I skipped yesterday's blog for uhhh obvious reasons. Not as a mark of respect, or anything like that, but because my planned post was a self-promo thing which just seemed guaranteed to get lost and be mostly a waste of time.
Anyway, here's a self-promo thing!
My flash fiction piece The Faces of Ghosts was published yesterday over on Uncharted Magazine.
This one has always been a favourite of mine. It's creepy, and technological, and from very much what I would call my 'rejected Black Mirror plots' phase of stories. I wrote it first in 2017. I think it was, actually, the second story that I wrote that year, which was when I actually started taking writing seriously and trying to do a lot of it and work really intentionally to improve. Which, y'know, is going fine.
I've revised it about half a dozen times since then. It's been doing the rounds on submissions for much of that time, and every time I thought about just putting it out somewhere myself, I'd read back over it and go 'no, this is still actually good' [with some small number of revisions]. It did actually sell some time in late 2018, to a magazine that closed shortly thereafter (I got paid, and the rights reverted, which was some consolation, but I really just wanted to see it published.)
I wouldn't write the same story now, for better and worse. It has something of the 'vignette' nature to it that a lot of my early attempts at writing did -- where I had an engaging idea and largely forged ahead to try to write the idea without the nuts-and-bolts craft work to developing the idea, the world and characters around it. I think it succeeds well enough in spite of that, partly by accident.
I wouldn't approach a piece in the same way now, but I think parts of my limitations there also helped the story a bunch incidentally -- particularly in the way it cuts so close to the core of the idea and doesn't waste any time. Perversely, I don't always have the same clarity and confidence then as now.
I was going to make the title of this post my favourite line from the story, but then I thought about how, uh, wonky that might appear showing up on Twitter right now. So you get it here instead:
She only lived once, but she has died many times. I have buried her many times.