Stories Future and Past
Stories Future and Past
A preview of my new serial and an invitation to stories you might have missed.
In today’s newsletter, I’m sharing stories future and past, and those links take space. This will be too long for email, but you can click on the button your provider gives you to open the full document.
First, you can take a sneak peek at the unpublished part one of episode one for my new serial, Heartfelt Among the Flying Islands.
The story will begin sometime after The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh finishes in the next two weeks. However, I’ve tossed out the half-completed novel that was the original version of Heartfelt, wanting to do something different with it. Pooh as a completed work that I’ve rewritten as I publish here, but Heartfelt is a fresh creation, and I’ll need enough material (and enough time for work to ripen for the rewrite) before publication officially begins.
Part of my plan with Heartfelt is to leave time gaps between episodes. For the three-to-six weeks it will take to complete an episode, it will publish weekly, followed by a short gap before the next episode begins.
The preview is available for anyone curious or anyone who would like to give feedback. This is not one of my usual genres.
Speaking of The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh, it’s almost complete, so this is a good time to get caught up.
In addition to the serials, I’ve been sharing several short stories, and I thought I’d share some of the favorites, because I bet you missed a few.
The Sphinx and Ernest Hemingway was the first short story I shared here, the only one for several weeks. It first appeared in the second issue of Fantasy Magazine, back when it was a print publication. It’s gone through several changes and lives since and published its final online edition in October, 2023.
The next story I want to share was written specifically for Substack, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out.
The next story was also written for Substack, and it’s a tiny thing.
The Sphinx has always felt like my signature story, but there are many who prefer this next one, first published in a Halloween edition of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. The building in the photograph is the actual Page & Palette in the bay-side community of Fairhope, Alabama, where the story takes place.
Aleskei’s Revolution is my time-travel story, and I’ll always remember it as my father’s favorite.
And my most recently shared story first appeared in Abyss & Apex, nearly twenty years ago. It’s an example of hard science fiction, which is to say that all the science is real.
Until the next story,
I’m Thaddeus Thomas.
P.S. — Yesterday, I presented a list of all my current substacks. I’m thinking of getting rid of The Free Bookstore. If you have thoughts on that, I’d be glad to hear them.
The post didn’t get cut off in my email. In fact, I’ve never seen any kind of warning when posting, and some of my chapters are 4K words.