Category: Short Stories (Page 1 of 2)

I have a new flash piece out at Nature Futures, “Self From Self.” It should be available for free until mid-April 2023. You may be able to download the pdf from Nature even after it goes behind the paywall.

This is another very personal story. It reflects the years of my early adulthood playing World of Warcraft, my sometimes fraught relationship with my parents, and my own personal journey through parenthood. It’s a story of loneliness and worry, but also of friendship. It also includes a few of my favorite lines.

Missiles carved trails through the smoke that fogged the valley. Hot brass fell like summer hail. … For 15 glorious seconds, mechs — friendly and enemy alike — shed limbs like dandelions shed seeds, until nothing moved in the valley but the parachutes of the surviving enemy pilots.

Self From Self – Me

The opening of this came easily. The ending took a fair bit of revision to excavate. The title took days of searching until I finally broke out the Shakespeare search engine and went hunting. I’m not sure how I found the passage from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but it seemed like it fit.

And why not death, rather than living torment?
To die is to be banished from myself,
And Silvia is myself. Banished from her
Is self from self: a deadly banishment.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona – Shakespeare

Another new story?!?

I know, right! That’s three in basically a month. There are times of famine, and there are times of feasting, and apparently, this is a time of feasting. Which is a metaphor entirely appropriate for this story.

The Regolith Eaters is online at Martian Magazine. This is a fun horrific little story that I tried in a few forms until I decided to try my hand at a drabble* (for about the third time ever) and it just fell into place.

Am I bothered by repeating the word “leg” near the end? Yes! Can I change it now? No! Am I still proud of this little story? Also yes!

Fun fact: I stole the title of the story from a card in the board game Terraforming Mars. The story itself is vaguely inspired by the game since it is, technically, about terraforming Mars.

*a drabble is a story that is exactly 100 words

My story “Three Resurrections and the Warm, Embracing Earth” is out today in the wonderful British magazine Shoreline of Infinity. This one isn’t a gimmick. It’s a raw, painful story about separation and sacrifice, told from the point of view of a woman called to war by a necromancer and forced to fight battle after battle through death after death, all while haunted by a creeping realization that she’s left something important behind.

You all know that I love a good gimmick story, and I cooked up a wild one this time. My story “First Sergeant Xelos Nesteroy’s Christmas List, care of Admiral Almay, Seventh Fleet, Interstellar Navy” is live today at The Dread Machine. It’s a Christmas list from a prisoner of war, addressed to the admiral who let him be captured. It’s inspired by Starship Troopers and Children of Time, but it’s a Brent story, so it Goes Places. Also, it’s a Brent story, so it’s only about 3 pages.

My short story “The Discerning Gentleman’s Guide to 21st Century Attire” is out in the POST ROE Alternatives: Fighting Back anthology. Like much of my work, this is a story with a grim undertone. Also like much of my work, it has a good gimmick. In this case, it’s written as if it’s a guide to style with perfectly sensible advice for suits, shirts, shoes, and ties, but there’s a thread of story woven into it, and it turns into a look at what it’s like to live in a country where the police think they’re the military and that civilians are their enemies. Modern America, in other words.

Most of my friends will likely enjoy this story. Most of my family probably won’t.

I am delighted to have a new story out in the May/June 2022 issue of Analog Science Fiction. “Retirement Options for (Too) Successful Space Entrepreneurs” is the story of a space entrepreneur who has achieved his goals, but found that he hasn’t quite realized his dreams. It’s a story about food, regret, and doing a little good in the world.

You can read it via most major newsstands and bookstores, or through the Analog website. My personal suggestion is to go visit your nearest independent bookshop and buy all the copies on the shelf.

Selling this story to Analog was the realization of a long-time goal when I started writing. Analog is one of the big, historical markets for SF, and having them buy one of my stories is a validation that I am, in fact, getting better at this whole writing thing.

I just re-read the story. It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written. You should read it, too.

Hello, friends. I have three stories eligible for 2021 awards. All three are flash length (under 1000 words), which qualifies them in the “short story” category for science fiction and fantasy awards.

“Kintsugi for a Broken Heart” is probably my favorite story that I’ve written, in part because it’s so intensely personal. If you really want to read just one story to get a feel for my writing, I’d start with this one. It was published in February 2021 in Nature.

“A Dying World, Overheated and Nearly Ruined” is another personal story, drawing on a lifetime of computer repair and customer service, but perhaps not the same degree as Kintsugi. I’m proud of it, and I’m especially proud to have sold a second story to Nature, this one in August 2021.

“An Open Letter to Bezoath, Lord of Darkness and Shareholder Value” is a “write what you know” story about corporate life, and the tone of it is right there in the title. It’s a bit lighter, but with an underlying seriousness. This story also came with the best acceptance letter:”I’m afraid I have some bad news. We really enjoyed “An Open Letter to Bezoath…” and we would like to accept it for publication, which means you will no longer hold the title of TTL’s most-shortlisted-but-never-accepted author. (P.S. congratulations!).” Translunar Traveler’s Lounge may be a semi-pro publication, but they are publishing some great work, despite (or because of?) publishing a Brent Baldwin story.

