My Scareuary 2024, Entry #8: "A New Spring" Replaces "Starlets & Immortality"

 Scareuary 2024, Entry #8: "A New Spring" Replaces "Starlets & Immortality"

In this small update, I just wanted to share a tiny little change that has occurred for my Scareuary 2024 Coppe's Webbe challenge. 

Previously, I was seriously considering working on my "starlet" story. I even had a name and a fun graphic made for it. Alas, after a little while, I stopped feeling that story idea altogether. I couldn't think of a way to effectively execute the story in my mind, and I wasted a lot of time trying to consider it as one of my four Coppe's Webbe stories. In the end, I decided that I simply wasn't going to go through with this particular short story.

 

 Instead, I ended up writing a short horror flash fiction piece for a zine, which ended up being rejected. I took that same piece and modified it, so that it included something significantly star-related, and edited it. Now that I was able to surpass the 300-word limit of the submission guidelines, I decided to flesh it out a bit more and give the story a little more meat on its bones. 

I'm quite happy with how it turned out, and hope to share it soon. All of this horror story writing has got me thinking that I might put out an anthology - a mixture of stories that are free to read and new stories you haven't seen yet! Maybe I'll release it there, along with the RRZ Mujannah (which is also submitted to a lit mag, though I've yet to hear back from them). 

If you're unfamiliar with the RRZ Mujannah story, it's the short story I wrote for the 'giant star that's not a star' prompt. It was the second story I wrote for Scareuary, and I'm really loving it. Though it has been submitted, however, I can honestly say that I look back on it now and wish I had added some more to the story. Oh, well! We'll see how things turn out! If it doesn't get picked up by the lit mag, I can edit it to my heart's content.

So, to recap, the stories I've worked on for Scareuary are now as follow:

1. The Star Seal
2. RRZ Mujannah
3. A New Spring

The fourth and final story I want to work on is the shooting star idea:

a shooting star falls somewhere off the coast of Angola; soon after, strange life-forms begin to wash up on the shores of the African country, and scientists are baffled... 👾

Learn more about Scareuary here. Read my entries for The Star Seal here. I'm writing it directly into my blog posts without any editing, so you get a first-hand look at how my writing process tends to go.