Stephen L. Thompson's Blog, page 6

My writing goals for 2024

 Four or fivemonths ago, in an attempt to get my act together, I set deadlines to finishfive of my projects.  Three of those deadlinesare this year.  I want to publish CollectionX, my tenth short story collection, a collection of essays on building a lunarbase, which I’m still hammering a title out for, and Rediscovery, a novella Istarted years ago about a writer

This hurt my brain

 Maybe the sea was too rough.

Writing Newsletter Fourth Quarter 2023

 Well, I finally finishedand published The Uncapped Pen, my collection of fifty stories dealingwith writing, in some way.  To try tobring some awareness to The Uncapped Pen, I reposted three stories thatwere in the “Maybe Pile” for the collection: “The Honeymoon’s Over,” “It’s Harder than it Looks,” and “It’s a Fine Line.” I also posted “Procrastination,”the idea for which I came

Random Writing Tips – Try new things

 About a week ago, I wasdriving to work and I wasn’t in a good mood. I hadn’t slept that well, I had a bit of a toothache, and I’d donesomething to my elbow.  Not to mention I wasthinking about all the writing stuff I needed to do.  I needed to write up some blogs, I needed tocome up with an idea for my Monthly Stories, I needed stories for the variouscollections I’m working on, I needed to

Short story – “Conditions”

“Conditions”With a mug of hisfavorite coffee, John went into the storage room/his office and locked the doorso the cat wouldn’t get in.  He set themug on his desk, then walked over to the stereo set on a metal shelf and put ona Vivaldi CD.  The music started and headjusted the volume until it was a soft background.  Returning to his desk he sat down and turnedon his laptop.  The twins had

Fool’s stories

This started acouple weeks ago when I had a dream.  Inthis dream, a giant dog was destroying cities. By giant, I mean this dog could have easily chewed up Godzilla.  All of our guns and bombs were uselessagainst it.  But then, this old guy from aretirement home stepped up and wrestled it into submission, or maybe killedit.  This turned out to be an immortal Gilgamesh,who had just been

2023 Election ebook sale!

I know that a lotof people are tired of being told that every election for the past decade isTHE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER!  But it’strue.  The fastest way for theanti-democratic forces to seize power is if The People can’t be bothered to vote. And they have too much power as itis.  To keep our democracy, we need tovote, in this election and every election. The tiniest partthat I’m

Free story idea – Two spooky ideas

I have a lot of ideas forstories.  Like, if I wrote a novel’sworth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting throughthem all.  I will admit that some of theideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could makesomething of them.  I’ll just never get achance to.  So, I give them to the world.  If you can make something of these, go rightahead.  And

Short story – “Procrastination”

I just published The Uncapped Pen, a collection of fifty short stories dealing with writing in someway.  I got the idea for this story abouta month ago, long after I had the fifty stories selected for thecollection.  So I’m just posting it hereas a bonus.“Procrastination”With a fresh cup ofcoffee, John sat down at his desk and opened his laptop.  He put the cursor over the file for his

Short story – “It’s a Fine Line”

I just published The Uncapped Pen, a collection of fifty short stories dealing with writing in someway.  Most were previously published – onmy website or blog – but the rest are brand new stories.  This previously published story was in my “IfI need it pile,” but in the end I didn’t need it.  So I’m just posting it here as a bonus.“It’s a Fine Line”Joan returned home fromwork on Monday to