Author Life Updates: April and May 2023

Life Update: Took a couple road trips, backpacking, started a new writing journal, award nominations, and celebrated 3 years with my Wulfric.

Author Life News

Publishing News: ‘To Carve Home in Your Bones‘ is nominated for best novelette for the Ignyte Awards, and I’m also up for best critic!

It’s been a very busy and eventful couple of months! I’ve been digging into writing and editing short fiction. I wrote a horror fairy tale about a group of kids joining together against something dark that has taken up residence in the forest surrounding their home. At first, I thought it was going to be a short story, but it ended up turning into a novelette. And I’m not mad about it. It reads well, and I’m pretty proud of the first draft. It took a couple weeks to write with everything else I had going on in my life, and it’ll take another month to edit before sending it off.

There are also a couple of stories from my bank I’ve been working on editing. One of them was a short story about a woman partying to her death and the cluster of aliens she spends the night with. A few years ago, during an August Short Story Challenge, I wrote a short about a machine creature. It wasn’t the best it could be, but I liked the idea and finally found a way into the story. Most of May was me wandering around, looking for a way of making the story better than it was. It came to me one evening walking around the block in my neighborhood.

I am a frequent walker, especially when I have a story problem noodling in my brain. The neighborhood I live in is very similar to the one in my story. While going around the loop my house sits on, a voice started talking to me about his life on that street. The routines and smells and neighbors and how it all was affecting him. The voice was strong. One of a person and not just some character I created for a story. This voice instantly unraveled the story and led me by the hand into the heart of the story.

Sometimes I say I find my way into a story, but really it’s less about ‘the story’ and more about the voice of the character. Once I have that, the story stops being something that came to me and becomes real in a sense. Now, the story has a heart and an engine and is going somewhere, doing something. I’m excited to finish the story and edit it. I also finished writing, editing, and sending out a short story about a woman who begins to transform into a fish.

I really like all of the stories I’m working on, but they are keeping me busy. With edits and writing, I am mostly churning through shorter works while pre-plotting and designing my world for the horror thriller I’ll write next year. I’m working on doing an in-depth chapter outline of it (it’s nearing 20,000 words now!). I finished plotting out the killer subplot and designing some settings and the location of the town.

I also finished reading the second masterwork book I picked for the novel. It was a thriller called Please See Us set where I grew up. It focused on two people who team up to solve a string of brutal murders that have taken place in Atlantic City targeting women. And I’ve moved on to the final masterwork book, It, which is a wild ride.

Strange Horizons also opened up for fiction submissions for a couple days at the end of April. We do a submission cap of 1,000 stories, and in this open submission story, we reached 1,000 submissions within less than 3 days. Last time we did this, I believe it took us about 5 days to reach 1,000 submissions.

I have been reading a lot lately outside my research books for my novel planning. To check out what I’ve been reading, you can follow my Storygraph! The main standouts have been Best Science and Nature 2022 Essays, Wuthering Heights, Heartbeat of Trees, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Gone Girl, The Hobbit, and He Who Drowned the World. Each of these books has sort of been a passion book or a book I’ve read to help me with my study of setting and description.

I’ve learned a lot, especially from Gone Girl, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and Wuthering Heights. Those books had a major impact on my writing after reading them. When I write, it’s a bit more fluid now, and the voices of my characters are stronger. Taking more time drafting my stories is also helping me layer in what I’ve been learning in a way that I can feel when I go back and read through the piece.

I’m really excited to share these new stories with y’all! IDK when that will be, but I have been flirting with the idea of going back to posting some of my short stories on this site. I probably won’t share any of the recent stories I’ve been working on, but I have just retired some stories from submission. So, keep your eyes out for some new pieces!