Last week’s story

I finished last week’s story yesterday. It’s called “The Last Adventure of Darkur the Barbarian”, and it features ogres, elves, and mermaids. It was, as usual, a blast to write, even if I got a little blocked toward the end. But that’s the thing: When one is a career writer (which I’m not), one cannot afford to get blocked. There are deadlines that must be kept to, whether you’re super hyper focused with the muse or not. With this story of the week project, I’ve got self-imposed deadlines to meet, and while those usually don’t work for me, this weekly deadline has helped. Even if I have missed it a couple of times.

This week’s prompt

But first, a little shake-up.

During a Ditch Diggers livestream with Mur Lafferty and Ursula Vernon, I asked how I can bring my writing up to the “next level”, since, in spite of this 2025 Commitment, I’m beginning to feel like I’m stagnating. The advice I got was two-fold:

1. Write a lot (check); and,
2. Write in different genres.

Hm. I do try to write in different genres, but mostly I stick to the genres I know: fantasy, horror, and science fiction. So, because I like rolling multiple dice at a time, I came up with the following. In addition to rolling a d4 to determine which Story Engine deck I’ll be writing from, I’ll be rolling a d6 to determine what subgenre I’ll be writing in. As is my way, I crowdsourced my question to Facebook and Slack and Discord, and finally came up with the following. For subgenre, I’ll roll a d6 and go by this chart:

1. Historical
2. Romance
3. Thriller
4. Humor
5. Mystery
6. None

So this week, I rolled a 4 on my d4 and got the horror genre; and a 1 on my d6 and came up with historical. I’ve already written a historical horror short story (“Artiface”, story no. 15), but I will write another one this week. Here’s the prompt:

A fanatic wants to imprison a shambling demon inside a fog, but it will lead their enemy straight to them.

Naturally, when I think historical, I think pirates, because that’s what I know best. But in the spirit of challenging myself, I’ll go with something different. I did just recently read Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary, but I hesitate for now to set something in, say, the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps I’ll do something set during the First World War, since I had done a lot of research in that setting for a novel that has never seen the light of day. Yeah, First World War. I like that.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

This week’s recommendation:

I highly recommend the television series and the books. They are all delightful.

Take care this week. And, as always: be safe, be kind, and have lots of fun.