With the steady and inexorable advance of Covid-19 at the start of the year very much messing up my plans, I have, thankfully, been able to work on a lot of writing over the past eight months. Summer was mostly productive, and the year has been very productive overall.
Firstly, I did publish my little vignette 2069 in July which was a fun experiment in second person narration, and an opening for a larger series of short stories I intend to be publishing over the next couple years. Not exclusively on this blog of course! I aim to anthologize them for fun and profit!
Secondly, over the course of the summer I finished my short story Priests of the White God which came out at 12,809 words. It is a low fantasy, nautical horror story which I intend to anthologize with some other short pieces this October, and that will be my biggest writing goal of September. It will be premiered alongside my existing piece of flash fiction, The Disappearance of Wilson and two other stories. One is The Closing Hour which features sadistic shopkeepers in a definitely-not-Walmart in sinister circumstances, I'm envisioning it as something like The Purge meets Clerks. The other is a story inspired by my time in quarantine during early Covid-19 and the depressing news hours I watched while not doing much of anything. It will probably clock in at some 7-10k words, untitled yet, but has lots of disease and a little death.
With those four stories I'll anthologize them and hopefully have them packaged for release by late October in what is tentatively titled Darkness in the Mind.
I also, over the last few days in August, managed to churn out a dark fantasy short for the Grimdark Magazine. They had the Matthew Ward Pay It Forward Competition for short pieces of dark fantasy running for unpublished authors, maximum word count 4,000. With the 4k limit, sadly my short story Priests of the White God was ineligible. I had an idea that had been in rough form for a while though, and so I hammered out some words and a brief plot. The Winter Law is sacred, and those who break it have naught but rough justice awaiting them. Bermer is a hunter apprenticed to his master Horm, and trudging through the late winter snows with only a guide, they must figure out whether a small family of farmers has broken the law, and if they have, there can be no mercy. That is the gist of my short story Winter Law which will be submitted to the contest. Coming in at 3,588 words, I'm sending this bad boy off and seeing where it lands.
Other than those works, I have made some progress on longer works. One alternate history project currently sits at 36,000 words, and another project is currently being meticulously plotted out, my 1866 piece A Road Not Taken regarding an alternate Battle of Ridgeway. I'm currently aiming for it to be my NaNoWriMo project.
In other news, my novella Integration remains in the slush pile at Tor. Since it now is not the only long form fiction I've completed I'm going to let it sit for a time, and hopefully have more news for 2021.
Overall, a rather productive summer for simply writing in my spare time! Hopefully by years end I'll have further updates for you all! In the meantime, I'm back to hammering on the keys!
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