I have a new story out today in Black Cat Weekly #230 – huzzah!
“To Rue, To Revel, To Revert” is… dark. Not going to sugarcoat it. In a world of holograms and brain chips, true justice means rewriting the soul. Any tyrant’s talents can be repurposed to serve our society, but not the way you’d imagine…
This story is about who you think it is, yes, but also every other tyrant like him. I hope you enjoy it.
2026 has been good to me thus far. I’m very very proud to announce a new published sci-fi short story. “To Dream of Better Worlds” poses a simple question: what if prophetic dreams are more than just dreams?
This story was a great way for me to combine some of my passions: sci-fi, strange history, and things that are undeniable but (thus far) unexplainable. For the record, every quote in that story was genuine – there was no misleading editing, eh.
I hope you enjoy the story! And afterwards, please feel free to check out the rest of the stories at Horrific Scribblings.
Here you go: https://horrificscribblings.com/to-dream-of-better-worlds/
Typing this up from a capsule hotel in Tokyo’s salaryman district, Shimbashi. Not something I possibly could have anticipated a year ago, but life can be wild like that, eh.
This was one strange, eventful year – more so than usual. The biggest disappointment was having had to cut short my Continental Divide Trail thru-hike which I’d started in April. Partly because my legs weren’t entirely up to it, partly because it was so soul-crushingly lonely (walking four days without meeting anybody else was considered normal), partly because it involved long stretches of walking on the highway… It did not meet my definition of a nature trail.
An odd experience, that: anticipation, a long journey, a glorious and multifaceted failure… An unusual set of sensations. Might use that in my fiction someday.
The other big thing was the end of the relationship that lasted almost three years – my personal best. I tried. The stress of her daily life only kept rising. The first year was wonderful. It was for the best.
That was also my last tie to Quebec City, which is how, after about four years, I finally packed up and moved to Montreal. In a matter of speaking, that is. All my things are in a storage unit, my address is a PO box, and I’m technically homeless as I roam the world, trying to catch up on all the adventures I’d put on the back burner. (See my “Feral Artist Nomad” posts for more on that.)
Perhaps because of my failure to hike the CDT, my creativity went wild to overcompensate, to make this year meaningful in any way whatsoever. Wrote dozens of new stories. Sold quite a few of them. Of the ones that got published, my absolute favourite was “Hard as a Mirror of Cast Bronze.” It was inspired by someone I once knew and loved, written during the stretch of 40 days and 40 nights when I cared for her: a difficult though rewarding experience, and I believe the story shows that.
This was also the year I got agented! Finding a literary agent was by far the hardest thing I’ve done in my entire life – and it involved writing a whole new novel, as one does. Brandy Vallance of BBLA is excellent, and my dystopian YA sci-fi novel, “The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes,” is currently on sub, pending with a few editors. It may have been inspired by my Siberian childhood…
My filmmaking side keeps competing with the writing side: my second-ever film festival was Dam Short Film Festival in February, near Vegas, and it was the single greatest week of my adult life. The entire Boulder City came together to organize an event where every visiting filmmaker was treated like royalty, and it was cool beyond all words. I’m currently awaiting their decision for the upcoming festival in seven weeks: I should know within 48 hours. I hope they liked my new sci-fi offerings.
I made four more short films in 2025 and sent them off far and wide… That got me into three consecutive film festivals in the US in October (yay free hotels!) and might result in some more adventures in the coming months… Unless I repeat my Pacific Crest Trail thruhike, which is a very real possibility, seeing as I already don’t pay rent and have all my stuff packed up. (Strategy, eh?) We’ll see.
One definite success was getting my first-ever creative award: my film “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace” got the second place in the comedy sci-fi category at the Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival, and that little prize alone can open up a lot of new doors for me… Incidentally, funny sci-fi is a remarkably underutilized subgenre. Hmm.
