August Author Updates

Life update: I turned 33! My birthday was lovely and filled with cake, books, and seafood.

August is normally my short story challenge month. If you’re new around here or need a refresher, my August Short Story Challenge is when I task myself with writing a new short story a day for the whole month of August. My usual parameters around the story is that it has to be of a specific word length. The first few years that I did the challenge I started with a low word count threshold of 1,000 words.

Sounds easy enough to some, but to a beginning writer, writing 1,000 words of a new story a day is tough. I used to post those stories on this blog as an accountability thing but also as a way of getting my work out there before I had sold any stories. It was great! I got a lot of new followers and people who didn’t know I wrote became new fans and interested in what I was doing.

Because some of them are hard to find on here unless you go FAR BACK IN TIME, here are those early stories from my first August Short Story Challenge. Be warned, though, these stories are rough and riddled with underdeveloped characters, spelling and grammar errors, and more.

I stopped posting all of the stories I wrote during these challenges pretty quickly because I noticed a shift in my craft within the first year. By the second year, the stories I was posting were more developed, had a stronger voice, and were doing new things (to me) with craft. So, I tested out working on some of the ones I wrote during 2020 as potential stories to submit to magazines. I’ve so far sold 8 stories I’ve written during the August Short Story Challenge to magazines or anthologies.

You can read those stories here:

But this year, I stopped doing it. Not forever, but for now. My schedule and focuses right now aren’t so much in speed writing a new fiction story, but slowly developing one over a longer span of time. When I sat down to try and write the first story during that month, nothing came out. When I meditated on it, I realized it was because I wasn’t working within my intentions. I sat out at the beginning of the year to slow down my fiction writing process to try and develop my stories past where I normally would.

I want to go deeper with my stories and craft and the gunslinger way of writing a story a day just doesn’t fit in with that. So, I am not priming with a story cache of over 20 pieces this year. Instead I have a handful of stories I truly love and believe in and am focusing on developing those and crafting more of them. That’s what I spent my August doing: developing a short story about depression in children, editing a flash fiction for Nightmare Magazine, and working on a novel about addiction.

That short story on depression is finished and going through a couple of rounds of critiques with my writing group, the South Sound Speculative Fiction Writers. That’s the group that I put all my stories through. If you’ve had a chance to read any of my published work over the past three years, each of them got to where they are thanks to my writing group! I’m trying to get the short story finished by Fiyah’s open call deadline, but also staying within my intention of not rushing things.

Especially when I’m dealing with such heavy topics as depression and suicide among children and teens. I want to get this right in a way that adds a meaningful story to the cannon. It’s a novelette and those are always hard to place because not many markets sell them and it’s an even harder sale because of the subject matter. But if I do it right, it’ll be a great story that may help some people and give others something to think about, while totally scaring the crap out of everyone who reads it.

And oh, yeah! I’ve sold a short story to Nightmare Magazine. It is a dark fairytale called ‘Whatever Takes Us’ that is about bullying and friendship in the New Jersey woods. I can’t wait for this story to come out! It’s another story that I wrote this year that deals with some heavy topics and personal stuff. It also completes the JJA Holy Trinity, meaning my stories have appeared in all three of John Joesph Adams magazines: Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and now Nightmare Magazine. Once the story is out, I want to do something fun with the covers to highlight the achievement I’ve wanted to hit for a while now.

I’m still plotting and researching my next book project, which is going well! I’m working on the last of the four character plotlines for the book and building out more of my research reading list for developing the characters and world. My plan originally was to write the book at the end of this year, but I’m changing things up and am going to continue designing the narrative for another few months with an aim of finishing things up by the end of the year so that I can write a first draft of the novel sometime in early 2024.

In other big news that is connected to the work on my book project, I applied to and got into grad school! I got into the Bennington Writing Seminars. I’ll get way more into my MFA journey in another post, but the novel I’m working on may end up being my thesis for whichever program I get into. This is such a huge step in my writing career and journey and no matter where I go, I can’t wait to take my writing skill to a whole new level and use what I learn to help others tell their stories.

In sad news, Fantasy Magazine announced they’re closing down this fall. It’s devastating to hear for readers, writers, and fans of the fantasy genre. Fantasy Magazine has published wonderfully diverse and sometimes challenging poetry and fiction over the past few years since starting up again. With them shuttering their doors, newer writers who write more outside of the Western lens lose another place that made a space for them. Fantasy went away before and then came back, hopefully, it’ll happen again and we’ll be able to get another chance at reading phenomenal work.

!!! I figured out how to fully celebrate my Ignyte nom for ‘To Carve Home in Your Bones.’ I got a tattoo of the baby bird creatures from the story. It’s my second tattoo ever and it came out great. I got it done by a local artist I’ve been a fan of for years, Vincent Li. I couldn’t be happier with how it came out. I also decided I’ll get a tattoo whenever I get an award nom.

It may never happen again, and that’s okay, but if it does, I have a whole lot of body to cover.

I also dropped the prices on all my books and games in honor of the two year anniversary. It feels like so long ago since I put together my rapid release of books, games, and courses. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about self-publishing, writing, and being a good teacher. I continue to learn and grow everyday in hopes that my next run of self-publishing releases, which will be soon, will go even better than the first one!

Until then, enjoy these stories I had a hand in bringing to light!

Published Stories:

If you’re new to the website, consider subscribing to stay up to date with all my posts. I normally post once or twice a month and it’s always about writing and my author career. I’m Aigner! An award nominated writer of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and all things weird. You can check out my stories here.