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/
My newest published story (the first of many this year!) is in the winter 2026 issue of The Colored Lens.
It’s part of my growing opus of time travel-related works (all of which are interlinked), and I had lots of fun adding my own spin to some of those old tropes.
This story is about the ethics of changing – or not changing – the timeline on a grand scale. It’s about the secret origin of Valkyries. It’s about cold calculations compiled into a cruel-seeming codex. It’s about the third and final chances…
The opening line: “When you’re a time traveler, every hour is a happy hour.”
Enjoy, eh.
My big goal for 2024 was to become a sci-fi creator – ideally a published author, but open to anything. One of those “anything” side quests led me to create a short film, “Please Don’t Send Help.” A few months ago, fueled by a spike of optimism (and a bit of boredom – let’s be honest here), I submitted it to a couple of film festivals, and, well… I’ve just found it’s been accepted by the Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival!
That film festival has been around for five years, it has 8,000 attendees, and it’s pretty selective when it comes to judging the submissions. This feels so unreal… The festival will take place in mid-October, less than a month from now: every film will be streamed online, but some will also be shown to the live audience in Brooklyn. I’m waiting for that update: if my film (all 2 minutes and 29 seconds of it) gets a live showing, I will be there – rubbing elbows, making friends, watching the audience watch my film, trying not to grin like an absolute maniac.
I’ve been riding the dopamine high from this announcement for quite a while now. My little film had cost me just $15 to make ($10 for the amazing voice actress + a 50% tip), though I did spend several weeks tinkering with it. And to have it accepted, and recognized – something I made with no film school experience of any kind – wow. Just… wow.
I played way too many video games growing up. (Some say I still play way too many video games.) Because of that, my overly competitive brain tends to view each and every hobby as a level progression, from 0 to 100. Everyone starts out at an absolute 0 in every skill, every hobby when they’re born, and eventually, through practice and hard work and luck, they level up. (A friend of mine is an amazing artist: she told me her parents encouraged her to draw since she was six months old, and she never stopped.)
When you apply that philosophy to filmmaking, level 100 would mean getting an Oscar. Level 1 would be pressing “record” on a camera and making a video of literally anything. I feel like this new development has propelled me somewhere around level 40, as far as this particular skill goes. There’s a lot more ground to cover, and I’m quite sure I’ll never reach level 100, but now I’m genuinely curious just how much farther I can take this, and how the world will view the rest of my ideas and my films.
Once I hear back from all the other festivals, I’ll post “Please Don’t Send Help” online for all y’all to enjoy as well – but it’ll be a few months. And now, I’m off to watch tutorials on making (and animating!) fun 3D objects in Houdini Apprentice for a particularly ambitious cut scene of my next short film. That should be interesting…
Grigory Lukin.com 