Sunday, March 10, 2024

Two Short Short Stories

I published two of my stories recently that are really short, right around 2,000 words each.  First, I put out "The Tomorrow Bowl." That's a story I put on the Anklecast years ago in late January/early February to coincide with the Super Bowl.  It's a story set in a post-apocalyptic future where the world has perished in a nuclear holocaust and humans had to flee underground to survive. After a thousand years of scraping by and barely surviving, humans are finally back to a level that they can begin to develop leisure pastimes again. They do research of the distant past, and find things that they celebrated in their spare time, and decide to resurrect the pomp and pageantry of American football.

Then there's the second story, "My Daughter's Balloon." We put this story out on one of our 13 Nights of Halloween marathons years ago. It's a kind of exercise in trying to take something that isn't inherently scary, like a helium balloon, and turning it scary. It was fun to write, trying to see if I could turn a balloon into something creepy and scary. I think it works.

They're both really short stories, so I took the hit an accepted the 35% royalty plan so that I would be allowed to sell them for $0.99. This basically means that if they sell, I make pretty much nothing off of it. So, buy it if you want or don't (which I suspect is the more likely outcome) and it won't hurt either way. They are fun little stories, though. So, enjoy them if you do decide to pick them up.

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