As part of my social media experiment, I'm trying out Substack. My latest post is an update on what I'm writing. You can read the full post here.
The interesting bit is that I finished a short story called "The Long-Unburied Dead" a few weeks ago and have begun submitting it to short form fiction magazines.
Whether it gets picked up there or not, it will eventually be bundled into a short story collection called Distant Moons along with three other SciFi and Fantasy moon-themed stories. "The Long-Unburied Dead" is Moon Horror (not too scary, promise) with Military SciFi vibes. One of the other stories may be a stronger Military SciFi, or I may go with something else entirely. Science Fantasy, for example. Think Star Wars.
Why four stories? Because one short story isn't much of a writing sample. Four stories is a meaty chunk and allows for a good dose of variety.
Now, what I'll do with Distant Moons is another question. I'm deciding between using it purely as a reader magnet for newsletter subscribers and publishing it in some other way. We'll see where that road leads when all the stories are finished. If "The Long-Unburied Dead" is picked up for publication elsewhere, it may take a while for Distant Moons to be released (due to contractual obligations prohibiting republication within a certain time frame). In which case, another four-shorts collection may be released instead.
As I said. We'll see.
I had thought to wait on releasing details about these stories until they were actually done, and then a few folks asked how the writing's going. So. This is part of how it's going. There's more in the linked post, but the short of it is that I'm working on finishing stories, slowly but surely.