Short story: A Hierarchy of Vengeance

Clearing the leaderboard at the end of the world

Hi everyone. This is the first fiction I’ve written since completing Tales from the Triverse’s serial run. It’s the first fiction I’ve written in almost five years that has nothing to do with Tales from the Triverse.

Publishing this feels bit like one of those dreams where you show up to work with no clothes on. Turns out that Triverse was functioning as something of a safety net, after all those years. A Hierarchy of Vengeance is something quite different.

I’ll say no more, but I will see you at the end for some author notes, including an earlier rough draft.

Enjoy! (or not, up to you)

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A Hierarchy of Vengeance

Everyone’s priorities shift when nobody can breathe. Air being a precious commodity focuses the mind. It was always there, taken for granted and ignored, right up until our lungs started burning, kids and old people began dropping dead from asphyxiation and the birds fell out of the sky.

The new hierarchy of needs is simple: Physiological needs first, then Safety Needs, Tribalism, Revenge, Catharsis. I’m at Revenge.

Pay is fine, but I do it for the love.

Getting to England was a challenge. The channel remains littered with mines and barbed wire, which meant no inflatables and taking it slow. They like to keep people out, the English. Once I’m past Dover, I’m in: nobody gives me a second glance as I board the lonely train that heads north, away from what used to be London. Seems that I pass the latest version of their purity test.

East Anglia fell into the sea forty years ago. It was one of the first to go after the ice broke up. You still get pocket communes of crazies and hermits, living in the marshes and on what few raised islands remain. If they keep clear of cholera and typhoid and can dodge the malaria when bugs swarm out in the summer, there are worse places to exist.

No surprise, then, that this is where the target is holed up. It’s off the grid; being a shithole has its perks. A low population density means fewer eyes, fewer sightings, fewer reports. William Fisher was the last CEO of British Petrochemicals in the 2050s, which put him in the original top twenty. Most of the headliners were crossed off years ago, but Fisher’s always been in the wind.

I hire a boat from a skinny boy in Thetford, right on the edge of the marshes and at the railway’s termination point. It’s a single seat, solar motor job and looks as if the bottom could fall out at any moment. The kid assures me it’s fully charged, and I head out. Rivers are a loose concept in Norfolk: what used to be the Little Ouse now blends into the River Thet and the Waveney. All the banks broken, the flood plains breached, a land desperate to return to the sea.

Eastwards takes me past the rooftops of Diss, chimneys poking out above the waterline, long-submerged streets invisible through the muddied water, reflections of grey skies broken only by reeds and ducks. There’s a splash and a sickly otter lifts its head, regarding me disdainfully before vanishing. The humidity rises the further out I go, my clothes pasting to my skin.

It takes three hours to reach the settlement: a collection of buildings on stilts surrounding a raised glob of land that protrudes up from the water. In all directions it’s green-flecked ocean, the mainland beyond the horizon and no discernible line between here and the bloated span of the English Channel. There are trees, grasses, reeds lined up like fencing, but otherwise it’s a flat nothing. Another couple of decades and it’ll be gone altogether.

There’s a dock on the tiny island, which is little more than a sandbank and I’m impressed that it can support any kind of structure at all. Eyes watch my boat as I approach, peeking from the darkened windows of the houses out in the water. The building on the island looks like it’s serving the job of a village hall. Maybe it’s where they all shelter when the storms come through.

The doors are unlocked and I enter without knocking, finding inside a congregation of sorts sat on old, wooden school benches. I walk the length, looking for the target, his face clear in my memory. The photos were decades old, but I’ve a knack for ageing them up.

He’s in the front row.

“William Fisher?”

His instinctual response confirms his identity. It always does.

“Who are you?” He’s an old man, in his eighties probably, nearly gone. White hair, sunken cheeks, drooping ears. So many of the original list are old, which is why we’ve all been pushing so hard to clean up the leaderboard. To let time take them would be a crime all its own.

“You are charged and found guilty of crimes against the Earth,” I say, the words coming easily, well rehearsed. “Your treason against your own species carries the sentence of death. I will be your executioner today.”

The decrepit man creaks to his feet and pushes past me, trying to get to the doors, to be anywhere else, even though there’s nowhere to go. He can’t swim to salvation. Not from me.

I pull my gun and activate the charge.

“Your complicity in the destruction of the planet has been confirmed by a panel of independent scientific judges. Your family traces back three generations in oil drilling and export. You have directly contributed to the environmental collapse and the ongoing mass extinction event. This verdict is final.”

