Free Short Stories and a Quick Update

Jan 26, 2024 3:00 pm

Last week, where I live, absolutely perfect meterological conditions occurred.

Perfectly awful that is.

It was just warm enough for rain to fall in liquid form, but the ground was just cold enough to cause rain to freeze on contact. The entire city turned into an ice rink. Emergency alerts went out by SMS to the entire population, telling everyone to stay home and not drive. Schools and businesses closed for the day.

Sometimes, I worry that society has lost its ability to cope with even the smallest and most naturally-occurring challenges

Writing Update

I'm fighting my way through one of the final scenes in which there's a lot of ... fighting. In fact, there's a lot more fighting in the book than I anticipated when I first started writing it. Not that there's all that much, but certainly more than I expected.

Combat's not the easiest thing to write. Too much detail and it feels almost mechanical, too little and the reader has no idea what's going on. Too many words and you lose the sense of speed and ugency, but make it too short and it feels like the fight was over so quickly it barely happened.

It's one of those passages where, even as I write the words, I sense a rewrite in my future.

I'll get there eventually.

Free Short Story!

Two for the price of one this week, and they're both free.

First, the prequel to Past Mistakes, which some of you may have seen before, but which I enjoyed writing immensely. It's called A first time for everything, and you can download it by clicking on this button right here:

Download "A First Time for Everything"

The second is an old attempt at revisiting a horror trope.

How does a supernatural creature make more of its own. The usual trope is that it's a kind of contagion. Werewolves scratch you, vampires bite you. What if it was more than that? What if it cost them something to make more of their own? If it did cost them something, why would they do it? These questions led to this story, which comes with a trigger warning for death, because without it you cannot be reborn.