What I’m reading
Currently, I’m in the middle of two books: In That Endlessness, Our End, Stoker Award winning short story collection by Gemma Files. These are not your typical horror stories. These tales tend to average longer than your standard short story published in a magazine (some of them are novelette length), and they tend to be slower and more unsettling rather than horrific. There are plenty of horrific elements here, but the stories tend to fall into a sub-genre that I’m coining “slice-of-life horror.” I call it that because there often isn’t anything super bloody or world-ending happening in these stories (though there are some notable exceptions). I’ll go into more detail when I post a review after I’m done. I’m listening to the audiobook, which has multiple narrators.
The other book I’m in the middle of is Ghostwritten by Ronald Malfi, a collection of 4 novellas about haunted books. These are very quick contemporary horror tales that have the pace of thrillers. I’ll go into each tale in a review later. I borrowed the paperback from my local library.
What I want to read next
Up next on audio is Bonds of Chaos by Zack Argyle. This is the conclusion to the Threadlight trilogy, and I can already say that this is shaping up to be the best self-published fantasy series I’ve ever read (granted I’ve only read 2 or 3 self-pub fantasy series in their entirety). I really hope he sticks the landing.
Up next in print is System Collapse by Martha Wells, the latest novel in the hugely successful Murderbot series. From what I’ve read online, Wells is contracted to write a couple more books in this series, but she’s sadly been battling cancer since early 2023. It sucks because her star was starting to rise, and she now has to deal with an unfair diagnosis. I wish her a speedy recovery and remission, and hope she finds the strength to write the rest of her books.
What I’m writing
I’m currently having the last story I ever released on my podcast, Fastasmacomm, critiqued by my critique group. This story is long and had to be broken up into several sections so my group isn’t overwhelmed. That story’s ending has been changed drastically, and there has been a lot of good feedback about how to tighten up the rambling narrative I wrote all the way back in 2020. This means that I will take this story down from the internet so I can try to publish this revised version elsewhere.
I’m also going through a few rounds of editing for a recently completed story about an assassin recovering in a house in Jakarta. It’s currently another rambling narrative of about 11,000 words. I’m trying to tighten it up by reducing the large blocks of description and dialogue, but I don’t think it can be reduced too much more without changing the story completely. We’ll have to see once my critique group gets a hand on it.
I’m looking to start another heavy edit of a story that my critique group looked at last month. This is an 18,000-word novelette, and my first foray into serious science fiction. That story will be a beast to get through, considering so many people have read this story & offered their critiques, but I’m excited to see what that story will become.
Sadly, all of this exciting writing will have to be postponed until next week, as work has been extremely busy this week with multiple deadlines. Oh well; the excitement I feel at getting back to my writing is helping me cope with my day job.
The Night Bulletin 