My best story?

Many years ago, I had an idea and hammered out a story of maybe 200 words.  I don’t remember exactly how I felt about it at the time, but I’m sure I thought it was a very good little story.  I think part of why I wrote it was I needed more stories for my first collection, A Man of Few Words, and it was a perfect one to include.  In the years since then, I’ll occasionally dig it out and reread it, and at some point, I started thinking of it as my best story.  I’ve written longer stories, and stories with more meat to them, but this one has like the most impact per word. 

For years, I’ve taken some pride in it; it is my best story after all.  But lately, I’ve started to wonder: did I already peak with my writing?  I like to think that my writing has gotten better over the years, but then why hasn’t a new best story appeared?  Or is it just my best flash fiction story, and I should try to figure out what my best short story is and when I wrote it?  Or should I stop worrying about such things and just write? 

Writing Newsletter Third Quarter 2025

 

This quarter, I wrote “Too Stupid” and “Sacrifices Must Be Made” as part of my Monthly Stories.  The reason there’s only two stories, is I didn’t post one in September.  I started two or three stories, but didn’t finish any because of burnout, and probably a few other reasons.  But the most recent story I started – which still doesn’t have a title – I’m 99.9% certain I’ll finish it up and post it as my October story.  My Ko-fi post for this quarter was my story “Perchance to Dream.” On one of my blogs, I posted the stories “Bated Breath” and “The Fall,” as well as reposted the story “Star-Spangled Ploy.” I also posted the poem “Nighttime Vision” on my Mastodon profile.

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If I counted correctly, this quarter I posted one new microfiction as well as reposted one.  I also posted two new haiku, and reposted three.  The microfictions can be found on my Untitled Works Page, and the haikus on my Haiku Page.  The low numbers are a result of general writing burnout, as well as 114 other projects in the garden and around the house.  Not to mention all the videos, and shows, and videos about the shows that somebody has to watch.

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I’ve been meaning to polish up a story and post it on Draft2Digital, but hopefully things will slow down enough in this next quarter that I’ll finally get around to it.

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Image from Pixabay.

An idea for a story anthology for people more organized than I

A month or so ago, I was at work hating my job, when the phrase “A world not ruled by money,” came to mind.  I started thinking about it, but had to stop because I was depressing myself.  But I had the great idea of an anthology of stories based on the prompt of “A world not ruled by money.” That is a great idea, but for somebody else to do it.  I don’t have the patience, organizational skills, or money to do such a thing.  (While the stories would be about a world not ruled by money, we unfortunately live in one that is, so selected stories should get something, even if it’s just $10.) So if you are a person who could put something like that together, please do.  And then let me know so I might submit a story.

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To show why I was getting depressed, here was what I was thinking.  I was just getting an idea for the world, I hadn’t figured out a story for it, yet.  I’m not worried about someone stealing this idea, because one possibility would be to have all the stories set in the same world, and this could be it.

So in this world, everyone gets, say 1000 Credits each month.  Someone could have a modest one-bedroom apartment with water, electricity, and internet, all the healthy food they’d want without any worry of going hungry, no worry about any medications they need, and they could take classes – online or at a university – either for a degree or just out of interest, and once a week they could hang out with friends at a bar, or a game, as well as have a date night of dinner and a movie, all for, say 900 Credits a month.  And with what they save up they could go on a vacation or two each year.  Basically, you could live a healthy happy life without much trouble.

Now if you wanted a car, or a house, or more vacations, you’d have to get a job.  In this world a lot of the manufacturing jobs would be done by machines, so humans would be left to the more human jobs.  Skilled jobs – doctors, teachers, etc. – you’d have some set schedule, but a full-time job would only be like 15-20 hours a week.  For “unskilled” jobs – wait staff, janitors, etc. – it might be the company would have a list of workers and they would call them up and ask, “Can you work five hours on Thursday?” Some people might stick to one company, but I can also see people working at a different place each week.   

The beginning idea for the story I had, was a “Day in the Life of” type.  Character wakes up, not with an alarm but they just wake up, and they have breakfast.  Then they get on a subway to go into town.  Their phone has a cracked screen, so they stop at the phone store to have it replaced, and maybe they put in a new battery since it’s a couple years old.  Because if the phone companies weren’t so motivated for you to buy a whole new phone, they’d be easy to repair.  And maybe they get a call to see if they could come in to work in a store because someone is sick, and they go in and it’s a pleasant experience. 

This is where things started to depressing for me, because there are so many weird things the store I work in does in the name of capitalism.  Like, we have different sized drinks, but the bottles twice as large cost half as much because they’re not cold.  People want a cold drink, so they’ll buy the more expensive version because it’s “convenient.” And I don’t know how much of my time is spent just dealing with putting up and taking down sales.  The point of sales is take the $5 item that you don’t really need and would normally walk past and make it 2 for $9 and you think, “That’s a deal!” so you get two of these things that probably only cost $0.50 to make.  Shit like that wouldn’t happen in a world not ruled by money. 

