Updates and Upcoming

and a quick poll on what title to use for my work in progress

UPDATES

I visited my parents over the winter break and my mom asked about one of my stories that she saw me promote on Facebook, so I let her read a different story, one without monsters or murder or weird sex stuff, and she liked it, and so then my dad read it too, and he liked it also, and not just in that parent way of saying, ‘you can do anything you put your mind to,’ but they laughed while reading when they thought I wasn’t watching, and yes, of course, it’s freeing to write without worrying about your mom gasping at the vicious characters you can conjure out of the filthy recesses of your mind, but it’s also nice and satisfying and encouraging when someone you love enjoys something you wrote.

And then! I got notified one of my stories was accepted for publication in an anthology!¹

And then! My wife said, “Cool.”²

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UPCOMING

I’m stoked to be part of a collaborative narrative, an epic prose version of the campfire game of “telephone.” The Fictionistas Great Substack Challenge 2.³

Each author will have one week to write the next chapter of an ongoing story; the order of authors was randomly generated. I’ve been blessed⁴ to go first. Expect that chapter to drop on January 18th.

And I’m slowly writing two ghost stories that I expect to both be novella length.

And I’m working on fictionalizing my quest for love as a starry-eyed romantic fool and hope to start posting those serialized chapters here on my Substack in the next week. Which title do you think is better?⁵

1. Sometime, next year. I’ll share more details when I can!

2. “Does it make you want to read it,” I asked. “Um, no. Not really,” she said. God, I love her so much.

3. Here’s a link to the first one.

4. Or cursed!

5. Also, aesthetically, I’m hoping to move away from so many footnotes. If it’s worth saying, it should be incorporated into the text proper, right?