One of this year’s odder adventures began with too much beer. I was browsing FilmFreeway and applying to all the $5 festivals I could find (always an odd mix, those cheapest festivals) when I stumbled on the first-ever Worldcon sci-fi film festival. That annual convention is typically all about books, not movies, so of course I applied. And got accepted! And decided that if I attend, I may as well go for the entire week, not just one day. Seattle is always a fun town to visit, and that week was beautiful… But during the closing ceremony, the two hosts were so woefully unprepared that they didn’t merely mangle all the foreign names – they giggled while doing so.
Five days had passed with zero condemnation from any VIPs from the SFF community, and so I took it upon myself… As they say in Russia, “If not me, then who?” (“Yesli ne ya, to kto?”) And thus was born “When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident” – the single most impactful thing I’ve ever written. It went viral. The organizers of the 2026 Worldcon in Los Angeles – a different crew – have vowed to do better. (Hard to do worse.) Some interesting conversations and debates took place…
And all of that was because once upon a time, I had too much beer, too much time (but that’s nothing new), and applied for an odd little film festival. A five-dollar bill, a click, and then a long and improbable series of events. Life can be funny like that.
I may be missing some other big 2025 developments, but I believe I’ve covered most of them. As the year ends, I’m sitting on nine sold but not-yet-published short stories and an almost-finished new novel and a few pending grant/residency proposals, and more than a few dreams. Once I finish typing this and crawl out of my oh-so-comfy capsule (it is currently 11:36am), I’ll slither over to the nearby cyber-cafe and use their computers to open a government PDF and submit a cyberpunk-ish short story for a writing contest organized by the Canadian military. My life is very strange: I have tried the traditional path; I have found it lacking.
I may go back to school and get my second Bachelor’s degree – in Physics this time. (The only anglophone universities in Quebec are in Montreal.) I may try some other fun stuff and see where that takes me. The horizon is open and vast.
And just for archival and historical purposes… Briefly: this was the year Donald Trump got inaugurated for the second time. Elon Musk gave not one but two Nazi salutes at the inauguration. It all went downhill from there, with ICE rounding up random people and sending them off to foreign concentration camps, with masked vigilantes harassing Americans without any fear of consequences, with massive protests that are nonetheless ignored by 97% of population. The AI bubble looks like it’s about to pop at long last. The US military has just destroyed its 30th fishing boat near Venezuela, as per the alcoholic Defense Secretary’s illegal orders.
…you can see how one would bury one’s head in fiction, eh?
So here is to a new year. Perhaps not a better one, but a new one nevertheless. Stay safe, my friends.
Most advice comes in parables. The kind that doesn’t is straightforward: “don’t eat the yellow snow” or “use the bathroom before going outside.” Anything more complex than that, though… Parables. Lots and lots of parables.
You may have heard the same damn piece of advice dozens of times before, but someday it’ll sneak up on you, shaped and phrased and packaged as something entirely new, novel, and unexpected – and before you know it, you’re looking at the same problem from an entirely different perspective, and everything clicks in place.
Ever since finalizing the edits on my YA sci-fi novel “The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes” in April, I’ve been more or less procrastinating on writing my next novel. (Also sci-fi, but – for once – without any time travel whatsoever! I know, I’m just as shocked as you are.) The last three months haven’t been unproductive, mind you. I’ve written tons of new stories, attempted (and then quit) a huge hiking adventure, and joined the SFWA. (Huzzah! The screening process took just two days.) But despite assembling an impressive collection of factoids, cool epigraphs, and citations for my next novel, I never actually sat down to write it…
A blank page is perfect by default: it is pure, unsullied by substandard words, and filled with glamorous potential. But you can’t make a novel out of blank pages. You must sit down and actually write.
