Three Stories

It’s been an interesting few months for me, as I was laid off from the shambling remains of Fanbyte and have been dealing with some personal issues simultaneously. On the plus side, it’s been an immensely product period, creatively-speaking. I published my first short story in Tower Magazine earlier this year, and have been working on a number of projects since then. It’s been immensely liberating to get to the point where I’m having fun writing fiction again — I used to do it frequently as a kid, but like visual art, my enjoyment of it was squashed by a few awful teachers in middle school.

I’ve been posting some of these stories on my personal site, which I’m trying to make better use of as Twitter continues to get worse and worse. (I haven’t had a Facebook account in years and I have no intention of getting on Threads.) So far it’s been about one a week, and while I expect the pace will slow down a little, partly as I start to hold more back for publication elsewhere, it’s been a blast thus far.

Egregore is about inventing a guy to get mad at on 2000s-era web forums who then becomes real and gets mad at the people who made him up. Neil Gaiman liked it, which is wild!

The Deep Word is about a tattoo artist who has an encounter with an unusual kind of client.

Lastly, Night Shift, which just went up yesterday, is based on my experience working the graveyard shift at a drive-through Tim Hortons.

I hope you enjoy these stories. If you do, please tell your friends about them or post about them on whatever social media you find yourself on these days.

Best,

merritt