The HP Lovecraft Film Festival was a joy this year—I watched sixty short films. I was impressed with all but blown away by a handful. Topping my list was the 19-minute “After the Fall,” a literary-cosmic crossover in which the world wakes up to see dead gods in the sky. In the credits, I discovered it was based on a short story by Jeffrey Thomas, and I found that it was in a three-story chapbook available on Amazon (you can get it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/108625239X?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title

The story is even better than the short film. It’s a disturbing, sparingly-rendered, provocative read. The piece is so good I’ve been toying with asking for reprint rights for 34 Orchard. Our readers would love it. If I don’t offer a reprint, I’ll definitely recommend it on the blog or in Autumn 2026’s back section.

My friend and fellow writer Kaitlyn and I got a chance to catch up. She’d written a new story, “A Fairy Tale,” and wanted my thoughts. I had only tiny suggestions to offer, because mostly, I was every bit as blown away by it as I had been with “After the Fall.” What “A Fairy Tale” has to say about the agony of choice—and the struggle to make the right one in the wake of shock—is poignant. But more importantly, what’s done well is the invoking of reader empathy. This being may end up doing something reprehensible, and yet we not only care about her, we desperately want her to succeed.

I knew immediately it would make a great match for 34 Orchard. I make a point of serving as many genres and sub-genres as possible. It’s been a challenge to find solid dark fae fantasy that hits the 34O vibe. Fortunately, Katilyn said yes, we could publish it, so that’s slated for the Autumn 2026 issue! I’m looking forward to bringing her piece to the world—I can’t wait for people to read it.

I had a meeting with Lorin, one of the editors from the Virtual Breakout Novel Intensive Class. She had several helpful suggestions for Tidings and pointed out many of its weak spots, which I agreed with. But mostly we talked about how Tidings started as a short story, and eventually the discussion turned toward the possibility of re-crafting Tidings as a collection of linked short stories, a la Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark.

I considered this. If there’s anything I enjoy most and do well with, it’s the short story. After the meeting, I was excited about this prospect. But as Thursday and Friday came, I decided I didn’t want that. Don had been very supportive of the fact that I could pull off Tidings as a novel. He believed in me. Why didn’t I believe in myself? I mean, really, was I just jumping to a shiny new idea because I didn’t want to put the hard work into what I already had? Why reinvent the wheel? Or, maybe, the answer to Tidings lies in some sort of hybrid—which, honestly, it already is. I’ll have to think more on it…

…and herein is some of the damage from having your life dictated: every decision is tough, because every decision, no matter how small, feels like life or death. Why? Because, when there’s constant criticism baying at the door, you don’t want to make the wrong one: if you do, it’s the difference between a bad day and a good one. So even something as simple as “should I still do this as a novel or change it to something else”—a decision most writers, honestly, probably don’t spend time struggling with, they make the decision and that’s it, it is what it is—seems like oh my God if I make the wrong choice I’ll fail again and my whole career and sense of self will be ruined. That’s not a life-threatening situation, of course. But to a broken person who’s been conditioned to believe that serving fish instead of meat to the kids for dinner could cause screaming, yelling, and a whole ‘what’s wrong with you?’ monologue, it’s terrifying. So the result is? DO NOTHING.  

On the up-side? The conversation resulted in getting my identity back: I AM SHORT STORY. I’ve always been short story. Honestly, for most of my writing career, all I’ve ever heard about is novels! Novels! Novels! You need to do that! Short stories don’t sell! That last is a mantra that’s been repeated forever. And in some aspects, it’s true. But way back in 2005, I knew that people’s attention spans were going to get shorter because of the internet. I knew anthologies were going to become a thing. I knew the internet was going to cause a sudden, voracious need for content. I stuck to my guns and kept writing short stories, and eventually, everything I believed came to pass. And who’d’ve thought there are now markets for flash fiction and microfiction? Remember people writing stories in Tweets? So… okay, maybe short stories don’t sell. But there’s a place for them. And there are plenty of folks who don’t read novels. I only read a couple a year, if that. A novel has to grab me by the throat, drag me in, and be strong enough to pin me down for a few days or a week while I finish it. I’ve taken to reading the Amazon preview, and if I’m not sucked in by the bottom of page one, it’s a no (I don’t pay attention to reviews, especially in this day and age when anyone can say anything). Short stories are easier. If one in the book doesn’t float, just skip it. Usually, in most story collections, I find an average of one to two that don’t do it for me, but the rest I like. So it’s less of a risk.

I ask myself the same question I ask about Tidings: why reinvent the wheel? I love short stories. I love the challenge of rising to meet a specific call. I love that each short story is personal, to me like a fictional journal entry, in which I honor and preserve a time, era, place, person, or event in my life. I also love that Jeffrey Thomas has mostly been putting out two or three stories each as chapbooks, and actually I’m thinking that’s something I really want to do. But is that something I want to do with Tidings? And here’s something else to consider: every writer I know has stuff in drawers we never finish. Maybe Tidings isn’t something I actually want to finish right now. Maybe I just want to take the awesome stuff I learned in that class—tough stuff, honestly, but wow what a workout, and my work’ll be better for it—and apply it to future short stories. It’s hard to know the difference between reason and laziness, if hanging on or letting go is better.