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So that’s the interesting idea I had.  But unless somebody puts together such an anthology, I can’t afford to put time and effort into it.

Random Writing Tips – Shameless Self Promotion

Back when Twitter was still a thing, I had two accounts.  One was my personal account for everything, and one was just for writing.  After a couple years of trial, I ended up with a way to promote my books.  For each of my books, I worked up fifteen or so tweets with the title and link.  Most were nearly identical, with me just rearranging the order of hashtags.  One day, on my personal account I’d tweet out something for Book X, and the next day on my writing account, I’d tweet out something for Book Y.  And I’d just go back and forth.  The reason I did different books was to try to see which account I got more sales from, but what usually happened is someone would buy Book Z.  I knew what I was doing was just screaming into the void, but it was Twitter, that’s what you did.

When I went to Mastodon, and later Bluesky, I was tempted to just do the same thing.  But I saw a lot of posts going on and on about how these sites didn’t want to just carry over the bad stuff from Twitter.  So I held back, and only occasionally promoted my books.  Was that the reason my sales – not great to begin with – basically disappeared?  Probably, although I will admit there are other real world reasons people aren’t spending money on ebooks from Amazon. 

Lately, I’ve been trying to do more shameless self promotion of my books.  But I don’t want to just go back to my Twitter system.  Occasionally, I’ll get a follow from someone and when I check out their profile it’s just post after post after post for their book, and it’s like, I want to block ads, not follow an account that is nothing but ads.  On Twitter, I did other things so it was more, ad for a book, funny video, ad for a book, thought provoking video, and so on.  But my latest attempts at self promotion have been … barely noticeable.  It’s more like, funny video, link to a story I wrote on my blog a couple years ago, thought provoking video, ad for a book, and so on.  Instead of doing very little, I’m trying to do a little bit of everything to see if anything works for me.  Early results are … nothing’s working, but some of my ideas I’ve only started a week or two ago. 

Promoting myself is like pulling teeth.  Yes, I did stuff on Twitter, but that was basic, simple and ultimately of little value.  Can I find a way that works and that I can actually do?  Only time will tell.  But, for now at least, I’m trying to do something.  Which has to count.  Right?

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How was this a tip?  Oh, ah, don’t limit yourself to what you’ve done before or are comfortable with.

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Image from Pixabay.

Some thoughts on AI “art”

A couple years ago, when ChatGPT first came out, most of the news about it I saw was just that it was terrible.  I think it took a few months for the main story I saw about it being that it was stealing work.  Anyway, I was hearing about how AI “stories” were terrible, and I had the idea of a writer who took an AI “story” as a first draft and edited it into a real story.  (Like all your story ideas are groundbreaking.)  But a few seconds after I had the idea, I wondered if life should imitate art and I should edit whatever the AI gave me.  So I found a site that let you get a sample of AI writing, and made a prompt along the lines of “Make a short story with aliens.” It started spitting out words, but after a paragraph or so I stopped it because it was basically gibberish.  Polishing this turd into something halfway decent would take longer than just writing a halfway decent story.  I know some will say I needed a better prompt along the lines of, “Make a short story about aliens in the style of Hemingway,” or whatever, but in the time it would take me to learn how best to use AI, I could just learn better time management skills so I could spend more time writing.  That is the only time I’ve ever tried to use AI for anything, and I never got around to writing that story.

Now you probably expect the standard screed against any and all things AI.  But I know that “AI” seems to just be a term applied to any fancy computer program.  Some of these may have merit, especially in regards to number crunching and pattern recognition.  I imagine someone having an “AI” look at tens of thousands of medical records and finding possible connections.  Like, maybe it would find evidence that having a banana a day cuts your chance of dying from a heart attack by 2%, but increases your chance of getting colon cancer by 1%.  This evidence, like all evidence, would need to be studied further in tests to see if there is an actual link or if it is all coincidence.  That type of AI I don’t mind.  As long as the medical records are used ethically and the results aren’t blindly taken as fact. 

The AI I do mind is what is used for “art,” and especially for writing.  There is a crafting-side to writing, which on my best days I’d still rank myself as below average, and there’s a business-side to writing, which I’ve largely failed.  My … disgust I guess at AI “art” is that they’ve cranked the business-side dial to 11 while also cranking the crafting-side dial to 0, or even -11.  In the time it takes me to craft a story that will make $X, an AI can “write” a billion stories that are all worthless, but each one only needs to make a penny or two for them to add up to $100X.  And in a world run by “More money is more gooder,” people, there will just be more and more well-crafted stories buried in a sea of AI slop. 

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I had an idea for this post, but it didn’t go in that direction.  So there may be future installments where I give my thoughts on other aspects of AI.  I’m sure you’re really looking forward to that.

