To my daughter, in the dark of the moon in Lightspeed and Megabot vs. The Fundamental Arbitrariness of Existence in fuckit
To my daughter, in the dark of the moon in Lightspeed
To my daughter, in the dark of the moon is in this month’s Lightspeed, and it’s free to read right now! A lot of my stories begin as flash, and then I grow them upward during revision, adding hundreds or thousands of words. But this story—something about it just refused any expansion or revision. I wrote it in a single pass, nearly a single breath, and with the exception of a couple of minor grammatical tweaks it has remained exactly the same as when I first wrote it.
I think that the voice, and the character, are simply so strong that it was impossible for me to revise them.
I’m reluctant to analyze the story before you’ve all had a chance to read it and make up your own minds, so instead I’ll tell you a little about how I came to write it. I first wrote To my daughter, in the dark of the moon in response to a challenge to “write a story based on your favorite video game.” In this case, that video game is the truly excellent Slay the Spire by MegaCrit games. If you haven’t played the game, and you like card games or rogue-likes or RPGs, I highly recommend it. If you have, you might enjoy seeing how many references you can spot in To my daughter.
When it came time to publish the story, this put me in a bit of a tricky spot. To my daughter, in the dark of the moon isn’t exactly Slay the Spire fanfiction—it’s not directly related to the game’s characters or canon. But it uses a lot of the game’s imagery, to the point where I was uncomfortable publishing it without disclaimer and permission. Fortunately, the people at MegaCrit games were incredibly supportive and responsive, and perfectly happy to let me play around with the toys that they invented. So this story’s publication is thanks to them, specifically!
Megabot vs. the Fundamental Arbitrariness of Existence in fuckit
This issue of fuckit magazine has another entry in my “the Power Rangers in group therapy” series, entitled Megabot vs. the Fundamental Arbitrariness of Existence. If that sounds entertaining to you, or if you’d just like to check out an excellent zine with excellent stickers (my favorite is “Make Weird Art” but there’s a pile of good ones), I highly recommend fuckit.
I started a writer tumblr
Okay, technically I’ve had this tumblr since 2014, but I recently started actually posting to it. If you want to follow me there, it will have about the same announcement as the newsletter (although, as always, the newsletter will get all announcement first.)
Thank you for subscribing and reading. I hope you have a great rest of your year and the beginning of the new one. I can’t say for sure when the next newsletter will be (I only have one short story in the pipeline at the moment, but another could sell at any time) so I will see you all when I see you next.