Remember: my 99 cent chapbook sale starts Saturday. Check out my profile for a link if you can’t wait.
I’m trying to switch things up a little when I put that up on Twitter, mostly involving not using the same image and trying to sound less like an ad. Also, no links, just a suggestion to look at the profile. We’ll see how that goes.
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!
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.
Actually making good progress! This will not be a novelette.
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!’”
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.
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.
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.
‘Up Above’ would have been an interesting novel for me to have written, twenty years ago. Oh, well, I was kind of busy at the time. Besides, twenty years ago I wasn’t as good a writer.
Starting Saturday, all five of my illustrated four-story chapbooks will be on sale for 99 cents. This is a Halloween sale, so originally I was just going to do it for Anagnorisis and Revisionary – but then I decided that all the other chapbooks had horror stories in them, too, so why not go nuts? Certainly getting the whole schmeer for less than five bucks ought to be a bit attractive.
I know, I know – but I can justify this one, honest! The paperback for Ghosts on an Alien Wind is headed for the online Barnes & Noble store (it is not heading for actual stories, more’s the pity). I just need for the website to finish publishing it. It’s an experiment! If I get sales there, I will reconsider my current KU-exclusive status for my digital books.
If I don’t? Ach, well, I tried.
#commissionearned
This will probably be finished next week; it’ll be more than 3K words, but not too long. I have about three, four scenes left to write.
In the spiky shadows of the ward and Curwin’s tonfa the attacker was no more definable than a haze, roiling and oozing around itself. But it was a directed, twisted haze that hinted at ancient hungers — and a terrible, voracious need. I was shocked, honestly. How could something this powerful still exist in the United States? We had Soothed our portion of the East Coast centuries ago!
Fortunately, it was also not subtle: the enemy’s first attack was an attempt to batter down my ward with sheer force, which is obviously the exact thing that the spell is designed to counter. I still almost staggered as a whip of cloud-curdled magic smashed against my ward, scoring the ground in front of it as it recoiled and drew back.
“Stay inside the ward!” I shouted, my free hand twisting as I assembled another spell. “It’s a manifestation!”
I’m keeping the e-version of GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND off B&N because, honestly, I cannot give up the KU sales without better assurances that it’d be worth it. Amazon dominates the e-book market. This is a thing that is known.
I’m also in the process of seeing if I can get a good dust jacket out of this. I… do not know. Getting the paperback book prepped for B&N as it was was a right royal pain. But I’m also getting a smaller royalty from B&N than I will for Amazon*, so it might make a difference to have a hardcover with a dust jacket. We shall see!
Moe Lane
#commissionearned
*Why do it, then? Because some buyers don’t like Amazon. Like, a lot.