Not long ago, I was procrastinating by reading the writing advice from some of the best writers of our time. Among them was Octavia E. Butler, whose work ethic was legendary: she treated writing as a job, and wrote four hours a day, every day. (By my guesstimate, that puts her in the top 1% of writers or thereabout.) This page of advice had a section called “Don’t Prettify Your First Draft.” It had this very interesting bit of advice: “To her, the first draft wasn’t art. It was a raw material dump. Only after that could real craft begin. She followed what they call ‘vomit drafting.'”
The phrase “vomit drafting” was so over-the-top vulgar, obscene, and hilarious, that it got past all of my mental shields, all the laziness and procrastination. We’ve all thrown up at some point. A highly unpleasant and purely physical sensation, that. When you link that simple, brutal word with “writing” (an activity that has more mystique and unmet expectations attached to it than just about anything else) – well, the juxtaposition is nothing short of hilarious.
And that’s what did it for me. I’d read lots of different variations on the theme before: the first draft’s job is to exist, every first draft sucks, etc, etc. But this simple, plain, funny brutality – “vomit drafting” – was what ultimately worked for me.
And so… I pretended to turn off the part of my brain responsible for shame or self-esteem, and I sat down, and I just started typing. The codename for my novel is “Inhuman Insurance Inception” (the actual title is much snappier, I promise), and it’ll feature two different points-of-view, as well as lots of interesting, world-building interludes. (A bit like in “The Watchmen” graphic novel.)
I started writing 11 days ago, on July 22. Haven’t missed a day thus far. The total wordcount (the first POV + the interludes thus far) is 15,146 words, which is pretty damn great. (I’ve also managed to knock out at least one new short story along the way. Yay side quests!)
I’ll leave for Worldcon in 10 days and I’m not exactly sure whether I’ll be able to maintain my writing streak of 1,000+ words per day, but I know I’ll add at least a few new words to ye olde manuscript. And the entire time I write, I’ll imagine the late, great Octavia E. Butler sitting in the same room, typing on her own computer, the two of us vomiting our first drafts onto the hitherto pristine – and pure, and empty, and therefore unsellable – pages.
Give it up for parables, eh?
Well, using the non-traditional definition of “reel,” but still. I’ve spent the last couple of months building up my army of loyal followers (and book enthusiasts!) over at Ye Olde Instagram. It’s been a quaint little quest, going from roughly 200 followers (lazily assembled over many many years, mostly by accident), to just over 1,500 and counting. That’s not nearly as high as some of the behemoth influencer accounts, but should be high enough to – at the very least – show that I’m serious about book promotion.
Aside from the many handcrafted memes on writing I’ve shared with my new friends, I’ve also been making reels, aka very short videos. For the most part, they’ve been my reviews of different books on writing. (There are so very, very many of them out there!) Yesterday, feeling particularly high on life, I spent altogether too much time to craft this little reel that makes fun of popular book genres. That was the closest I’ve come to making a short film in about four months, and was a ton of fun to make. (And all the little “likes” keep rolling in!)
I already had all the props on account of having accidentally developed a hat collection over the years, across my many travels. (Don’t ask about the lab coat. Long story.) In retrospect, I’m surprised by the five genres I picked – because between them, they fairly accurately represent the five humours of my personality. (There ain’t a lot of Romance in this life, but I’ve still got 35 good years ahead of me.) Incidentally, the “Slipstream” bit is more or less my default mode these days, though my walk through the sunny streets of Quebec City is a bit less over-the-top exuberant than that. (But only a bit.)
It’s an odd art form, these reels. Ditto for the short videos on Facebook an especially TikTok. (I speak not of Pinterest, for that’s a dark, forbidden land beyond my socioeconomic status.) I truly and sincerely hope somebody out there is archiving all those little videos for the future. Some of them are creative masterpieces shot on essentially zero budget, such as this little reel right here. (That was some Rashomon-level retelling, eh?) But then again, I have this intuition that the digital decay will come for them all, that almost all of them will disappear within 10 years. Definitely within 25. Shame.