A shot to the head puts him down and he bleeds out on the floor of the hall. I snap a photo. A guy on the little stage at the front is shouting, the congregation have jumped up from their pews and are scuttling away. I ignore them and leave, get back in my boat, turn it around and head back to the remains of civilisation.

It’s dark by the time the lights of Thetford Station come into view. I hit signal coverage and upload the kill, getting that reliable little thrill as my score ticks up. I refresh and pick a new target.

*

Crossing the Atlantic isn’t trivial. Ever since the major ocean currents went to shit, it’s a toss-up whether you’ll get from one side to the other. Surface storms, newly formed undersea waterfalls, rogue icebergs, and that’s without mentioning the myriad of human threats. Piracy is back in fashion.

I find a slot on a sealed catamaran, one of the ones with a gyroscopic interior. In theory it doesn’t even matter if it capsizes - the cabin flips 180 and you keep going. Helping the crew on the way over pays half my passage. It’s a calmer trip than any of us expect.

Getting inland is the next challenge. The trains into Virginia aren’t running due to the lines being severed by the recent earthquake, so instead I hop in the back of a truck. It takes two days and my body’s bruised from head to toe, but I’ve had worse.

The warehouse is immense. I knew it was going to be big, but it’s on an altogether different scale. These things were used for everything, back in the day. Most started out as Amazon storage and shipping, then for a time got bought out by the government to house people before deportation or decapitation. After that it was datacentres all the way, until the second bubble took that whole industry down for good.

It’s almost dark when I arrive. This one has to be a mile long and half a mile wide, crouching over what used to be a small town, now abandoned. It could fit a village inside it. Strapped to the outside are the giant turbines that used to power the place; repurposed jet engines, burning fuel to keep the ones and zeroes flowing. Now silent and rusted over. As a monument to everything we did wrong as a species, it’s on the nose.

People used to try to escape from these places. Workers, detainees. Everyone who passed through was a prisoner, one way or another. I smash a lock and find my way in, past broken storage racks and server cabinets. Inside it’s a forest of metal and plastic; frayed cables and what would have been row after row of blinking lights, now long dark.

Red gleams through the gaps and I head towards it, discovering a ring of fires burning in old oil drums. The towering server stacks have been pushed away and toppled over like dominoes, forming an irregular wall around a camp. There are tents around the edge of the clearing, and people are sat on fold-out chairs, like in those old photos of trips in the forest or parties on the beach. Smoke from the fire billows up into the darkness of the steel beams above, leaving a fine rain of ash drifting back down. The air in here is better than outside, where the fallout continues to blanket most of the continent from Tennessee to Pennsylvania. Most people went west, or fled to South America; those who stayed, these people huddling around their fire, are too weak to make the journey.

“Welcome to RIC9,” says a woman, approaching me from where she was cooking something in a pan suspended above the flames. “No trouble.”

“That depends,” I say, showing my hunter ID. Her face goes a little pale, which is a useful response. There’s an authority that comes with the badge, granted to me by the World Government. It forces people to confront their past decisions, to contend with their guilt. I’m watched with suspicion from the edges of the camp.

“We keep to ourselves,” she says. “We burn only wood that’s fallen. We hunt only what we need, scavenge as much as we can. Keep within the rules, we’re careful with our quotas.”

“That’s very good of you,” I say, amused at the idea I might be looking for one of these nobodies. I pull the photo from my jacket and show her. “You don’t need to worry. I’m after this man specifically.”

She inhales sharply, a flake of ash settling on her lip. She doesn’t seem to notice. “He’s not here. We’re careful with who we let in. You want to head north to Warrenville.”

“Warrenville?” My information had definitely pinpointed this warehouse.

“That’s right.” She points. “Head that way, between those two racks. Keep going for half a mile, but watch out for tripwires. Warrenville is closed to visitors. They keep to their end, we keep to ours.”

“It’s another camp inside this warehouse?”

“We use what we have.”

Venturing back into the server forest, the warm glow of the fire soon behind me, I wind through the maze of defunct components. Circuitry and coolant and cabling, burned out or long starved of power. All these places turned out to be a dead end. It took so long for everyone to wise up to where the wind was blowing. Still, huge warehouses make for good wasteland accommodation.

