Damon L. Wakes's Blog, page 17

The Spiders That Follow Spring Rain

Flash Fiction Month 2022, Day 2 Challenge #1: Write a story with a phobia as a central theme, and (optionally) a first and last line exactly 13 words long. Every summer, after spring rain gave way to clear skies, the spiders came. To the silk-weavers they were a godsend, the blankets of web over the […]

Separated by a Common Language

Flash Fiction Month 2022, Day 1 “Baas luk usuck mall Bussak-luk mal baasllub.” “Your presence in this place is an affront to the Bussak Empire,” explained the translator, the Bussak naval fatigues comically oversized on his human frame. Captain Hensley regarded the diplomat—also most likely some kind of military officer, based on the trophies dangling […]

The All-Singing All-Dancing Newsletter Reboot

Way back in 2015, I set up a newsletter. Honestly I think it was a pretty good idea at the time: it picked up a solid number of subscribers, and helped push me to make regular progress with my projects. The idea back then was that I’d send out the main newsletter once a month […]

Flash Wednesday: The Three Doors

I won’t put out a blog post for every episode of my podcast – I aim to release a new one 3pm every Wednesday (UK time) and you know where to find them – but on this occasion I think it’s well worthwhile. The Three Doors is one of the Flash Fiction Month stories that’s […]

The 25th of April is a Good Day to Start Camp NaNoWriMo, Right?

…Right? Yeah, okay, it’s probably not. But still, I’ve been sitting on Girth Loinhammer and the Quest for the Unsee Elixir ever since it formed my debut (and to this day highest ever ranking) IFComp entry back in 2019, and I’d really like to bung in enough extra content to justify publishing it as an […]

Flash Wednesday: Clockwork and Cats

Remember a while back when I invited people to contribute voices to my Flash Wednesday podcast? Well this week’s episode – Clockwork and Cats – is the first to feature a voice actor! E.R Hollands (who you can find as @ERHollands on Twitter and Instagram) provided the voice of Karen, a magical girl on a […]

New Game: Good Grub!

Okay, “new” is probably pushing it. I initially wrote Good Grub! as a last-minute submission for the Green Stories Interactive Fiction Competition back in 2020. It placed in the Top 10, but was never actually made available to the general public and pretty much didn’t do anything beyond get me some nice feedback from the […]

New Game: Don’t Let the Bookbugs Bite!

I completely forgot about Ludum Dare 50 until someone mentioned that it was starting on Twitter. Naturally I decided not only to knock together a videogame in 48 hours, but to do so with absolutely no notice and no ideas going in. The result is Don’t Let the Bookbugs Bite!, which is being rated on […]

New Game: Twinedle – and a competition!

I realise it’s far, far, far from the most original game idea ever, but I’ve put together a Wordle variant using nothing but Twine! Twinedle – as the name might suggest – is a Twine version of Wordle. It deals with words of six letters rather than five (as the shorter guesses looked a little […]

Voice Actors Wanted for Flash Wednesday Podcast

I’ve been running my Flash Wednesday podcast for ten weeks now, and I think it would be good to get some other people’s voices in it! If you didn’t catch the news the first time around, this is a weekly podcast (with a new episode released each Wednesday – duh) made up of recordings of […]