In any case, here are some reels I’ve made, in case you wanted to see what all I do to build a loyal geeky following. In chronological older, starting with the oldest:
How to tell when your money tree is happy
My index card system for short story markets
When a character has too much plot armor
My review of “On Writing” by Stephen King
A plucky little weed growing in the middle of the road, surrounded by rain
My review of “Writing Tools” by Roy Peter Clark
When Europeans try to write hardboiled noir…
Huh. More reels than I would’ve thought. They sneak up on you!
And with that, it’s time to head back to doing absolutely nothing while, in the background, nurturing my imagination to see what else it comes up with.
Do all y’all have an all-time-favourite reel or short video to share? If so, drop the link in the comments!
I love it when a bunch of things I’m juggling pay off all at once. To outsiders, that looks like magic. To me, that’s the result of a lot of work.
I’ve heard back from a few film festivals, and they want me in! There are a couple I’m not yet allowed to announce (because they give the filmmakers the good news before posting the results online), but the one I can absolutely mention here and now is the 11th annual Ridgway Independent Film Festival (RIFF), held in the beautiful Ridgway, Colorado. Never really been to Colorado (in some alternate universe, I’d be hiking through it right around now…), but I look forward to visiting it! The festival will be in mid-October. If any of you are around those parts, drop me a line – let’s hang out, eh.
Yesterday, I signed the contract for my sixth short story publication, huzzah! The story is “Hard as a Mirror of Cast Bronze” and it’ll run in Bullet Points magazine this October. The title comes from a Biblical allegory that tried to convey how futile it would be for a mortal to comprehend God-level plans. The premise of my story is somewhat similar: what if there was someone so brilliant, so off-the-charts great at integrating and weaponizing different fields of science, that she’d be destined to take over the world? Not only here, but in every single dimension. And what if an assassin sent to kill her found not yet another version of a megalomaniacal tyrant, but… someone entirely different? Wait till October to learn more!
After I signed that contract, that set off the final stage of my internal Rube Goldberg machine, because at that exact moment, I became eligible to join SFWA! (SFWA stands for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, aka the worldwide guild.) To join as an associate-level member, you need to prove you’ve earned at least $100 as a genre writer over the course of your life. Reader, I am very very proud to share that with this new story sale, my lifetime earnings equal exactly $100.78. Right past the finish line, woot! (It would’ve been funnier to land at $100.01, but I’ll take $100.78!)
And so… I filled out the long and detailed SFWA associate application yesterday, at long, long last, after many years of dreaming and planning and writing. It was a bit funny to encounter the “I am not a robot” checkbox during the application process. A very dry sort of pun, considering.
The form requested proof of earnings, of course. My sincerest apologies to the SFWA staffer tasked with reviewing and summing up all six contracts I uploaded. If you’re reading this, my SFWA friend, and if we ever meet, I’ll buy you a glass of water. (The annual membership fee is $100, leaving me exactly 78 cents. Heh. Good investment, though.)
Joining the SFWA will grant me access to what might be the most exclusive message board in the world, with decades-old archives of SFF writers talking about life, writing, and everything else. Also, access to SFWA convention suites. Also also, the ability to nominate (and vote) for the annual Nebula award. Also also also, a not-insignificant level of protection in the event something goes haywire with a writing contract. And much, much more… I hope my application goes through before this year’s Worldcon, which will kick off in just three weeks. As a filmmaker with a short film and a live screening, and as the (hopefully) newest SFWA member, that’ll be one helluva week!
And, to wrap this up with even more good news – I started writing my third sci-fi novel! (This one, in a surprising twist, will feature zero time travel. I know, I know.) I’ll keep the title secret for now, but the working title is… let’s call it “Inhuman Insurance Inception.” That more or less sums it up. It’ll be a multi-POV tale of the ethics of assimilation in general and first contact in particular. Aliens and humans. Hackers and webcams. The so-called civilized humans and the isolated tribes. And more…
So far, I’m 4,000 words in, with an outline and a lot of juicy quotable tidbits already prepared, and I’m going to shoot for 2,000 or so words per day. It’ll be easy, considering the plot has been boiling inside my brain for many many months. Should be fun, eh.
