Sure Is Quiet . . . Too Quiet

When we took a break, back in July 2022, I had another Micah Hogue tale half-ready in the hopper (actually a prequel to “E,” about how those kids in the Haight came to summon a demon), along with a fairy tale featuring a talking fox, and one about a woman who finds the food in her house is not what it seems. Steve had plans for the site too. He’d sent me a couple of drawings suggesting a more abstract direction, which got me thinking about even shorter stories. Surreal bites of 1,000 words or less.

Eight months later, none of that has happened here, because we both remain too busy with other projects.

Just incredibly busy with projects, definitely not overwhelmed.

That’s good news, of course — Steve’s a working artist, and I’m doing lots more writing. In January I completed a short novel (or long novella? the veil between worlds is thin), which is out on submission right now. I’m happy with it, and also have some shorts out on submission — enough that I need to track them on an electronic spreadsheet, just like M. R. James used to.

I owe a lot of that to this site. It forced me to work — I’d guess 17-18 days is the average time spent on everything you read here, from conception to publication. That schedule did not allow for lingering in doubt, my usual modus operandi. It focused me on Poe’s formulation: The short story is a work that aims at exactly one effect. So I started each story with a single ambition: Disturb the reader. That helped me get more — professional, I think is the word. Don’t drag in distractions, don’t noodle away until you’ve created a giant bowl of spaghetti. Maybe as a result, the story “Party Line” ended up a little too spare, so it doesn’t quite land? But other times it worked out, I think — maybe “Elf, Elf, Up Too High” gets it about right.

James reaching for his Alienware to boot up Excel.

And some of the stories I wrote for this site didn’t get posted in full, or were posted for a few hours and then yanked — because I wanted them out on submission instead. Of those, a few were then published in other venues, like “We Must Believe Our Problem Will Wane,” a werewolf story (maybe you guessed from the title), and “Of Cars and Temples,” about surgery gone awry. Plus there’s that novel~novella, which if not for this site . . . well, would it exist? Probably — as either notes jotted on the back of a junkmail envelope, or as a 90,000-word sprawl that I tell myself I’ll “fix” next month (always next month).

I believe we will get back to this site, Steve and I. Add more stories and art. Doing so gave us both a lot — but the right move for both of us right now is to put what we learned here into the rest of our work. I will try to pop into the blog section more often, say hello — in the meantime, thanks for checking us out. Hope you enjoy your visit.

Recent work by Steve Morris, out in the world.