The Literary Salon with Thaddeus Thomas: Substack Authors

Real Worldbuilding: Horror

_______, _________, the unknown, and the feeling of being out of control—these are universal fears. (Read Haly’s piece to fill in the blanks on what she covered.)

In creating a story about a small town, I can think of one rudimentary place to begin. I won’t talk about how to implement the universal fears you listed, but for the unknown, there’s a section of town that’s been fenced off by authorities. Warning signs are posted but no one knows why. At night, a soft rumble stirs people from their sleep. They can feel it in their bones, and it didn’t use to be there.

Normally, that suggests a story where whatever is over the gate is the focus of the plot, but if those spooky details fit thematically, that need not be the case. Our story can be fully told on one side of the fence with that bit of worldbuilding acting as a metaphor. For example, the main character’s father could be closed off in ways he never was before. He’s inaccessible, and sometimes its not the distant rumblings but something closer to home that wakes the child in the night.

That’s what I want explored more and what I felt was missing. It was like reading a few good pointers on romantic comedy from Stephen King.

And I know—you love the spooky stuff. You are speaking to us from one of your strengths, but not from people’s expectations. Stephen King may have a lot to say about romantic comedy, but the disappointment of expectation remains.

Plus, horror in worldbuilding is just an awesome topic, and I’d love to see more from someone who knows her stuff.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Update: Haly has responded.

Real Worldbuilding

Stop! Wait! Proceed with CAUTION & CONSENT…

10 months ago · 3 likes · Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️

Tochi Onyebuchi, Championed by Tom Schecter

Tom Schecter — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 09:30:28 GMT

Guest author:

Presenting the fiction of:

Championing Tochi Onyebuchi, RIOT BABY, and Empathy

This article is part of Literary Salon issue #7.

Championing Tochi Onyebuchi, RIOT BABY, and Empathy

All right. So I’ve done one of these already. This one is going to hit a little different.

For one, the author I am here to speak for today has already made some waves. He’s won a few major prizes, been published in some serious-business anthologies, and even been interviewed on The Daily Show a few years back. He’s also an old high school classmate of mine, so obviously I am biased and should shut up.

But I believe Tochi Onyebuchi wrote a novel that needs to be read by every single person at least once, and Thaddeus has been kind enough to lend me several hundred extra eyes to make my case in front of, so on we go.

—

I have been reading Tochi’s work for about a decade, since I got a notification that a high school classmate of mine was about to release his first novel, got curious, and got knocked on my ass.

By a YA fantasy novel.

First off, it was gorgeous. I knew nothing about West African folklore going in, and I was fully engrossed in the world and the imagery, and the story held up, too. But what got me was, it was tense, rippling with a really deep undercurrent of seething distrust of the powers that be. And it was for kids! And I remember thinking to myself, I wonder what he might do without an age restriction to make him tone it down?

—

There is a reason why certain political and religious organizations are in the habit of vilifying empathy.

Two reasons, if I’m being generous.

The first is obvious: it’s a lot easier to separate people and make one group out to be the enemy of the other if neither group is given a chance to really, truly understand how the other feels.

The second? Well… Empathy has the potential to be really fucking uncomfortable. More uncomfortable than a lot of us are used to. More uncomfortable than a lot of us can tolerate. Which, of course, makes it easier for the bad actors from reason one to sell empathy as the problem (and there I go, back to being ungenerous. Oh well...).

The thing is, the discomfort is what makes empathy so incredibly necessary. We can intellectualize and sympathize all we want about how terrible situation X is, but in order to be inspired (read: forced) to get off our asses and do something about terrible situation X, often we need to experience it ourselves for a moment—even just emotionally—and hopefully that moment galvanizes us, makes us think “wow, this is fucking unacceptable,” and leads us to real action.

—

Riot Baby is a profoundly upsetting story, and a lot of that upset is derived from its grounding in reality.