I may yet have a fourth story out this year, but it looks as if it’s slipped to Q1 2022.

We take a break from the regularly scheduled Football Manager posts to announce not one but two new short stories available this week.

The first is “A Dying World, Overheated and Nearly Ruined” at Nature. It’s a flash piece that’s about computer repair, global warming, and corporate bureaucracy. They say to write what you know, right?

The second is “An Open Letter to Bezoath, Lord of Darkness and Shareholder Value” at Translunar Travelers’ Lounge. This is another flash piece about bad bosses and corporate bureaucracy. Again: write what you know, right? (My current and past managers are wondering which of them this is about. I’ll tell anyone that wants to buy the first round.)

Dying World is my second published story at Nature, and it’s the first time I’ve had a market publish me twice. I’m delighted to have another story there. I’m also delighted to have published a story that I think is about something serious and affects us all. July 2021 was the hottest month on record since humans have kept records, and I still have to listen to assholes tell me that it’s totally natural, despite all evidence. Yeah… things are going great.

Lord Bezoath is my first sale to Translunar Travelers Lounge. It could be the last. The editors at the lounge want stories that are “fun.” I struggle with fun. My work tends to be on the serious side. Or the “vaguely creepy whoah this veered toward horrific” side. I want to broaden my repertoire, though, and that includes more things that are fun. You. Will. Enjoy. My. Stories, he says, turning purple in the face.

Both stories are quick. I hope you enjoy each of them for entirely different reasons. Please laugh in the right places.

Now, back to the Football Manager posts.

It’s another new story day. Kintsugi for a Broken Heart is out at Nature Futures.

This is a story I wrote as part of a writing community event in 2020. It’s near and dear to my heart, and if you know my children, you’ll know exactly which child inspired Violet. I’ve been told that the story should come with a warning for other parents: have a tissue handy. No children or robotic dogs are harmed in the story, but it does tug on your heartstrings. Mission Accomplished, imo.

I mentioned in my end of year roundup that while 2020 has been a terrible year in general, it’s been surprisingly good for my writing. One benefit of being at home all day, every day is that I have had more time to write. Truthfully, I’ve spent much of that time watching football (soccer) and playing video games, but I have done a good bit of writing, too. At various points I’ve felt unproductive, but I think that’s a reflection of working in small, productive chunks followed by long, fallow weeks of football and video games.

Looking back, I have completed:

10 flash fiction pieces
4 short stories
1 novella
1 novel (in-progress)

All told, that’s about 100k words of fiction, not counting rewrites and edits. Even within that 100k words, not all of them were keepers. I’ve trunked (retired with no intention of submitting or publishing) a few of the short stories and the novella already. They are story-shaped pieces of prose, but they either don’t have much to say or need to be tackled with a new story rather than edits. Some of the others may end up in the trunk if they don’t sell, but there are a handful that I think are legitimately good, and three have already sold.

Selling, dear reader, does not come easy. You don’t spend long in this business without learning to deal with rejection. I’ve gone back and looked at my statistics for the year, and while I’ve had a record number of sales, I’ve also had a record number of rejections. According to the Submission Grinder, I have submitted a story 145 times this year. Of those, 104 were form rejections, 17 were personal rejections, five were sales, and the rest are either pending or were closed with no response. That may seem like a huge number of stories, but the reality is that many stories were rejected multiple times, and I have been submitting stories from prior years as well as 2020.

Five for 145 is a 3.5% success rate. It’s not great! Selling three of 15 finished stories this year is a 20% success rate, which looks better, but that still means 80% of the stories I’ve written are misses rather than hits. The 100k words written is probably my lowest since I got back into writing seriously in 2011.

And yet, I’m actually thrilled with how the year has gone.

It feels as if I’ve turned a corner in the last eighteen months. Not just the sales, though the external validation certainly feels nice, but the way I look at my own work. In the past I would write a story, feel good about it, and send it out. Sometimes the story was decent, but many times it was flawed in a way that I couldn’t personally see. Sometimes my writing group could help me see the flaws, but I couldn’t fix them in a satisfactory way. Turning the corner has meant seeing the flaws sooner. It’s meant crafting stories in a way that the flaws other people find are more-easily resolved because the story itself has stronger characters, setting, conflict. It’s also meant looking at a story, seeing what I can use later, and throwing out the other 90%. Knowing what doesn’t work is just as important as knowing what does work. Writing is sometimes adding little pieces of clay to a skeleton until the sculpture is built, but other times it’s starting with a roughly-shaped block of marble and carving off the parts that don’t belong until the sculpture emerges.

2021 will mark 10 years of serious writing for me. If I’ve learned nothing else in that time, it’s that downs follow the ups, and ups follow the downs. I may not sell a single story next year. I might sell ten. I might sell ten and a novel. (Dream alert!) Obviously, I’d rather sell than not, but if it’s another year of growth and learning without any sales, that’s okay, too.

My goals for the year aren’t measured in sales, they’re measured in finished stories. I want to complete at least ten short stories, finish my current novel that’s in progress, and get another novel started. Those all feel achievable and they are within my control without being subject to the whims of editors or agents. If I can write a few more stories that I’m proud of, I’ll be a happy writer.