#AmWriting, still

I’ve written a lot since my last #AmWriting. In fact, though there’s little to show for it, 2025 was a very productive year.

Obviously I’ve been writing here in the Gyre: 8 posts last year. I don’t write as much here as I used to, but that tends to mean I’m spending more of my energies on writing fiction. And I have been doing just that.

In 2025 I completed two short stories, which I really should submit. I’m terrible for just finishing something and moving on to the next thing without sending it to magazines. Fear of failure? Fear of success? Laziness? All of the above?

The stories were fun, for different reasons. The first was a black comedy, set jointly in Edinburgh and (sort of) Dante’s version of Hell. It was the most fun thing I’ve written in years, and practically self-generated. Really, who needs AI when you have a good idea and the right narrative voice? The second story was also fun: my friend Will and I challenged each other to write stories with the same title and see where that led us: to very different but equally satisfying outcomes, was the result.

The closest I’ve come to publication – by which I mean it wasn’t a direct rejection – was having my short story “An Older Grievance” be ‘highlighted’ in the annual British Fantasy Society short story competition. And yes, I really should submit it somewhere, shouldn’t I?

Early last year I spent a month exhuming a folk-horror novel(la) I’d abandoned just before COVID. I stripped away most of it and tried telling the story in a very different way, which was fun for a while but then the strict, episodic format I had given myself sucked all the fun out of it, so I abandoned it again. But I don’t rule out returning to it and trying a third attempt at some point. The core idea is good, but I just haven’t figured out how to write it yet.

But what of my long-term project, my recurring character, taciturn cosmic technician The Engineer? I wrote his first adventure during lockdown; to date it’s the only one of his stories that has been published: mostly because the subsequent tales are so much longer they fall outwith the range for magazine publication, and aren’t long enough to be a novella (and in any event, each story benefits from having read at least one of the others). There are now six completed stories, totalling around 200 pages, and since I completed the last one, what have I been doing? Well, looking at the #AmWriting update from April 2024 I can see that I’d been working on #7 in some form since the previous June (2023), so that’s now 2 and a half years, and what do I have to show for it?

Well: I veered off-track to start telling the backstory of one of The Engineer’s antagonists, and what he was up to in California in the late ’60s, and that grew into a much longer episode than story #7 could support, so it’s now a separate beast entirely. But I’ve been writing that since the summer of 2024 and it still isn’t finished: but the beginning of the end is at last in sight. Really, it all comes back to me starting without a detailed plan, but when I do have a detailed plan all the fun evaporates and the writing stops. There must be a sweet spot somewhere in between.

As for #7 itself, well it has grown arms, legs and tentacles. #6 was possibly the best thing I’d ever written, and gave me a huge confidence boost, which – though the lack of momentum suggests otherwise – has sustained me since. But #7 will be the longest Engineer tale, and such is the scale – and the way it will connect with all the others – that after I’ve written the bones of it, all the other stories will need re-written to some extent, so that the entire oeuvre (“pretentious? I?”) works as a novel rather than a series of linked stories, because realistically a publisher or agent won’t look at anything else. But yesterday I calculated that there are at least 14 characters who need to have some sort of story resolution, which is an almost Stranger Things level of excess. I’m not at the beginning of the end, but as Churchill said (I think), I’m at least at the end of the beginning.

So my intention for 2026 is to finish those two works-in-progress. It’ll be a relief to finally have them out of my head, if nothing else. And then maybe I should try submitting things, eh?