New Short Story Called “Eclipse”
Today, I completed a short story titled Eclipse. The 7,494-word story took a few days to write and I am really excited and proud of how it turned out. Here is the synopsis:
“Once a year, for two weeks at a time, the colonized planet Tromsø experiences a deadly solar eclipse that plunges the planet into darkness. With the eclipse comes the emergence of deadly bats who rise from underground to ravage the planet’s surface. The bats destroy everything in their path that isn’t under heavy shielding, leaving complete desolation in their wake.
When bats damage a power cable feeding valuable energy to a heavily-shielded hospital on Tromsø during the eclipse, a daring team must go out to repair it. But that means entering the realm of the bats.
Based on Viking culture and inspired by Norwegian cities that experience blackouts for days at a time, the world of Eclipse blends ancient Nordic cultures and traditions with futuristic and fantastical elements, making it a truly unique world.”
I wrote the story specifically in mind for War & Whiskey Publishing’s upcoming anthology, Strange Sunsets: Terrors on Distant Planets. The criteria for acceptance was straight-forward enough: “Science fiction stories that take place on another planet. There must be an element of horror.”
Easy, right?
Maybe not so easy, at least for me. When I write, the difficult thing is keeping it short. As you may know from my books like Iris and Hive, I like to write long, long stories. With a recommended word-cap at 7,500 and a hard cap at 10,000, I had to show a lot of restraint when putting this story together. But it was a good exercise in keeping things concise and in editing out filler.
When will you see the story? Oh, that’s a good question. There is no telling whether War & Whiskey is going to accept the story firstly. If they don’t, I may try to submit it to someone else. I’m not entirely sure. All I know is that right now the story has been sent and it is in consideration. It may see the light of day, or it may not (and will linger forever in an eclipse).
Because I am still struggling to find a publisher for my fantasy novels, I figure I will try short stories in the meantime. In fact, Eclipse is not the only short story I have sent out. I’ve also submitted a similarly-lengthed short story titled Egyptus to a few people. I would love it if either one got accepted!
Despite my struggles keeping it short, I’ve had some experience publishing short stories in the past. My first accepted short story was a science-fiction comedy called Totalus, which was published in December 2017 in Pew! Pew! Volume 4: Bad Versus Worse by the Wooden Pen, LLC. This parody of Star Wars was told in a series of vignettes and, unlike traditional short stories, was close to 20,000 words (not so “short” for a short story). My second accepted short story was another science-fiction comedy called Valentine’s Day 1979: An Intergalactic Adventure, which was published in Pew! Pew! Volume 5: A Fist Full of Pews, also by the Wooden Pen, LLC. Like Totalus, Valentine’s Day 1979 was on the longer side for a short story. It saw a regular man from the 70s teleported to space to take part in a whacky space wedding. Most recently, Salvation of the Seas was published in June 2019 in Horizons Beyond by Keystroke Medium. This story, a proper short story length, saw a bleak not-so-distant future where humankind has been ravaged by a terrible disease that wiped out most of the planet.
When the rights reverted back to me, you may recall that I re-released the two comedy stories, Totalus and Valentine’s Day 1979, in my own special anthology titled Kangblabla! In that anthology, I also included three additional new stories written specifically for that anthology.
And although the rights to Salvation of the Seas have reverted back to me now too, I have chosen not to do anything else with it at this time. As of now, that story remains exclusively available in Horizons Beyond.
In all three cases, releasing the short stories led to an increase in sales for my regular full-length novels. This reinforces the point I’ve always known – that the more content is out there, the more it will help sell my other content.
At this point, I can only wait and hope that stories like Eclipse and Egyptus get picked up. I certainly hope that readers will get a chance to experience them. I’m sure you’ll love them!
