In the pauses between working on larger stories, I like to keep the creative juices fermenting by doing Drabble A Day, which is my version of a fairly common writing prompt. (See Ommataidia, who I’ve posted about before, for someone who does this really well.) My rules: I browse through the dictionary until a word [...]
I have an idea in my head for an interactive fiction story: a depressed young man sits in a cafe, waiting for a phone call from his girlfriend. Depending on what happens – what she says, whether he even gets the call, whether he talks to the older man reading a paper or the little [...]
A little while ago, I discovered Thaumatrope, a now defunct twitter fiction magazine. They published short fiction, either in the form of one-offs – flash fiction of 140 characters or less – or serials, short stories which could be separated into 20-30 tweet-sized chunks. I thought this format made for an interesting challenge, so I [...]
I have another old story of mine I’d like to share. But first, let me explain something: for years and years I’ve been obsessed with ancient Sumer. There’s something so compelling for me about that civilization, arising as it did in the liminal period between recorded history and the unknowable endless millennia sprawling out behind [...]
I’ve put off posting my original fiction to this blog, because most of the stuff that I think is really good – that I’m really proud of – I’m trying to polish and submit for publication. Which leaves the ‘halfway decent’ and the ‘truly terrible’. No one will ever get to hear the truly terrible, [...]
