2023 Year in Review
Achievements from this year and goals for next.
The final days of 2023 are upon us and I figured I'd take a moment to take an inventory of just what I've accomplished this year. I'm generally in a reflective mood during these waning days of December, but I feel as if I’m fighting the onset of some sort of illness, so this will likely be brief.
Short Stories Published:
“The One With the Mysterious Package” in the anthology Ahh! That’s What I Call Horror: An Anthology of 90s Horror. The alternate title to this one is “The Device”, I just couldn’t resist using the episode naming convention from the 90s sitcom Friends. RIP Matthew Perry.
“In This House, Spiders Are Our Friends” in the anthology This World Belongs to Us. I think this was the quickest I wrote a story this year. I had a lot of fun with it and it was pure coincidence that stumbled upon the open call of this anthology.
“A Tornado or Something Like It” in the anthology Howls From the Wreckage: An Anthology of Disaster Horror. Part of the film Twister was filmed near where I grew up.
“The Great Pumpkin Massacre” on The NoSleep Podcast. They tend to have a pretty long response time, but they are always open for submissions and its always a treat to hear your story with these types of production values.
Novella Self-Published:
Crybaby Bridge: Slaughter in a Small Town
This is an oral-history style telling of a single bloody night that happened in the little town of Somerset over twenty years ago. It’s a slasher and a love letter to small-town Americana.
I am fading fast over here, so I likely won’t be able to publish any sort of goals for 2024. I think that my biggest goal is to go with more what I’m feeling like with regards to reading and writing. I have a story I’ve just finished a first draft on for an open call and it was a struggle to even get this far, now I’m staring down the barrel of a rewrite. This wasn’t the case for the previously mentioned story, “In This House”.
So I think that I’ll lean away from open calls and go for the backlog of stories that have been begging to be written, or the stuff that comes out of the blue when the inspiration hits. Those inspired stories always seem to be the most fun to write.