I have sold another story to Sunday Morning Transport! This will be my third, coming out some time next year.

The thing that pleases me the most here is, this short story was originally supposed to be a novel trilogy. One for which I came up with the concept over fifteen years ago — but I didn’t sell it then, and now both the genre and I have moved on enough that I recently faced up to the fact that I’m unlikely to ever write it. For an assortment of good reasons . . . but it made me a little sad, because there were key beats in the concept I really liked, which can’t be transplanted to a different story without basically re-creating the thing I had good reasons for not writing.

And then, while I was being sad, I read some of Borges’ short fiction for the first time.

Which is how I wound up condensing that trilogy down into 2500 words of testimony from the interrogation of a character who was there for all the events of the novels I’m not writing! Not only did this let me keep those key beats, but it also let me skip the hard work of coming up with all the details of the clever, long-term plans laid by the characters; I can dispose of that in a sentence or two of “we spent years setting that up.” Win-win! <lol>