Recent content by X Equestris

Fantasy and sci-fi can get away with being door-stoppers, especially epic fantasy and sprawling space operas. However, 167k and no end in sight is well outside the norm for debut fantasy romance. When I was starting out, the conventional wisdom was that agents weren’t interested in debuts more...

21-day acceptance from Lovecraftiana Counterbalanced by the fact I have nowhere to send one story now that I’ve written off its submission to Calliope Interactive as a 409-day dead letter.

No. I’ve seen the 2010 remake but never read the book.

I’m taking a bit of a break from fantasy with “Showdown on the Hogback” by Louis L’Amour, collected in Big Medicine. Made it about three chapters in quite a while ago, then got sidetracked and never returned until now, so I decided to start over. Now on Chapter VI.

Well, this was an almost total rewrite of a short story, which ended up growing into a novelette by the time all was said and done. I first wrote it way back in 2017, but I’ve come really far as an author since then, and the prose just wouldn’t stand up beside my more modern work. Since I’m...

After five months on a rewrite, I’m finally done! Kinda don’t know what to do with myself now, since it’s consumed so much of my time and mental focus for a massive chunk of the year.

I started The Fortress of the Pearl over the weekend and finished it earlier. What an acid trip of a book!

Yeah, that’s the one. I did it back in 2020, so the exact curriculum might’ve changed, but it was definitely interesting.

If you’re looking for courses, Writers of the Future has an online workshop that takes you through the process of developing and drafting a short story. Even as a fairly experienced author at the time I did the workshop, it had some useful insights, so I’m sure it would be especially helpful for...

Over the weekend, Amazon released the paperbacks of Hanging at Crosbhothar, and I launched preorders for The Gale at Quiet Cove. After all the work that went into these, it’s really exciting to watch it come to fruition!

Seconded. Years back, I tried to write this dark fantasy piece with a mad artist villain whose lifelike sculptures are in fact made from his victims. The first scene turned out great—the heroine encounters this horrendous abomination made from the villain’s “leftovers” while trying to climb up...

All my manuscripts follow the standard Shunn Manuscript Format, so .5 inch first line indents (made with paragraph settings, not tabs), double-spaced, left-aligned, no extra spaces between paragraphs. Only time I deviate from this is when a publisher specifically asks for it, and even then, I...

Today’s the day: Hanging at Crosbhothar is out on Kindle! Paperbacks should be available in the next few days; unfortunately, since it’s a reprint, I couldn’t schedule their release ahead of time. Once I’m done with my current project, I want to look into launching the ebooks wide through D2D.

Basically, they need to be snapshots. Small, decisive moments with a narrow scope and limited cast of characters. My experience with drabbles has made this really clear. Those are even trickier: a hundred words exactly.

The Nightmare on Story Street horror contest announced their winners without sending out rejections, so there’s a 33-day no response rejection from them for “The Goatskin Codex” I believe this leaves me at twelve in all for 2025.