I felt like I just did one of these, but that was last month! And I did tell my email people I’d only email them once a month or so. So! here we are!
Story: Space is Full of Ghosts (and I fucking hate it here)
Published in: Breath & Shadow [web]
Length: 1,800 words
Brief synopsis:
How the story came to be: Have any of you played Rain Code lol
There’s a character in it who has the ability to see ghosts/spirits, and he is not a big fan. This is only really relevent for the one chapter you work with him, but he’s one of the people who got an “extra” story as part of the DLC. In it, he said (to a ghost) that he was so tired of seeing/hearing ghosts that he wanted to kill himself to make it end.
So I’m sitting there like…but that wouldn’t fix anything? Now you’re going to be a ghost, hanging out with other ghosts. Alive people won’t be bothering you anymore, but it won’t solve the ultimate problem of ghosts bothering you. So I turned on my fanfic brain and asked myself: what would fix this problem? Where could one go where there’s no ghosts at all?
Well, space, obviously. Not that many people have died in space…but how does someone get to space in the first place? And, by the time that Regular People can go to space…wouldn’t more people have died in space? Building the colonies and dying from regular reasons and all that?
So the concept of off-Earth settlements being full of ghosts was very funny to me. They’d be less-bad than actual Earth, but still bad, and it’s not like a person can vibe between stations/celestial bodies forever. What is the logical solution this character would think of? And what’s the funniest thing that could happen?
And that’s how this story happened lol. This is the second “well what if I just wrote original fiction instead of a fanfic” piece I’ve written, and I’ve done quite a few more since then!
PUBLISHING THE STORY
Relative Confidence Level Before Submitting: 4? 5? I knew having the f word in the title would work against me, and also that the story is, like…working up to a punchline. And the nihilist/negative MC. I re-read it recently and it’s definitely not my best work, either (I think there’s some worldbuilding stuff I’d clarify/cut out) so there’s that, too.
Rejections before finding a home: 46
The eventual home: Breath & Shadow. This is actually my second piece there! I got “Subsume” reprinted there in their previous issue, actually. No complaints about these guys 🙂
