count is a secondary goal, and one that will be fairly easy to achieve if I get in the right mood for it, but I’ll be happy to let it slide if I can make significant progress on revisions instead.
I received CBR+PNK (“cyber plus punk”) as a holiday gift, and while I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, half the fun of TTRPGs is in leafing through the materials, enjoying the art, and trying to figure out how the rules fit together and how it will actually play.
CBR+PNK bills itself as “Cyberpunk one-shots forged in the dark.” It gets its story DNA from its namesake, Cyberpunk, the gritty dystopic future setting that has recently found fresh life in the popular Cyberpunk 2077 video game and Cyberpunk RED core rules update. However, its rules are based on a stripped-down version of Blades in the Dark, a fiction-first, fast and simple ruleset with a core mechanic of rolling d6 pools.
The Package
CBR+PNK is clearly broadcasting its goal of being a light, low-prep, pick-up-and-go game. The form factor is less than half the bulk of a typical core rule book; a slick little fold-out box filled with laminated pamphlets, all held together by a sturdy sleeve.
The lamination means these should stand up well to the typical abuses of game nights, including spilled drinks. It also allows players and GM to mark up their pamphlets with whiteboard markers and reuse them across sessions.
The left fold of the packet contains includes a “GM protocols” pamphlet and 5x player “runner files”—a combination character sheet and mini instruction manual. The right half contains a variety of odds and ends: optional mechanics, settings and runs.
The Framework
The players play as criminal or semi-criminal agents, mercenaries with specialized skill sets who might come together for assassinations, heists, sabotage, or other high-stakes operations at the behest of shadowy contacts promising huge payouts.
Unlike games that cater more to long campaigns where player characters can grow over months or years, the characters in CBR+PNK are veterans on their last mission, hoping to finish the run and get out of the game alive.
There are some optional rules for running CBR+PNK campaigns over multiple sessions (and supplements to that effect on Itch.io), but it’s tailored for one-shots, and I suspect the rules might feel thin in places for a long story across many missions.
As part of initial setup, each character has an “angle.” Are they out for revenge? Trying to buy a luxury flat to get their family out of the slums? Paying off a bookie? Searching for a missing friend?
At the end of the run, each player decides how they will leverage the results of the mission to try to satisfy this broader character goal, then rolls a special skill check with various bonuses. This is the final payoff or disaster.
Setup
The game is designed to be low-stress for the GM. That’s achieved in three ways—few rules, spreading some load to players, and minimizing prep.
It’s suggested that the GM figure out the mission objective, a couple locations and assets (people, data, vehicles, etc.), and 3-6 obstacles that players may have to overcome.
Players come up with their character’s name, look and “angle,” then assign points to the four “approaches” (broad attributes like Aggressive and Smart) and the 11 “skills” (narrow attributes like Close Combat and Coding). All of these attributes max out at 2, keeping bookkeeping simple.
Players also pick a cybernetic augmentation and a Load of Small (3), Medium (5), or Heavy (7), which impacts how much they can carry, but also how fast, conspicuous, and stealthy they are.
That’s about all that’s needed to start the game.
Play
Play revolves around three primary mechanics: Action Rolls, Stress, and Harm.
When a player tries to do something risky or difficult, they make an action roll. The GM decides the threat (risk) level, consequences of failure, and effect of success. Players can try to shift this equation to their advantage with gear or tactics, and the GM can increase the difficulty by doing the same for the bad guys. The player can also choose to simultaneously boost both risk and reward.
The roll uses a pool of d6s based on the sum of the Approach and Skill used and takes the highest roll(s). Rolling multiple 6s is a critical success, a single 6 is regular success, 4-5 is partial success with negative consequences, and 1-3 is outright failure. This basic system should feel very familiar to anyone who has played Forged in the Dark or Powered by the Apocalypse games.
Stress is a penalty pool that players can fill (up to 7) to get a variety of benefits. They can Push their own action or Assist another player’s action to add dice for an action or improve the effect. They can activate a cybernetic augmentation. Or they can perform a Flashback.
Flashbacks are a fun mechanism for coming up with new fiction on the spot. The player gets to describe something that happened before the mission that impacts the current action or predicament (and presumably helps them). The GM decides the Stress cost based on how outlandish this gamified retcon is.
Gear works similarly, but without the stress cost. Players decide they packed an item when they need it. The only caveat is that you can’t produce more gear from your pack than your Load number allows.
Harm is what often (but not always) happens when the characters fail an action, and it’s a replacement for more common hit point systems in other games. It’s a three-level system where L1 is superficial damage, L2 is serious injury, and L3 is severe. Stacking multiple lower-level harms results in an injury the next level up. L4 kills the character.
The Extras
The FRAMEWORK pamphlet is an odd combination of rules clarifications, quick lists for GMs, and rules for an odd campaign mode built around a series of session-long flashbacks. It feels like this really wanted to be part of the GM pamphlet and ran into the limitations of the form factor.
