It’s a gloomy, wet, unseasonably warm night here in Ohio. It feels like a good night to write a story, although I’m not sure what it would be about. But it set me thinking about how the immediate environment can influence one’s writing.

For example, I’ve never been to sea. I was on a boat in Lake Erie a couple of times, and I’ve been to the beach twice. So when I wrote 1NG4, I mostly used my imagination–but I did go down to a bridge over a river the day I wrote the first half of the story. I stood around, soaking in as much detail as I could. Doing that helped me write some of the description of the sun reflecting off the water.

Another example: for the scene in Vespasian Moon that takes place inside the title character’s cabin, I purposely stayed up much later than I normally do, turned out all the lights except for a flickering jack-o’-lantern, and then wrote the scene. That helped me with describing the way the shadows on the wall moved in the candlelight.

As someone who has long struggled with writing description, I’ve found this is a helpful trick. Of course, it has its limits. I doubt I’ll be traveling to any other planets to get the vibe I want for my science fiction stories.

41JZ1SRtsjL

I got the idea for this story not too long ago, and once I had the outline down, I raced to get it all finished as fast as I could. This tale, which I’m calling a “long short story” (hat tip to Mark Paxson for that idea) is the result.

As I think most readers know, I love conspiracy stories with weird and mysterious elements–Deus Ex, The X-Files, The Mothman Prophecies etc. fascinate me. I’ve tried writing something in this vein before, but that novella left some readers (understandably) unsatisfied. I think I was much more successful with this story–it’s way shorter than Majestic World, but I think it packs just as much conspiracy weirdness into a much tighter package. But that’s ultimately your call to make.

Some other notes:

  • It’s approximately 15,734 words. I say “approximately” because I made a few edits after converting it from a Word document, and I don’t know how to see word count in the Kindle file format.
  • There is some bad language and violence, but nothing too horrible. I think it would probably be rated PG-13 if it were a movie, but these days, who knows?
  • This is easily the fastest turnaround time I’ve ever had between thinking up an idea for a story and actually completing it. Whether that is good or bad is, again, up to you to determine.

That’s all the relevant info I can think of. It’s available on Kindle for 99 cents, and free on Kindle Unlimited.