And with that… Gonna sign off, watch some surprisingly poignant reality TV (I know, I know…), and get ready for another day of writing.
Hope y’all are having a wonderful weekend.
WorldConputer-5000 reviewed the agenda. “Bring me Grrrr Martin!” it roared.
“But Your Highness, he perished in a tragic trampoline accident 27 years ago,” said Bobby the Intern just before his shock collar went off.
“Then bring what’s left of him!”
***
“…stupid Conputer. Stupid internship,” Bobby muttered under his breath as he pushed the gruesome cart through the dank tunnel.
“Shh. Someone may overhear,” said Inga as she stepped out of the shadows. Bobby liked her: she always decorated her shock collar with fresh flowers, a luxury from above.
They hugged the wall as a squad of Tesloids marched by. Each Tesloid was an LLC, and thus a corporation, and thus had more rights than a mere intern.
“Do you ever dream about, um, the future?” Bobby asked as he and Inga slowly pushed the cart.
“Only all the time,” she said with a rueful smile.
“I want to become a full citizen,” Bobby said, “but I can’t handle 25 more years of this.” He didn’t specify. He didn’t have to.
Inga put her left hand on his shoulder. “Well, we can always become writers.”
At that, a terrible shriek emanated from a deep tunnel.
“Someone missed a deadline again.”
“How did it ever get this way?” Bobby asked. Inga always knew things others didn’t.
“Ever hear of exponential growth?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Well, it’s when something grows forever, without bounds. It can get out of hand pretty fast…” Her voice trailed off.
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s say there were 673 short story nominees in 2025,” Inga said.
“Okay.”
“And in 2026, that number went up by 15%.
“Sure.”
“And then someone centralized the Worldcon by building that monstrosity, and it demanded 15% more output each year.”
“But that’s… That’s…”
“Unsustainable, yeah.”
Their conversation was interrupted by a wretched-looking hairy creature wearing a burlap sack. It ran out of a side tunnel, clutching a filthy keyboard.
“You’ll never get me alive!” the feral writer shouted as three Tesloids gave chase.
They disappeared out of sight. No screams followed.
“Things can’t go on like this,” Bobby said once his heartbeat finally slowed down. “There must be something – anything – we can do.”
Inga stopped and gave him a slow, appraising look.
“Tell me,” she said slowly, “have you ever heard of time travel?”
“Pfft. Fairy tales,” he said with an eyeroll.
Inga’s expression didn’t change. Could it be… Was it possible this wasn’t a prank?
“No way,” he whispered, his eyes wide.
“I’m with the Resistance, Bobby. We have a working prototype. Join us – join me – go back in time, change this timeline.”
“…I’m in.”
“I knew you would be.”
THE END
This short story (flash fiction, really, at 443 words) was written completely spontaneously, when I got visited by a muse. (The muse took the form of a bowl full of pasta with ketchup. Mmmm, carb rush…) I was reading this excellent Bluesky thread by Abigail Nussbaum, a Hugo Award-winning critic and author. In her thread regarding the future of the Worldcon, she wrote, “One thing that the reactions to this thread have really crystalized for me is how amorphous the demand to centralize the running of the Worldcon actually is. After years of having this conversation, I still haven’t seen even a vague sketch of what it would look like.”
The words “even a vague sketch” inspired me, the first skeet came unbidden, and then, well… It was too much fun to stop at just one!
And now, dear reader, there is at least one vague sketch of what the centralized Worldcon would look like. (A very very unserious sketch, but a sketch nonetheless.) You can read my original skeet thread over here. (Yes, we call them “skeets” over yonder. No, we won’t change.)
…it would be pretty funny if after everything I’ve written, after all the sci-fi films I’ve made, this got nominated for the Best Related Work. Heh.
Grigory Lukin.com 