The end of the year is approaching, and I don’t have anything scheduled to come out in the next few months, so it’s time for the yearly roundup.
Focusing on writing Wizard Confidential for a year and a half left my short story backlog low, which means I published all of zero this year. That writing has picked up recently, but I haven’t sold any of the new batch yet. I haven’t been working on novels at all lately.
That means the only two pieces I have are interactive fiction. If that’s not you thing, I’d urge you to give one of these a shot. It’s a cool medium, I promise!
Love is Like Sinking Into a Pinpoint Black Hole: INKJAM 2026 Winner! You have the perfect life. Side by side, you and your wife work in the engineering bay of the greatest starship ever made. The engine, a gravity core held at the edge of black hole collapse, powers interstellar travel with weird physics and incredible energy.
Perfect, that is, until everything collapses.
This is a novelette-length piece of interactive fiction and completely free to play in your browser over on itch.io. It works particularly well reading it on a phone in my opinion.
I’m ridiculously proud of Love is Like Sinking Into a Pinpoint Black Hole, if I’m being honest. I mean, it won InkJam 2026. It’s an example of gameplay and story dovetailing nicely, even if the gameplay is just an ever-spiraling series of choices recursing into a narratively complicated black hole.
Wizard Confidential: Seattle, 1927. Rogue wizards, bootleggers, and a missing detective. You’re a private eye in the city on the sound, and life just got a whole lot more complicated. This one’s free to read if you don’t mind watching ads, but only a few bucks if you’d rather pay for it. (I have a few Steam codes, so if you’re reading for award season let me know)
I had a great time working with Choice of Games. They guided me through creating this, and I learned a ton doing it. Wizard Confidential hits on some major themes that I love writing about. There was so much cool union stuff happening at that point in American history, and I learned a lot about the origin of speedboats while doing my research.
Reading For Awards?
One note about awards. Many of the big sci-fi and fantasy awards don’t have a category that cleanly fits interactive fiction, but these might fit in the prose categories. For instance, the Hugo defines the novelette category as, “Awarded for a science fiction or fantasy story of between seven thousand five hundred (7,500) and seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) words.” Love is Like Sinking Into a Pinpoint Black Hole fits that description. It’s a story. The total wordcount is about 7900, and a single readthrough is about 14k words. Many other big awards have similar definitions.
Will they let it slide? I have no idea, but I’m a big fan of pushing boundaries. If you have an open slot in Novelette or Novel and you like one of these pieces, I know I’d appreciate the nod.