I finished a short story tentatively titled The Cat (or Psychostasia, I can’t decide). It’s about a cat’s love for their human and vice versa, from the perspective of a house-cat as he investigates the murder of his owner Paul.

Very happy with how it’s turned out, so much so that I’ll be shopping it to magazines and won’t be publishing it here on the blog. I am, however, working on some other shorts and flash-fics that I could share on here. I’ll share the first few paragraphs as a story on my Instagram page. 

The novel has been another story entirely (no pun intended.

There are real highs and lows to learning what does and doesn’t work in a story. The upside is of course that you get better at your craft, but the downside is that you have to cut things that you really love because they don’t work thematically or they screw up the pacing and aren’t important enough to be allowed to do that. Lately I’ve had to take a butcher’s cleaver to the second half of my KILL THE KING plot outline, but I know it’ll be better for it. I’ve been so wrapped up in this that I’ve taken a break from most other writing or creative pursuits, including editing my new shorts and sharing them online, so I have the freedom to un-fuck the second half of this novel. 

I also lost a very productive weekend worth of work to an iCloud syncing issue, but rallied like a champion. 

Will be in touch again before the end of the year to post some short fiction.