The Revised and somewhat expanded ‘Audition’ is up on Patreon.

I was going to send this out to be sold somewhere, but: there’s nowhere to send it to. Novelettes and novellas are the bastard children of the writing world anyway, and all the paying venues are drowning in a sea of slush piles overflowing with AI popslop. Patreon is where the stories get sold, now. It’s all about the subscriptions.

So. Tell your friends!

Patreon!

Moe Lane

PS: I’m giving serious consideration to expanding my Substack to include reprints of some of the stuff found here. I don’t know if I want to, though. Or if I want to create paywalled posts for said Substack, in addition to the free posts I do now over there. It’s a tough question for me.

Tweet of the Day, I Am Not Accommodating iOS On My Patreon edition.

Short version is: part of the change on this is that Patreon is doing a mandatory switch to a subscription billing model, instead of first-of-the-month billing. I don’t expect to get any new readers from Apple products anyway; my readers seem indifferent to the proposed change; and every time something does change in this sort of thing, somebody unsubscribes*. It’s not in my best interests to mess with the status quo, in other words.

So no thanks.

Patreon!

*Yeah, I know the last two points come across as contradictory. They’re also both true. Sue me.

10/21/2024 Snippet, NEVER RETURN.

Actually making good progress! This will not be a novelette.

Patreon!

But with the ward now anchored (and no longer drawing power from my own magic, which was both good and bad), I could more freely use my potent spells. The great weakness of ghosts is that they require a focus. Wreck the focus, weaken the ghost. To do that you must first find the focus, which is the simplest thing in the world if you know the right spell. I do. Every schoolchild in the country studies it in school. It was the work of a moment to cast it…

… “Damnation,” I muttered (I do not apologize for the profanity, for it was quite apropos). “This is not a ghost.”

“What?” My two companions could not have echoed each other more fully if they had practiced.

“It’s not a ghost, gentlemen! It’s something else!” I prepared another spell, one not specific to specters, ghosts, spooks, or haunts. Hopefully, what it lacked in precision it would gain in unsubtlety. “When I blast it, ‘stand not on the order of your coming, but go at once!’”

Ohhhh, right, this is why I stopped sending out stories. Publishers are drowning in them.

There are far too many desperate authors inundating the relatively few places that take unsolicited submissions. The folks with actual budgets have to throw up draconian requirements just to keep things down to a dull roar, and they still get enough submissions that they don’t have to pay squat. It’s very much a buyer’s market out there when it comes to short fiction.

Guess I can always throw ‘Audition’ on Kindle Vella. It won’t make any money there, either, but maybe it’ll help my Amazon algorithm.

Moe Lane

PS: It will not get better. In fact, thanks to people spamming slush piles using AI, it will somehow manage to make things even worse. I should just be grateful I have fans.

An addition to THE AUDITION.

Audition is the Unfiltered story I wrote a while back. I’ve decided that, horrible people or not, I could send it out as a short story, see if somebody will buy it. I spent most of the day adding the scene I’ve been meaning to add to it. Here’s a bit of it.

Patreon!

The interrogation process was strange.

There were four interrogators, one of whom sat next to the seccy (Norm decided he needed to remind himself that the pathetic figure in the gurney was actually a wanted terrorist), with the other three sitting behind. All of them wore full face masks, too. Madole shrugged when Baker pointed that out. “It’s not about personalities,” she told him, and would not comment further.

The questioning itself was even weirder. Baker and the others weren’t actually in the room itself, and there was no sound in the feed. The three interrogators still didn’t actually talk; instead, they huddled among themselves, silently writing on a piece of paper, making edits and additions until they apparently liked the result. Then they handed the paper to the fourth interrogator, who did speak aloud. After a moment, the seccy would mumble a response, which the interrogator would write down — and hand back to the other three. They would read it, put their heads together, and start scribbling another question.

That confused Ashelyn. “Why are they doing that? Can’t they hear the answers?”

Madole shook her head. “No. They have earplugs.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not about personalities,” Madole replied, eyes on the screen. Ashelyn looked at Norm, who shrugged. She rolled her eyes, but didn’t push the point further.