I reach the edge of the racks, though not the far side of the building. A large, dark space has been cleared, creating a no-man’s-land from where I am to the gates on the other side. Spotlights are positioned up on the walls, roving back and forth; violating one or two energy commandments all by themselves. A little fortress, built within the warehouse. Somebody’s personal fiefdom. I’ve seen this setup before, and know that if I try to cross the clearing I’ll be shot with a bullet or an arrow before I make it halfway.

So I stay in the shadows, moving back and forth to obfuscate my position, while delivering the verdict.

“Dwayne Hoggart,” I call out. “You are charged and found guilty of crimes against the Earth. Your treason against your own species carries the sentence of death. I will be your executioner today.” An unintelligible shout from the other side of the barricade comes as a reply. I continue. “Your complicity in the destruction of the planet has been confirmed by a panel of independent scientific judges. As press secretary for the final President of the United States of America you oversaw multiple campaigns of misinformation that directly contributed to disease outbreak, civil unrest and the terrorist attacks on Los Angeles and Austin. The consequences of these events have had global ramifications. This verdict is final.”

There is silence for about a minute. I expect flaming arrows, at the very least, but am disappointed. Finally, a response comes, more clear this time:

“Go fuck yourself!”

It takes a particular mindset to fight back, to attempt to protest a World Government warrant. The sort of personality that likely led them astray in the first place.

“I should note,” I say, “that anyone aiding you is considered an accomplice and will receive the same sentence.”

I stalk the row of shelves, peering through the gaps between cases. It doesn’t take long: the gates of the barricade open and a man stumbles out. There’s the scraping of metal, and the gates are shut. There’s a slim possibility of it being a lure, but it seems unlikely. I walk across no-man’s-land to the man, who is down on his knees, pleading, muttering nonsense. I check it’s him, and there’s no mistaking that broadcast-ready jawline.

After he’s dead, I put my gun away and direct my voice towards the gated settlement. “Thank you for your cooperation,” I call, as I snap a picture.

*

There’s a new idea that’s been spreading through the leaderboard for the last couple of years. Sign of the times, perhaps, but I don’t mind it. The premise is that a simple, quick execution is letting them off too lightly. After all the damage done by these species traitors, to simply shoot them dead is barely a punishment. It doesn’t take away from their decades of abuse, of using power and wealth to live in luxury while the rest of us were starved of air, food, water.

In the early days, the super rich stayed in their compounds. Underwater cities, insulated greenhouse biomes, floating utopias in the Pacific, giant airships that never came to ground. It didn’t work: most of them self-destructed, and it turns out that a lot of rich people in a closed environment will find a way to invent a new hierarchy. The rest were sabotaged, being extremely easy targets, and are now piles of wreckage dotted around the planet. The guilty went to ground, hiding out in backwater nowhere places, which made the hunts considerably more satisfying.

Getting down to South America is easier said than the done and means bending some of the rules. The equatorial cataclysm is especially intense in the waters that used to be the Caribbean Sea, back before the breaching of Panama and Costa Rica and the mixing of the Atlantic and Pacific.

Even from the Brazilian border the fires are visible. The smoke, at least, covering the skies to the south. The wars continue, huge swathes of the rainforest burned every day with nobody to stop it. The last of the trees going up in flames, even with the atmosphere already at its lowest oxygen concentration for half a billion years. Some say it makes what we’re doing on the leaderboard pointless, given that there are still active climate crimes being committed.

One thing at a time.

I found him in a bar on the edge of town. There was some collateral, but guilt-by-association took care of the paperwork.

“Johan Nava,” I say, in Spanish, to the man tied to the chair in the middle of the room, “you are charged and found guilty of crimes against the Earth. Your treason against your own species carries the sentence of death. I will be your executioner today.”

He spits on the ground, saliva flecked with blood. “My people will find you.” His eyes stare unflinchingly at me. “You’re a dead man.”

“We’re all dead, Johan,” I reply, checking the power level on the chainsaw. “Didn’t you hear? The world’s ending.”

“I can pay you, more than you’re getting from your shitty gang of assassins.”

“It’s not just the money,” I reply with a smile. “Your complicity in the destruction of the planet has been confirmed by a panel of independent scientific judges. You inherited your logging company from your parents and continued operations, despite a moratorium on all such activity on the continent. In actively harming the Earth’s ability to replenish oxygen, you have harmed all remaining life. This verdict is final.”