Look at all that self-sabotage! I mean, who spends all that time agonizing? I’d heard around that shadow work can help. Simple definition (from WEBMd): Shadow work is the process of exploring the unconscious motivations behind your feelings or actions. Based on all this, I was ready to try it. There are a lot of apps that “guide you through this” for a price—and most, once I looked into them, were exploitive at best, scammy at worst—so I did research on my own and built my own program. Today is only Day 2, but the difference I saw in myself after only one 15-minute session was pretty incredible; it was the reason I did so much work on “Hot Times at the Dinosaur Bidet”—I took a negative emotion and channeled it in a positive manner, and stayed focused all day. It’s amazing how a well-written exercise can be that effective.

Not that I didn’t have distractions. “Hot Times…” is set on the last New Year’s Eve of the 1990s, and so I spent time watching ABC 2000, the hours-long around-the-world ringing-in-the-new-millennium celebrations coverage. What a gas to hear Peter Jennings alarm there isn’t sheet music on Harry Connick Jr.s’ music stand, but instead, a computer. “Where on earth is this all going?” he asks Steve Case, chairman of AOL Online. Case responds with “We’re at a magical point in history because the internet’s not big enough to matter, but small enough to be shaped… we need to make sure we build a medium we can be proud of, one that protects privacy and that’s safe for kids.” And then we get to hear from Sam Donaldson in the Y2K Command Center in Washington, D.C.!

But the first thing I did when I sat down to work on “Hot Times…” was re-work the opening. Before Don’s last class, I’d been pretty happy with it. After Don’s last class, in which he taught us an actual, deeply exploratory process on using primary vs secondary emotions instead of things like “his gut seized” or “she felt a chill down her spine” (okay, I’ll say it, I will never use these phrases again and now I’m going to make sure they’re nowhere in 34O), I wanted to use this process in my opening to evoke emotion. So I reengineered the whole beginning using this process. And Lorin had said something about the opening of Tidings being very low-temp. Which I completely agree with. Is it possible that my short stories do the same thing? It’s not something I can qualify. I’d have to look at every short story and see. Although I’m not sure I agree that every single short story has to have a rocking-ass, balls-to-the-wall opening. It has to have a killer opening line and excellent grounding, as well as something tantalizing to pull the reader forward. But the suggestion seemed to imply explosions and screaming and smack-in-the face. Maybe novels are different? Is there, indeed, anything wrong with a low-temp opening? I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe there is, or maybe it’s okay to have one in certain circumstances. These are things I have to think about and do some reading on.

When I was ready for a break, the other thing I watched was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Protrait,” a 2025 film that was an official selection of the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, but was only shown at the live event and not the streaming package due to rights issues. Fortunately? Amazon has it available for rent, so I dug in.

“The Oval Portrait” is my favorite Poe short story, and it’s nice to see it get some attention (I even wrote my own homage to it, a piece called “Vanity,” which was published in 2011 in an anthology called In Poe’s Shadow– https://www.amazon.com/Poes-Shadow-W-Gifford/dp/0615537529/). Poe’s tale is short and it’s not really a short story; it’s basically a description and nothing happens: two guys break into a castle, find a portrait, and on the back there’s written a tale of how an obsessive artist painted his love and kept her in that pose until she starved to death. It doesn’t go beyond that, really. I wasn’t expecting much of the movie.

The film was excellent—a fantastic, rich, dark, scary romantic tale in the vein of The Woman in Black, and certainly worthy of a Poe piece. An original story is built around Poe’s kernel, one that is part mystery, part ghost story, and part crime tale: A thief, artist, and shopkeeper are pulled into the orbit of a haunted portrait connected to a vengeful ghost, reads the IMDB description. The writing, the atmosphere and mood, overall the acting, good pacing, solid story. The scary moments are brilliantly executed, and it runs high with emotion—I cried at its very unexpected resolution (I cry in a movie, that’s a win). Here’s where you can rent it: https://www.amazon.com/Edgar-Allan-Poes-Oval-Portrait/dp/B0FRB41GY4/

The Andrew Morgan Smith score was gorgeous—haunting, rich, nuanced, and clearly, there was homage to the Bernard Herrmann scores of the old Poe films. It was exactly the kind of stuff I write to, and something I was already trying to figure out how to get my hands on when, in a search for a DVD, I found it’d actually been released! I couldn’t believe it! How many times over years of my life did I wish that someone had this score or this movie or this book available, and it wasn’t? Yet, here was this obscure little movie, on my favorite Poe short story of all time, with a score I just simply must have for my collection… and someone had made it available to buy. It was the greatest. Thing. Ever! Here’s where you can purchase the score: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVGKQ2BG?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_digi_asin_title_340

Take your glimmers where you can get them, right?

When Kaitlyn and I talked, she reminded me that I can’t buy into all the negative things I think about myself—even though it may seem justified. That I’m my own worst enemy. And she’s not wrong. With Christmas just five days away and still so much to do—including the newest home repair, the guest bathroom toilet is now leaking from the flange—I feel indulgent taking a few hours today to work on that short story. But truth be told? I’m having a blast. It feels good to be back. For the first time in a long while, I see some positive about me again. I see myself fitting someplace in the world, and that’s in my short stories. Maybe that’s enough for now: to belong, if only on the page.