The HUNTERS pamphlet provides optional mechanics for what amounts to boss enemies, and seems like a pretty cool thing to add to a run once you’ve got the hang of the basics.
The +WEIRD pamphlet is a build-your-own Shadowrun, adding some light fiction to bring magic into the world, meta-human backgrounds, and magical abilities that slot into the character sheet just like cybernetic augments. It’s another set of optional rules, but trying to do a lot more than HUNTERS. It feels a little slim for what it’s trying to do, which is a lot.
The PRDTR pamphlet provides a setting—a base on Ganymede where a worker insurgency fights against corporate overlords. The colony is falling apart, infested with out-of-control mutant jungle and an engineered living weapon (definitely not the trademarked alien from Predator). It includes several starting points and missions, NPCs, a simple graph-map of locations on the base, and random events. All in all, a nice selection of components to build a mission from. A team synergy mechanic is also included, but this didn’t seem to add much, and I’d consider not bothering if I was running it.
The Mona Rise Megalopolis pamphlet is a very different take on a setting, with random tables for just about everything randomizable in this simple game, packed with what I assume are references to characters and locations from William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. Unfortunately I haven’t read those books, and this falls pretty flat as a stand-alone artifact without that context.
Finally, the Mind the Gap pamphlet is a complete example run, with a fun bubble-story setting, a simple three-act structure, and a twist. My biggest pet peeve for TTRPGs is when they don’t provide examples of play to help understand the game flow and rules, and this goes a long way in that regard.
Final Thoughts
This package is cool and slick, but also limiting. They’ve crammed every millimeter of these quad-fold pamphlets with text, and in some cases it feels like another page or two would have been beneficial.
As a prospective GM, I had to jump between all the pamphlets and do some internet searching to understand threat/effect and harm. Harm is the one case where the game makes a choice that I think adds significant complexity over other common mechanics like HP and well-defined status effects.
Like many, I cut my teeth on D&D. These days, I really like the FitD/PbtA style of fast, low-rules, fiction-first play. It’s so much less intimidating than running something like a D&D campaign whether that be from a book or homebrew.
That said, they also have limitations. I haven’t run a longer campaign in one of these systems, but I expect it would feel very different from something crunchier.
I’ve been looking for something relatively easy to play with the kids, so I expect I’ll find time to play this sometime in 2026. I’ll post a follow-up when I do.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week three: Jan. 17 – Jan. 23.
Stats
Stories Finished: 0
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 1
Rejections: 2
Acceptances: 0
Keeping up the Pace
These first few weeks of the year have been about setting up a scaffold for the work yet to come. I’m now feeling like I’m in a comfortable place.
Each week I have some “standard” work: completing a Critters critique, meeting my first draft writing quota and my revision quota, and writing something for the blog. I like having some checklist items that I can work on without too much thought at the end of a long day. Beyond that, I can choose my own adventure.
I’m also getting back into the habit of scouring Duotrope’s upcoming themed submissions calendar. This is something I like to do pretty regularly when I’m writing short stories. Occasionally, a theme will inspire an idea for a new story, and if I already happen to have a story that fits a theme, those are great places to submit.
I didn’t find anything in the near future, but there were a couple themes opening in the next month or two that fit the stories I’m already shopping around.
Goals and Results
My goals from last week were to submit a story to Critters, revise another story, and keep up with my self-imposed quotas.
First, I spent some time cleaning up my newest and shortest story in progress, Taco Cat Employee Manual v7.1. As is typical, these are pretty light revisions based on feedback from my in-house beta readers (my wife and daughter) and anything that stands out to me after letting the story sit for a week or two. With that done, I sent it off to the Critters queue, and it should go out for feedback in early February. I’ll be curious to see how many responses it gets as a flash fiction piece that will only count for half credit.
In addition to those revisions, I dug into Red Eyes, a much longer story with a laundry list of improvements that need to be made. I made some progress, but there’s a long way to go.
The work I put into those two stories just about got me caught up on my revisions quota. Most of my writing quota was knocked out by working on a little horror story I’m calling Estate Sale, which I did partly while waiting at the DMV on a Friday afternoon. Once again, having a story in progress on my phone has paid off, even if I have to type with my thumbs. (Yeah, I probably could have brought the laptop. But I didn’t want to.)
Next Week
My first goal for next week is to work on Red Eyes revisions. I’m going to try to get the story done in the next two weeks. My second goal is to do some light cleanup on one of my stories that’s still in need of critique. That way, I will have Red Eyes ready to submit to publications by the time the Critters feedback for Taco Cat comes rolling in. I can immediately submit the next piece to Critters and work on the Taco Cat revisions while it works its way through the queue. Like a short story assembly line.
Words Deferred 