I take each of his arms off first, then both legs in one sweep. He keeps staring at me, unblinking, even while screaming, right up until he passes out. Compared to a gunshot to the head it all seems unnecessarily messy and anti-climactic. Despite the hype, I find it hard to see the point. It’s performative and a waste of my time.

Makes for a good photo, though.

*

Suburbs are for the history books, gone along with their host cities. The very thought of so many people trundling about their lives, consuming day after day, taking, extracting, all without even the slightest consideration of what they were ushering in. Collective, societal myopia.

As much as anything can these days, this street still manages to feel like the burbs. The road is in one piece, with only a couple of potholes. The drainage appears to still function. Streetlights run the length, powered by tiny solar cells to stay within the regs. I check to make sure.

The northern European countries got off lightly compared to the rest of the world. Turns out they were already used to harsh climate conditions, and had spent decades designing a clean energy infrastructure. And it almost worked! If you go looking for an echo of the old world, this is where you’ll find it. I’ve had a long career of tracking down the remnants of that old world, then shooting it, so I know what I’m talking about.

The original leaderboard being cleared, we’re working to a new list. Nobody knows where it came from, with the best theory being that an analyst somewhere in Korea rolled it after hacking a massive data store of early twenty-first century transaction records. List is a list, so we’re running the names down. What with the World Government gone to pieces, it seems like the best way to keep the good fight going.

The house is so bland I almost miss it. The people here are pretending to live in an older world, hiding away from reality. In a way, they are all guilty through their absence: shirking responsibility, living a fantasy that everything is going to sort itself out.

Nobody is coming to save us, but we can have retribution. The only purpose that matters.

I kick the door in, welcomed by screams, and I’m dimly aware of a baby crying, another child peeking at me from a cracked doorway. The interior is basic, comprising a living space, a dining area, a kitchen. Stairs heading to the first floor.

Finding her in the kitchen, backing up against the counter, I pull my gun.

“Anna Ehrling,” I say to her, “you are charged and found guilty of crimes against the Earth. Your treason against your own species carries the sentence of death. I will be your executioner today.”

She moves away from me, keeping the kitchen table between us. “I just wanted them to have a life. To know the world.”

“Your complicity in the destruction of the planet has been confirmed by a panel of independent scientific judges.”

“What’s the point of surviving if we can’t do anything? Don’t you see that?”

“Satellite observations show you moving your family unnecessarily between locations over significant distances, often using unsanctioned vehicles and fuel.”

“They used to call it a holiday. Do you zealots even know what the word means?”

I ignore her. “The consequences of your actions have global impact.”

“You really think one family can affect what’s happening?”

She’s being deliberately obtuse. “Not one family. But imagine if everyone broke the rules as you have done.”

“Imagine that.” Her face is rage, but she’s not going to try anything.

“This verdict is final.”

“Don’t hurt the children, please.” There’s acceptance in her voice.

“They haven’t done anything wrong yet,” I say, with a reassuring smile.

*

Getting old isn’t compatible with the job. There was a time when I wouldn’t have hesitated to travel across an ocean, hop a train, pilot a boat, hike for days to find a target. Travel is harder than ever and my body less willing, which keeps me local. Hunting in a small area, staying in one place for too long, is a bad idea, which means I’m effectively retired.

I’ve built up enough to keep bringing in the food. I can afford blankets in the winter, can patch the holes in the walls. It’s not my house, but I found it empty, and it’s comfortable enough, given that it’s on that thin line that marks the habitable zone. A narrow ring around the Earth where you don’t melt or freeze, narrowing every year.

Nearest neighbours are an hour’s walk, and I only see faces when I need supplies. They don’t know me. Making friends has never been compatible with my profession.

The leaderboard keeps growing, new names added every hour. The original top twenty were dealt with decades back, and I’m proud to have played my part. It’s hard to say that the world’s a better place without those people - we’re too far gone, too deep in the pit. The leaderboard was vengeance, it was supposed to make us feel better. The catharsis remains out of reach, always another job away. All that effort, yet here we are with the same problems.

There’s a rickety armchair on the rear porch of the house, the type that wants to collapse under its own weight. The springs are gone, the cushions long-disintegrated. I empathise. I sit and watch as the sun goes down each evening, the winter days drawing in, those pollution-tinted hues producing their own twisted beauty.

I’m sat outside, the temperature dropping, flicking through my photo album, when she arrives, sauntering around the side of the house and leaning against the wall, weapon already drawn. She’s young and full of fire.

