Looks like all this writing is going somewhere

I’m pleased to say a story of mine has been accepted by a magazine I’ve really enjoyed reading the past couple years. The contract is signed, the proofs are . . . proofed. The issue is due out later this month.

It’s clickable! If you click it, you will open their website.

It feels good. And Cannibal Cyclops is 100% the reason I’m about to be in Dark Moon Digest.

Steve Morris and I started this site because of the pandemic. We’d been saying for years “we should collaborate on something,” and we finally took the first step that first week of working from home. In a burst of headlong plague-worry, I wrote a story and emailed it to him. “Is this the kind of thing you’re looking to illustrate?” It was itself a story about plague. Who had anything else on their mind, March 2020? Steve replied that he was busy illustrating a Solomon Kane book, but he’d take a look.

Two days later, he said he had some good ideas for the art — and somehow I’d already written another story. Which I also sent him. In the space of 72 hours we found ourselves planning this website’s look and feel, and we launched it on May 5 with three fully illustrated stories.

Here’s what happened next.

Real panic on my part. Because we did not have a fourth story. But we had committed to publishing one on June 1. And one every month.

Of course, I’d been writing for years — at a pace of two, three stories per year. I cared about every word, I noodled with them endlessly. Would get one story to a point where it felt ready to submit to a magazine. Then it would get rejected (the industry norm) — so I’d noodle with it some more. I would spend six months, ten months, two years polishing, rearranging, in weird self-inflicted agony because of how much I cared about each tiny detail — and no one read any of it apart from a handful of friends and a rejecting magazine editor. So . . . for Steve and I to declare on May 5 that we’d have another story up for people to read on June 1? That was, for me, revolutionary as hell.

Shown: Me, feeling anxious about the commitment I made.

And did I mention that the stories I’d been writing for years had a habit of being 10,000 words long? That is long! At this site, we needed 2,500-word pops, stories that people could read in 10 minutes. I needed a whole different way of working. Of thinking. I had to reinvent myself. On the fly.

Well — to start with, it helped to write for Steve. To begin each scene by asking myself, “How can I make it cool to illustrate?” To write characters who didn’t noodle like I did. To cut to the chase. Or to the axe murder, or the evil wizard shooting fire. Make things happen.

I’m happy with the 25-ish stories we’ve published. I’m happy to say I’ve gotten a lot more careless since March 2020. Strangely, that was my goal. And whipping up this al fresco horror has been incredibly fun.

Now if you look through, you’ll see some months we put up a placeholder instead of a story. You get Steve’s art — pretty good placeholder! But in those cases I sent the story to a magazine instead of posting it here. No extra noodling! It still had to be done in the month (well, maybe I spent another week or two on it). But then off it went to audition for a spot in the magazine world instead of living here.

And one of those showing up in issue 47/48 of Dark Moon Digest (alongside some other enjoyably creepy stories) is the result. That feels good. Thanks for coming along with us. See you back here later with the next CC story.