It’s been a while since I posted my last short story, or even a proposal for one. I’ve been busy, stressed, ill, dealing with issues and many more excuses you really don’t want to know about.

In the past couple of weeks though, as things have cleared up, I’ve managed to finish up a first version of one of the stories I proposed oh so many moons ago:  The Song, a Sci-Fi Noir story. The bad news is that I’ve decided to do something else with that particular story as soon as I’ve put it through a few revisions and test reads. I’ve never submitted a short story for publication in a magazine, and it’s something I’ve wanted to do but I’ll admit that it terrifies me. I don’t know if I’m even half the writer needed to pull that one off. But you know, fear is the mind killer after all, so I won’t let that stop me.

But there are a good amount of stories I proposed and never wrote, and others I worked on but never finished. The Lion’s Claw and Fringes being the prime candidates. Those have been ready for ages but since my proofreader never got back to me, they’ve kinda stayed in limbo.

But I can’t wait anymore, at least not for eternity so I’m looking for a new set of readers, and will send them the stories as I finish them, so they can at least review the overall tales and tell me their failings, so I can improve upon them on the second, third and nth drafts. I’m also commissioning some custom art to go with the stories, to bring some of the key scenes to life. This might delay the stories a bit, but I’m confident it’ll be worth it.

So, with The Lion’s Claw and Fringes coming soon, what’s next? Which one am I picking to write first? Well, I’ve decided on this order for writing them, completely ignoring the poll I’d setup for them, by the way. When I first put the polls together I felt the same about all stories, but since then I’ve had time to think and imagine the worlds they take place in and there are some I’m most excited about.

You can find the full synopses for the stories in the one-shot page, but here’s the list of the stories I’ll work on and publish:

• Cooking Up Trouble | Detective George & the Dragon: I’m listing them together even if they’re separate stories because they’re from the same universe, one I call Collision. The stories are two sides of a coin, with one taking place on Earth, with a detective now having to deal with magic and things that defy explanation; and the second taking place in the other reality that collided with ours, in that other city in the sky, one of magic that suddenly sees our technology finding its way there, warped and turned into dangerous artefacts as our science interacts with their magic.
• Long Live the King: As I write my D&D campaign, I’ve put a good chunk of time into imagining villains, so writing this story from a Dark Lord’s point of view just as he’s about to meet the adventuring party coming for him, is something I find fascinating.
• The Crows: This is one of the first worlds I came up with for fiction pieces, but never got around to write anything about it, so this is really appealing to me.
• The Beast: Another world I created long ago but never did anything with, it’s time to let the Genmod their time in the sun and put this story out there.

There are more stories in the one-shot page but honestly at this time they don’t excite me as much as these I have listed.

I can’t promise an ETA for them, though as soon as possible is about it.

As I write them, I’m bound to have more ideas so I’ll probably come back to propose a few new stories.