Tag: programming

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.

Computational Literature — 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.

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.