She says my name, knows who I am. “You are charged and found guilty of crimes against the Earth. Your treason against your own species carries the sentence of death. I will be your executioner today.”

I consider arguing the particulars, but it’s not worth the time.

The woman looks like she’s at the start of her career. Maybe it’s her first gig. “Your complicity in the destruction of the planet has been confirmed by a panel of independent scientific judges. Over a span of thirty years you repeatedly travelled to locations around the world. This unnecessary indulgence has directly contributed to the continuing ecological collapse. The consequences of your actions have had global impact. This verdict is final.”

I’m pleased. To make a difference is all I ever wanted.

Hopefully she’ll take a good picture.

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Meanwhile.

Thanks for reading! Would love to know what you thought, good or bad, so do pop a comment below. How very strange to publish a story that is in a single part. One post and it’s done! Remarkable. It might catch on.

I slightly went off on one on Notes last night, but I think some of the observations are valid:

It’s remarkably easy to get in your own way, so perhaps those tips will help.

Elsewhere, really enjoyed this report back from Eastercon from James Kinsley:

Eastercon!

Cons often feel like refuges and visions of a better future. TFNation was similar last year, with its determination to welcome everyone. It felt like an act of resistance.

Elsewhere, did you know that JMS is on Substack? I enjoyed this piece:

Everyone You Know Is Wrong

Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer is worth reading, too, especially if you treat it as a companion piece to Straczynksi’s excellent Becoming Superman autobiography.

Author notes

Back to today’s short story. Those of you who are interested in the nuts-and-bolts of writing might be interested in taking a look at an earlier draft, complete with lots of scribbly red pen and a title dump:

You can download the whole thing as a PDF here:

A Hierarchy Of Vengeance Early Draft

345KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The ubiquitous nature of digital word processors means that we don’t see scribbled notes very often, so I thought it might be a bit of a novelty to expose that part of the process.

I’m now going to do a mini-FAQ on A Hierarchy of Vengeance, because I’m feeling indulgent and it’s my newsletter dammit.

This story is quite grim, Simon. What the hell?

This is true. Most of my writing tends to be optimistic, even if grim things happen along the way. Triverse goes to some dark places, but it was always designed to be an ultimately hopeful story. Writing it from 2021-2026 made that a challenge, let me tell you.

Short stories are an altogether different beast. I wouldn’t want anyone to trudge through hell with me for four and a half years of a serial, and I don’t think I’d want to write it. But a single short story, one-and-done, can be something else. It’s a small commitment, which makes it tonally more free. That’s why The Twilight Zone is episodic: it would be too much if it had continuity across entire seasons.

So this is eco-fiction? It’s about saving the planet?

Maybe. Is it? It starts that way, for sure. Environmental collapse is laced through it, of course, but that’s hardly a science fiction concept: we’re surrounded by it.

I wanted to explore righteousness and conviction. To poke at purity politics and see what fell out of my brain. And so we have a story that begins as a guilty pleasure (from a certain point of view) and then becomes increasingly uncomfortable as it progresses.

Some people will be horrified from the start. Others will be cheering. We’ve seen cheers as businessmen are assassinated on US streets, or as molotov cocktails are thrown at Sam Altman’s house. Everyone has a line, presumably, but it’s considerably further away for some.

So we start with the oil baron, then the tech bro, then the illegal logger and gang leader. Then the mum. Then the hunter and narrator.

Yes, you’re very clever. Aren’t you worried that it’s a bit ambiguous?

Not really. I’m more worried that it’s extremely on the nose and a bit obvious.

However, something I do find disquieting is that it’s somewhat open to interpretation. After a five year serial like Triverse, it’d be unlikely for a reader to not have a pretty decent grasp of what that story was about. A short story is in and out, it moves fast, and as such remains extremely open.

There are numerous ways A Hierarchy of Vengeance could be read. This was intentional, but also leaves me feeling unusually exposed.

Is this set in the Triverse universe?

Absolutely not. I mean, the triverse is formed of inter-dimensional portals, so theoretically all fiction and our real world could be part of it, but outside of that scenario, no. This short story is a clean break and exists as an isolated thing.

The freedom to write outside of that framework was exciting, though I also discovered it to be somewhat terrifying.

What’s it like world building in a short story?

