Witness the firepower of this fully-armed and operational story node!
It’s a long long issue, and it looks fantastic:
It’s full of cool stories that have to be read to be believed. If you like space opera, demon-slaying, mad emperors, and other such, it’s the issue for you. Click here and Pay What You Like on Gumroad!
No, not really. That’s the sort of click-bait stuff that everyone talks about as the Almagamation of Awesome, but no one actually reads. And with good reason. Juxtaposition for its own sake usually hides a paucity of narrative. Instead, an authorial update to announce progress.
First, I have in fact, completed a thing long talked of The Meditations of Caius Caligulia. Which is to say, I have completed a rough draft. I consider it a skeleton about which meat can be hung. I need to do some more deep diving into Virgil and Lucretius and Ovid before I can flesh out the Un-Mad Emperor’s thoughts and story. But it’s done. The sixth Chapter, On Conquest, will appear in the October issue of Unnamed Journal. The final chapter, On Death, will appear sometime over the winter, with the complete volume.
Second, I have also completed a rather long short story, Cantilever Jones Runs Hot, set in a space opera galaxy of my own devising, a universe that goes under the name “Gods of the Sky”. There’s a good few stories set in this universe, including two previous Cantilever Jones stories, and some Death-emperor vs. Star Buddhists expositions. I’m building the universe in shorts, with an eye towards a novel. I’ll probably put a collection out sometime next year. This story will also appear in the October UJ. The story clocks in at around 7,000 words, which is borderline a novelette. It can be frustrating when you’re trying to get a story finished, but also exciting when it keeps taking on a life of its own. But when your hero is trying to survive a battle he didn’t create on a jungle planet inhabited by velociraptors, you just go with it.
Anyway, I will be moving on to other projects shortly. Watch this space for publication details, and enjoy some cover art concepts while you do.
I’ve started doing the layout work.
One of the things we’ve used UJ for is world-building. I’ve created some shorts in a fantasy world, Cevalon, that I conceived long ago. I’ve sketched out a space opera universe as well, under the tentative title “Gods of the Sky”. And there’s the Drunk Vampire Hunter stories, and Catakuri, and various serial novels, such as the recently finished Ulysses and the Fugitive.
Each of these are going to get their own books on Gumroad going forward. The Singles Collection is the omnibus for everything else: all the tragedies, dystopias, monsters, metaphysics, and screeds we’ve published in the last few years.
Details on this space, further details (such as upcoming podcast episodes) on the Patreon for subscribers. You know you want to.
All kinds of bad craziness. We have three, count ’em, three, chapters of Ulysses and the Fugitive, in which the aliens start taking over and sending their agents to do their bidding. Then Drunk Vampire Hunter makes a return for When’d He Go?, which is absolutely a pun on the name of the cannibal monster from Native American legend. We also return to the universe of Chamber of Pain and Cantilever Jones Lands Hard, in which the Imperial Deathguard trap a star monk in a ruin and immediately regret it. I call it Ash on the Wind.
The Chamber-Cantilever-Ash universe is currently organized under the working title Gods of the Sky. There may or may not be a novel or novella from this, or I could just keep pouring out shorts. All my Star Wars and Dune fanboyism is just pouring out of me in the process.
