It’s been a while since I did a monthly summary, here or anywhere else, but I said in my last post that I was going to do one, so here I am.

My goal is to keep this focused on what I worked on, what (if anything) was submitted and/or published, and my writing plans for the coming month.

I spent a good part of November working on a non-fiction piece for Heartlines Spec. This was a quick turnaround, which was a lovely change to the way things have normally worked for me. I wrote and submitted it, worked on edits, and then had it published by the end of the month. Very satisfying! The piece, “Volunteering Something of Myself,” is available to paid subscribers now, free to all in mid-January.

I also edited and submitted a flash/very short story I’ve had kicking around for a while. It was one of those Apex flash contest stories (glitter from June 2024, I had to look that up ;-)). The glitter part is now gone (it really wasn’t central enough for the contest) and I developed the story a bit more. I really like this one, it’s very lesbians in space.

There are a couple of other stories I’ve been working on. One is a science fiction asteroid mining horror thing that’s still at a pre-first draft stage as I try to figure out what sort of story it wants to be. The other is a near future climate/plant thing that I’ve been working at on and off for ages. It’s one of those stories that I fully developed and thought it was done—and then thought about it some more and decided that was definitely not the case.

I also submitted a story I originally had published in 2018 in an anthology as a reprint. It was almost immediately rejected by the first place I submitted to (as it goes) and I immediately submitted it elsewhere (really the key to actually ever submitting). I have a number of pieces I could be submitting as reprints and this is the first time I’ve done it. I like the idea of some of these stories I had published in anthologies getting another life/more exposure in magazines that are more easily accessible.

And I have another horror story that is still pending with a small magazine (and has been for a while).

My story “The First of Cart Lake” was published in the anthology Ghost to Ghost to Ghost: an anthology of haunting tales from Canada (Frost Zone Press) in late October (but I wasn’t doing a monthly summary then so I’ll include it here :-D). This is a northern Ontario climate horror story and based on this lake, near the town of Cobalt (where my dad’s from and where I spent summers with my grandmother).

Inked in Gray Press announced the list of authors for their anthology Stellar Parallax: Human Hope in Grimdark Worlds, which will be coming out in Fall 2026 and contains my story “The Orchard-Bay” (more details, including a cover reveal and pre-order information will be coming soon).

We’re almost a week into December, but my plans for this month are to work on stories for two submission calls (this one by January 15 and this for end of January) and get back to the stories I’d been working on in November.

I also have a novel (novella?) about medieval beguines and aliens I’ve been working on sporadically for A WHILE that’s never far from mind, but, after writing a lot of words into different versions of it, I’m still not happy with the overall direction of it, so it needs more thinking.

Anyway. That’s it for now.

Take care.