Thanks for asking. In a long-form serial, or a novel, the world building can be spread out over the entire text. A short story like this one is all I’ve got, so everything needs to be in there; at the same time, it can’t be overloaded. All the usual rules apply. If anything, a short story is even more at risk of becoming an infodump for the author.

Making A Hierarchy of Vengeance a travelogue helps. As the narrator moves around the world, that naturally introduces opportunities to reveal. Each of the targets also provides opportunities for reveals: the oil baron, the tech guy, the logger. Each of their ‘crimes’ is also serving as world building.

Why does the story start in Norfolk? Stories don’t normally start in Norfolk.

This is true. The obvious reason is that I live in Norfolk. Also, places in Norfolk have amusing names, like ‘Diss’ and ‘Ouse’.

There are two reference points here. The first is JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, which I’ve only read once about 26 years ago. It imprinted heavily, although now I have no idea how much I actually remember and how much I’ve sort of half-invented. For the opening here, I wanted to try to capture that sense of a damp, rotting world, slipping back into the ocean. The other touchpoint is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars (I think — it might be Blue Mars), whereby a character returns to Earth and travels around south-east England. There’s a sequence where they boat past the submerged ruins of the town of Faversham, which is where I lived as a child. The bizarre juxtaposition of my very, very normal Kent home town in this massive science fiction epic always amused me.

Hence, Diss having an underwater cameo.

What have you got against big warehouses?

Nothing, as far as I was aware prior to writing this. But as I worked on the second sequence, it did occur to me that mega-sized warehouses represent a lot of not-great things about the 21st century. The takeover of retail by goliath corporations like Amazon, the housing of migrants by ICE, the apparently fictional construction boom of the LLM goldrush. A lot of societal issues are held within those enormous, grey, anonymous boxes.

A single location could do a lot of heavy lifting for this particular story, basically.

What’s the leaderboard all about?

First, hat tip to the wonderful Brian K. Vaughan and Spectators. While the leaderboard in this short story has a different story function, I’m sure Spectators was rolling around in my brain. I mean, the comic has stubbornly lived there, rent free, for the last couple of years, refusing to move out.

Inserting an element of gamification felt like the right move. It’s the Polymarket trend, with people turning tragedy and awful world events into money-making bets. It’s the slow corruption of the human soul via bureaucratic means. That’s something that Orwell’s 1984 and Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please explore so well, whereby society fails not through a single grand act but hundreds of smaller decisions, each seeming reasonable in isolation.

At a wonderful Neill Cameron event in Norwich last year, he spoke about a very simple way to come up with new ideas: Awesome thing + awesome thing = even more awesome thing. He was talking to children and was therefore thinking about jetpacks and dinosaurs (= dinosaurs with jetpacks!!), but it’s a technique which works for grown-ups, too. The central concept for A Hierarchy of Vengeance is essentially what if 20th century Nazi hunters + eco-warriors?

I doubt Neill will be using that example at his next event.

From that initial idea, it could have spun out all sorts of ways. The most obvious being to make it a splattery, exploitation-style revenge story. A story to make us feel better in an uncertain world. The introduction of the leaderboard shifts that to the side, adding a moral compromise at the core. Which brings us to the central question of vengeance and what is acceptable.

Moral drift is fascinating, to go back to Papers, Please. People don’t generally wake up one day having flipped from a decent person to a nasty person. It’s a slow erosion. Papers, Please is remarkable in that it takes the player on that exact journey. A Hierarchy of Violence isn’t as clever or as subtle, but I did want to take the reader from having a naughty sense of “yeah, stick it to the man!” at the start to “oh god, this is awful” by the end.

So is this ultimately a reactionary, conservative story?

Oh god, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not just one thing. Make up your own mind.

It took you ages to write this. Why are you so slow?

Yeah. I finished Triverse in January. Then I took a month off to clear my head and reboot. This short story is the length of a couple of Triverse chapters, which I used to pump out once a week, yet it took me well over a month to get this thing out the door.

Part of it is not having the weekly social pressure to deliver a new serial chapter. That has always helped me be consistently productive, and is why I love writing serials specifically. Another aspect is having to navigate an entirely new setting for the first time in four and a bit years. I’ve also sat with and edited this more than I might an individual serial chapter, for the reasons outlined earlier: there’s no follow-up chapter in which to course correct.

I’m itching to get back to publishing serials, though. Haven’t quite decided which angle to take, yet.

Anyway, I’m going to stop wanging on. Thanks, as ever, for reading and putting up with me.

Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash