It’s been a little bit since I’ve posted here, but this time I’ve actually been getting some writing done! I’ve finished rough drafts of two new short stories, “Wings” and “Bedtime,” and I’ve been working on another called “The Passing.” “Wings” was the result of a prompt an apartment-mate at university gave me (“buffalo angel wings”), and turned into a very open-ended story about fallen angels, hungry giants, memory loss, and the malleability of reality. “Bedtime” is very short, about 500-word piece exploring what happens if there really is a monster under the bed. I’m currently editing and revising these pieces, and hopefully will be submitting them to be published in as-of-yet-to-be-determined places. The piece I’m currently working on, “The Passing,” was inspired by this scene from Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated, an SB incarnation I have very mixed feelings about. It involves an interdimensional being “passing” through someone’s home in the middle of the night, and interacting with the homeowner in a variety of unsettling ways that drive him to insanity.
Those short stories aside, I have two other projects currently in development. The first is another free online serial novel, in the vein of the dead Astral Tide, but this time with just myself writing. It does, however, borrow heavily from many of the themes present in the earlier work. Beginning June 9th, every Monday I will post a 500-2000 word chapter in the story, which is what I call a “post-Lovecraftian” tale, mixing science fiction, horror, and fantasy in a post-apocalyptic setting in which Lovecraftian monsters have awoken on earth. The setting borrows heavily from the Cthulhu Mythos, and will feature characters and beasts from Lovecraft’s works very prominently. For those of you who are interested, I will direct you to The Eldritch Wastes, where you can read more about it and dive into the short preludes I have been putting up. I encourage you all to check it out!
The other project I’ve been working on is another new short novel-length piece. I got bitten by a really bad plot bunny a few days back, and I’ve been plotting like crazy. The current working title of the piece is Moons Over Sothenheim, and I am aiming for a 50-75 thousand word novel in which capitalism meets Lovecraft. It begins as a science fiction dystopian novel taking place about three hundred years in the future, and follows the troubles of a young woman trying to survive in a Darwinist universe, but over the course of the novel she winds up mining on one of the moons of the frontier planet Sothenheim, where something beyond human comprehension is being exploited by leaders of industry, threatening all human life. In order to ensure that I finish this project (hopefully by the end of this summer, fingers crossed), I will attempt to write the whole first draft in the month of June, in the form of my own Camp NaNoWriMo, complete with weekly updates. So, stay tuned for all of this, and I’ll be back soon!
Z. M. Wilmot 