Random Writing Tips – Blog lists

 

The basic reason I write these Random Writing Tips posts, is the idea that the more things I have out on the internet, the more likely someone will stumble upon them, learn that I exist, be interested enough to buy some of my books, and I make a tiny fraction of the money I make from my hated day job.  I guess there’s also the hope of building up a friendly group of fellow creatives.  But instead of just writing posts on random topics, I’m trying to write some that are loosely connected under the topic of Writing Tips. 

That’s nice, but why am I telling you that?  Well, I was trying to think of a tip to write up for this month and I had an idea.  But after thinking about it for a bit, I wasn’t sure if it was a new idea.  When I first started these, I kept a list of the posts I had done, but I’d forget to update it and whenever I remembered I had to add the last four or five posts.  (So, I have a Word doc for Writing Tips.  The first page or two has the tips I’ve started writing, and then there’s like four pages of ideas, and then I have the archive.  But I rarely scroll that far down, which is why I keep forgetting about it.) So to see if I had done the idea before, I had to click the Random Writing Tips label in the blog, and scroll through all the posts.  And while I did find that the new idea was new, it was very similar to an old idea. 

This took a few minutes of my time, which isn’t that bad, but I did wonder if I could do something better.  I also may have just needed a little project I could work on for a few days.  So I made my Random Writing Tips List page.  It’s just a list of all my writing tips, along with the day they were posted and a brief description.  So now when I get an idea, instead of spending a few minutes scrolling through my blog to see if I’d done it before, I can spend a minute scrolling down a page. 

Cool.  But does this really warrant a blog on writing tips?  Well, if you write a blog where you review movies, it makes sense to have a list of what movies you’ve reviewed somewhere, either sorted by release date, genre, however you score them, whatever.  But if you’re doing something as nebulous as Random Writing Tips, you may not think to keep a list.  And a list makes it easier for people to check out whatever tips sound interesting without having to scroll through my blog.  Will this list increase the chance someone will buy one of my books?  There’s no way to tell, but it can’t hurt.

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Image from Pixabay.

Save America EBook Sale

I think for the past decade, every Fourth of July I’ve had a sale for some of my ebooks.  Which ones vary over the years, but Political Pies, my collection of forty short stories of a political nature, is always included.  The sale is usually just to mark the Fourth of July, but this year – with an ever-quickening slide into authoritarianism – I’m making it a Save America Sale.

How will my ebooks save America?  Well, I could argue that most of my stories are science fiction and show worlds where very alien aliens have learned to live and work together, thus showing the idiocy of people being upset their neighbor doesn’t have the exact same shade of skin color.  But really, my ebooks don’t contain some magic formula to save America.  It’s just a nice gesture.  If you’re fighting authoritarianism, then it’s likely you read, so here is a collection of free ebooks you can pick up.

In previous years, I’ve had sales at points throughout the year where I asked people to also register to vote or to vote.  But apparently, offering anything to get people to register or to vote is technically illegal.  I doubt they’d go after some unknown author giving away free ebooks, but I’m also not a billionaire who can just bribe his way out of problems.  So for this Save America Sale, I’m not asking anyone to do anything.  If you do decide to register to vote, or run for office, or march in the streets, that is entirely on you.  But if you have some time waiting for the march to get going, some of these ebooks are collections of short stories you can read in a few minutes. 

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From Tuesday July 1st through Saturday July 5th, the following eight ebooks will be free to download.

Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

Rise

“Rise” is a standalone story set in my Human Republic Universe. The story follows the events after the tragic deaths of the colonists on a small colony in a distant star system.

Duty

For reasons of safety and avoiding paradoxes, Time Travel Incorporated assigns a Guardian to all its travelers. So when there is an accident during political historian Roj Hasol’s trip back to 1968, it’s his Guardian Susan who sets out on the arduous task of cleaning up the mess.

The Only Certainty

On The Day, for reasons unknown, people began changing. They went to sleep as their old selves and woke in their beds in different bodies: bodies that had belonged to other people. And each time they fall asleep, they wake in a new body. Set months later, The Only Certainty follows Derrick Gorton on an average day in this new world as he deals with food shortages, the semi-collapse of society, and how to finish his latest novel.

Lonely Phoenix

Partway to a new colony world, board member Geoffrey Ames is woken from hibernation by the caretaking crew of the Lucian. They require him to look into the matter of their fellow crewman Morgan Heller. Morgan’s claims – such as being over 1500 years old – would normally land him in the psychiatric ward, except he can back up some of his other claims.

An Ounce of Prevention

Like most people, Jason Fisher wanted to make the world a better place, but he doubted he would ever have the chance to make much of a mark. Then a “woman” came to him, asking his help to save humanity by threatening it.

The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.

The Future is Coming

As a science fiction writer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how technology will change the way we live. I’ve come up with these ten short essays about science fictional elements that will – almost certainly – one day become science fact as a way for people to start coming to terms with them. Because I’ve spent time thinking about clones and AIs, I feel I’ll be okay when they do finally show up whereas most people will probably freak out. I hope these essays will get people to start thinking about the future because, no matter what we do, the future is coming.