Week 3: this week was special. I’ve decided to tackle magical realism and specifically the sub-1,000-word flash format. Each word had a purpose. The end result is a 996-word tale of Shintoism, and small gods, and belief as an act of self-care – not as a way to show off.
Week 3.1. “Rights, Wrongs, Lefts” – a 100-word drabble written on a very long walk through Tokyo’s chilly streets. That one wasn’t even part of the plan – it just happened, eh. And then, ironically, it became my first 2026 to be published. Life can be funny like that.
Week 4: got a bit carried away! I once had a particularly terrible boss when I was a warehouse grunt. Those memories have stayed with me, even over a decade later. I finally felt confident enough to turn them into a story, but it kept growing and growing…
Anyway, now I have a 8,592-word hard sci-fi novelette and a new mini-quest: trying to find a market that would buy something this long. My previous longest story was 5,300 words long.
Good times. Good times…
Week 5: decided to finally write down a pretty dark story (inspired by true events!) that’d been bouncing in my braincicle for quite a while. The end result is a 2,580-word sci-fi noir story. Quite an underappreciated subgenre, that. In a way, it’s a complete opposite of solarpunk. You know, you absolutely know that there won’t be a happy ending… And in my opinion, that adds a certain beautiful element of fatalism.
With luck, I’ll finally be able to break into The Dark or The Deadlands with this tale!
Grigory Lukin.com 