Tag: short story

Solarpunk Syllabus

I recently purchased a solarpunk anthology, and it led me into a minor fixation on this lesser-known sub-genre of science fiction. Last week I wrote an introduction to solarpunk, but I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ve been exploring the web to find more, and compiling a little syllabus for my own self-directed course.

Since I’m taking the time to write it all down, I figured I might as well put it out as a resource for anyone else who is interested in digging a little deeper. (As usual, I’m providing Bookshop.org affiliate links where possible – these support me and local bookstores.)

It’s interesting to note that most of the solarpunk fiction I’ve found so far is anthologized short stories—fitting considering my renewed focus on short fiction this year.

Short Fiction

Novels

(Retroactively Categorized as Solarpunk)

Articles and Essays

Posts and Lists

Related

Week 10 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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 ten: Mar. 9-15.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 2
  • Submissions Currently Out: 6
  • Submissions Total: 11
  • Rejections: 9
  • Acceptances: 0

Goals and Results

My goals for last week were:

  1. Get my Critters ratio in the green by Wednesday.
  2. Catch up on my word count goal, and possibly finish the first draft of Out of Towner.
  3. Submit Taco Cat.

I had a story in the Critters queue, and I needed to get my ratio up to ensure it went out. I got that done early in the week, the story went out, and the feedback has been steadily coming in.

I haven’t finished Out of Towner, but I’ve made some good progress. I think the story probably needs another 500 words or so to wrap it up. I’ll see if I can get to that this week. I also wrote a few hundred words of a solarpunk idea that may or may not go anywhere. Either way, I’m happy to now be well ahead of my word count and editing goals for March.

Submissions and Responses

I had a form rejection for my drabble Tom, Dick, and Larry, which I sent out to a drabble-specific themed issue. I have a couple of these 100 word stories knocking around, but I mostly only send them out these days when I see a flash fiction theme that fits them.

I also received a personalized rejection for The Incident at Pleasant Hills. I’ve been submitting this story for a while now, and while it has gotten positive feedback a couple of times, it just hasn’t gotten across the finish line. I think it’s a good story that will eventually find a home, so I sent it out again.

I also sent out a pair of submissions for Taco Cat Employee Manual. That keeps it active and covers goal #3 for the week.

Next Week

The Critters’ critiques of my story, F-TIB, will finish rolling in by Wednesday. At that point, I’ll have a bunch of notes to work through. I will also want to get another story in the queue as quickly as possible. I think the next one on the docket is called Hunter’s Apprentice. I’ll need to read through it a few times and try to get it as polished as possible (for a draft that only a couple people have read).

I’d also like to get one or two critiques ahead. I didn’t enjoy having a tight deadline to get those done so my story would go out. Getting ahead makes that less of a concern.

Goals for next week:

  1. Prep a story to queue up for Critters.
  2. Start the post-Critters revisions for F-TIB.
  3. Get ahead on critiques.

Week 9 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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 nine: Mar. 2 – 8.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 2
  • Submissions Currently Out: 5
  • Submissions Total: 8
  • Rejections: 7
  • Acceptances: 0

Goals and Results

My goals for last week were:

  1. Submit critiques.
  2. Start a new story.

It was a busy week outside of writing, but I’ll count both of these for partial credit. I did work on my Critters critiques, but I still need to get one more done before Wednesday. F-TIB is scheduled to go out for review this week, and I’d rather not have it delayed for a week while I get caught up.

Despite my noises last week about giving up on Out of Towner, I actually wrote six or seven more pages. I was able to employ that classing writing technique of just skipping over the part I wasn’t sure about. That means I’ll have to come back to that part later, but at least I can hope that I’ll have a better perspective on it when the rest of the story is done. That goal is a partial miss only because I’m still a few hundred words behind my self-imposed average daily word count.

Rejections

I marked down three rejections this week. One was from Clarkesworld, a magazine I love not only for the fiction they publish, but for their absolutely no-nonsense attitude toward submissions and crazy fast turnaround times for reading submissions. I send a lot of new stories their way, because I know I’ll get a response in a couple days; basically unmatched speed among high-tier pro markets.

Another of these was a non-response from a magazine whose Duotrope stats show it averages non-responses on 5-10% of its submissions. These are a thing that everyone who submits a lot will run into eventually, but it’s still annoying. I do my best to act professionally as a writer, and I expect the same from publishers I’m submitting to. On the other hand, it’s a real AI-slopfest-shitshow in publishing right now, and you never know what an overstrained, underpaid editorial staff might be going through.

Next Week

My goals for next week:

  1. Get my Critters ratio in the green by Wednesday.
  2. Catch up on my word count goal, and possibly finish the first draft of Out of Towner.
  3. Submit Taco Cat.

Week 8 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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 eight: Feb. 23 – Mar. 1.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 2
  • Submissions Currently Out: 8
  • Submissions Total: 8
  • Rejections: 4
  • Acceptances: 0

Goals and Results

My goals for last week were:

  1. Submit stories
  2. Submit critiques
  3. Continue writing Out of Towner, or start a new story.

This week was a submissions week. I made two submissions for stories that have already been making the rounds, and another four for my new stories, Taco Cat and Red Eye. Those submissions get me back on track for meeting my goal of 50 submissions this year.

My inspiration for the story Out of Towner has fizzled, so I’ve decided to set it aside. I haven’t started a new story yet, but I’ve been thinking about punk stories, on two different fronts. The first is an idea for a punk magical community in late 1970s New York, and the second is a budding interest in the genre of Solarpunk. I’ll have more to say about that in a future post.

I continued to neglect my Critters critiques, something I’ll need to rectify in the upcoming week.

Next Week

Unfortunately, my wife injured her arm this past week, so I’ll be picking up the chores that require arm mobility and strength, and giving her some extra support for the next few weeks. That will cut into writing time, and I’ll have to make some adjustments to my plans and goals.

For now, my goals next week are carried over from this week:

  1. Submit critiques.
  2. Start a new story.

Rod String Nail Cloth: An Afrofuturist Mixtape — Read Report

Buy on Bookshop (affiliate links)

Rod String Nail Cloth was a random library pick containing six stories and a poem. It’s slim enough that I read it in the span of a Saturday afternoon. When I grabbed it I didn’t know anything apart from the title, but I’ve been meaning to investigate Afrofuturism for a while, and a short anthology seemed like a good place to start.

As it turns out, T. Aaron Cisco was born and raised in Chicago, but now lives in Minneapolis, so there’s a hometown connection for me. It also turns out that this is self-pub, and has a whiff of punk-rock “zine” to it. Unfortunately, it also has something like 20-30 typos and formatting errors across its 150-odd pages.

These stories revolve around themes of time travel, racial injustice, environmental catastrophe, and transhumanism. There are some interesting ideas in here, and some sentences and paragraphs that really pop. However, I found some of the writing straying too far into the literary style that I most struggle with: pages spent on a character’s languid internal thoughts without giving me enough plot or setting to latch onto.

The first story, “Now, Justice,” is the biggest offender in this regard. It follows a Black inventor who creates a machine that manipulates people’s perceptions. He uses it to take vengeance on a policeman who shot an unarmed Black kid and dodged the consequences. However, we don’t get to the first mention of the machine until page 17.

The subsequent stories were tighter, in my opinion. “Thursday Addison” is a Shonen anime of a story where a cybernetically enhanced enforcer is sent into a violent, futuristic battle that she barely survives.

“The Hesitant Envoy” is a tongue-in-cheek tale where an advanced civilization pulls aside one human to ask him to justify the continued existence of the species. He has a hard time coming up with a good argument, and isn’t particularly inclined to try.

 “Lydian Mode” is about a down-on-his-luck Black musician who travels back in time to 1960s Chicago. Despite the dangers of life at the height of the civil rights movement, he discovers that there are also opportunities.

“Captain Michaela” is a poem about the titular character (maybe?) saving the universe. I’m just the wrong audience for this. While I have my favorite poets and poems, I’ve never felt drawn to sci-fi poetry.

“Rod String Nail Cloth” is the stand-out story of the book for me, an epistolary story about a person sent far back in time to fix a broken world.

In “They Burn So Easily,” an apocalyptic virus turns people into still-thinking vampire/zombie creatures called Chalkies, more strongly affecting those with paler, less pigmented skin. It’s a story about choosing forgiveness and humanity even when it may be undeserved. The conflict in this one felt a bit rushed, and I would have been interested in a longer exploration of the setting, the premise, and the relationships between the characters.

Rod String Nail Cloth is, in parts: intriguing, goofy, and a little rough around the edges. It’s not going on my favorites list, but I’m happy to have read it, and I’ll keep an eye out for Cisco’s work in the future.

It also whet my appetite for more Afrofuturism, especially in short fiction. If you have any good recommendations, leave them in the comments.

Week 7 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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:

  1. Finish Red Eyes.
  2. Finish Taco Cat.
  3. Continue writing Out of Towner.
  4. 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:

  1. Submit stories – at least three
  2. Submit some critiques
  3. Continue writing Out of Towner, or start a new story.

Week 6 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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:

  1. Finish revising Red Eyes.
  2. 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.

Goals for Next Week

  1. Finish Red Eyes.
  2. Finish Taco Cat.
  3. Continue writing Out of Towner.
  4. Get a new story in the Critters queue.

Reblog: Three Things I Learned From 100 Story Sales — Aeryn Rudel

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.

Three Things I Learned from 100 Story Sales

Week 5 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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:

  1. Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
  2. 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.)

Next Week

For the upcoming week, my goals are:

  1. Finish revising Red Eyes. Finally.
  2. Start the first draft of a new story.

Week 4 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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:

  1. Clean up another story (F-TIB) for Critters
  2. Revise a story (Red Eyes)
  3. 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:

  1. Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
  2. 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.