Post-Halloween Blues Writing Update

Halloween was a week ago. Maybe it’s because daylight savings time plunged us into darkness only a few days later, or that the Seattle weather turned into Seattle winter weather like a switch had been flipped, or just the ongoing wretchedness happening domestically and abroad, but the Post-Halloween Blues are hitting me hard this year.

For the last ten years I’ve been attempting to watch 31 seasonally-appropriate films every October, posting about them over on my instagram. I think a big contributing factor to this year’s bout of PHB was falling into the steady rhythm of watching a film at night after work, waking up in the morning, and then writing my review. Now that I’m through with that, I find myself floundering.

Speaking of floundering, I had earmarked this time for working on a new story, but I’m blogging here instead. Now that I caught myself, I have to get back to that, but here’s a quick update on writing stuff:

• I’ve got two stories on deck to be published early next year: “Videos of Unidentified Dogs” in Archive of the Odd (looking at a mid-January release at present) and “Elizabeth by the Pea Patch” in something I’ll be announcing soon (preorders will be dropping when I do, and that should be out mid-February). I’m very excited to see these in print. AotO does fantastic work, I’ve seen what they did with “Dogs” already and I’m stunned–they’ve also paired me with an artist, so there will be illustrations to go along with it! And “Elizabeth”…I can’t talk about it now, but I think it’s my strongest story, and when it’s released I’ll have achieved a tremendous personal milestone in terms of my writing career…but more on that later.
• 2025 has been a very slow year regarding my writing. I’ve completed exactly one piece of fiction, a 500-word flash piece called “In a Rich Man’s House There Is No Place to Spit but His Face: or, GHOULS!”, which I’ve been submitting for publication here and there.
• I finished the first draft of a story called “A Green From the Hazel” about a year ago, but spent most of this year revising it over and over. It still doesn’t feel right to me, but I might say enough is enough and start submitting it soon.
• Over the summer I wrote the first draft of a King in Yellow story (my first in close to 30 years–the last one was, if I recall correctly, about a SETI technician receiving an encoded Yellow Sign from a distant star system). It’s kind of a mess, so it might wind up another piece I tinker with for a year.
• I’ve been submitting a 6,750-word story called “How Lonely” for a year now. It might be the best thing I’ve done to date (“Elizabeth” is a close second, and in fact the two stories are linked). The market for short horror fiction has been dry, especially so for work over 5K words, but I believe in this one and know it’ll land somewhere in time.
• Much of the writing I’ve done this year was rolled into two longer pieces, that at this point look like they’ll be novel-length when I’m through.
  • Weltschmerz, Returning is the first in a potential series about a paranormal problem solver (and neurodiverse mess of a young woman) named Agnes Maidana, who uses ritual magic to protect a drug dealer from a revenant who has the wrong guy.
  • Watching Oliver is, honestly, harder to pin down, but it’s about a depressed, awkwardly horny 20-something barista going on a gnostic journey while pet-sitting his crushtomer’s cat (the titular Oliver) in a house whose architecture doesn’t make sense…there’s also a monster called Christopher Kisses.
• I’ve started several stories this year and stalled out, but I plan to complete them all, dammit:
  • “It’s OK”, about a guy whose mother goes feral and disappears when he’s a teenager, only for her to return to attack him throughout his life at several pivotal moments
  • “Born for Burning” about a group of five anarchists facing down two hundred Christian Dominionists on a mountain pass to protect their people post-societal collapse
  • “The 1984 Hammonton Jamesway Disappearances”, about, well, I don’t even know how to talk about this one
  • “The Third Time”, the alien abduction story I’ve meant to write for years, which, at the time of this writing, appears to feature Blaze Foley as a secondary character

Wow, writing all that out makes me feel like I have actually been putting in a lot of work this year; fingers crossed 2026 is the year I finish it all! Post Halloween Blues have abated somewhat, now I need to write about aliens before I head to work.