Grigory Lukin.com

Week 6

This week’s story was a wild mix of sci-fi, horror, and dark humour, weighing in at about 1,650 words. Pro tip: it’s much easier to draft and edit if the entire story is a monologue! No worrying about the characters’ body language, no need to overthink whether you used the “said” speech tag a few times too many… Easy, eh.

After a couple of perfunctory, almost ritualistic submissions to two very fast, very competitive markets (both declined), the story is off to a fun anthology that had inspired it in the first place. I should hear back from them sometime in May, which seems almost impossibly far, considering my likely March plans…

As we say in Québec – on sera.

Week 7

At some point, every sci-fi writer gets tempted to write a response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” I gave into the temptation.

This week: an 1,800-ish word story about Omelas and Cold Equations and more!

Week 8

Accidentally wrote two stories instead of one. I realized Memezine had a 2/28 deadline, and it felt like a really fun project to be part of, so I put together a funny (and topical!) 850-word story for them. If they pass, I have 2 more markets lined up…

This week’s main story is based on one of my short films! (I’d written that script myself, too, just to be clear.)

It’s the age-old tale of a demon tempting a person with power and riches… Except that the demon is an AI (what else?) and it’s in space and they’re both women (or women-presenting, in any case).

I took more care than usual with it, but after six drafts (and at 2,483 words) it’s ready to send out, eh.