Let me qualify that: as you might have noticed, if you’ve ever looked at my profile picture at any point since I joined Substack, I’m…how to put this gently so as not to shock anyone?…not Black. My understanding of the experience of Black people in the United States is, by default, a limited one. I have read a ton of history, obviously, and I’ve gotten deep enough into the facts and the data and primary sources and whatnot that I know, on an intellectual level, that the experience has been horrific, on the whole, and that white people—wealthy ones in particular—have largely done whatever they can since Reconstruction to ensure that their former chattel remain permanently beneath them in the social and economic pecking order.

And I’m pissed about it, because I have this thing about bullies where I hate them and want them to suffer from terrible incurable hemorrhoids forever, and it doesn’t particularly matter to me what that bully looks like on the outside when I make that distinction. So I sympathize with the several generations of Black Americans who have suffered this treatment. While we’re at it, I sympathize with the literal majority of my countrymen who are at or below the poverty line these days simply because certain wealthy people want it that way and can pay off the right people to keep it that way.

But that’s different from living it. It’s different from panicking about what you can afford to buy to feed yourself and your loved ones.

It’s different from watching dozens of news reports about people who look like you getting shot and killed by law enforcement officers—or even just wannabe vigilantes or plain old domestic terrorists—who don’t look like you and who suffer little or no consequences for their actions.

It’s different from watching doctors treat your family members with indifference.

It’s different from watching hate groups march down Main Street in the town your high school is in—in Northern-as-hell Connecticut, by the way—and having your teachers have to tell you to stay as far away from certain blocks in town as possible on that day for your safety.

I don’t know (most of) those things feel first hand. And reading studies about housing discrimination, or doctors minimizing or flat-out ignoring black women’s pain complaints, or about how the bail system often leads to poor young men of color awaiting trial for years in prisons like Rikers Island (yes, in my own goddamn native city)...it’s upsetting, and I don’t like it, but it’s admittedly sometimes hard to feel the full force of it. Especially when it’s so pervasive. Especially since things like this have been going on for actual centuries.

Especially when it’s not my reality, and I don’t have to expect it and react to it daily and feel it every second of my life.

–

I am wary of trying to describe the effect of this story before you get a chance to see some of it for yourself. I meant to, originally, but I don’t think I can do it justice. So, instead, I’ll give you a big fat block quote of the first instance of our co-protagonist Ella at six(?) years old, experiencing her “Thing.”

“Pretty soon, he’ll be ready for daycare,” LaTonya says, and even from the porch, Ella can see the light twinkling in her eyes.
Grandma smiles wide. “The way you look at that child…”
“I know.” LaTonya shows her teeth when she grins, bounces Jelani a little bit. “Doesn’t look a thing like his daddy, but don’t tell Ty I said that.” And the two women giggle.
“Well, you know Lanie’s getting her business started up soon, so you should stop by. She’s been sticking sticky notes on everything, and she’s been saving up for a playpen. Even talking with the library about getting books for the kids. Lanie says we’ll eventually get a computer set up, so the kids can play their games after school. I don’t know how I feel about them staring at a screen all day, but sometimes it’s best to be indoors.”
“Well, you let me know when it’s up and running. Jelani would love to make some new friends. Isn’t that right, Jello.”
Jelani buries his face in his mother’s chest.
“Oh, he’s so shy.”
The sun feels too bright outside like it’s washing the color out of everything, and dizziness hits Ella like a brick. Grandma and LaTonya are still talking when Ella staggers to her feet and stumbles inside, and the light falls in rectangles through the burglar bars over the windows. In the bathroom, she stands over the sink and lets the blood slide a little bit from her nose before tilting her head back up. It always feels like there’s something rumbling whenever she gets the nosebleeds, like the earth is gathering itself up under her, but whenever they stop, the nosebleeds, and she looks around, it’s like nobody else noticed a thing. Vertigo pitches her forward. She leans on the sink, squeezes her eyes shut and tries not to think of what she saw outside: the boy Jelani, grown to ten years old, walking the five blocks home from school, a bounce in his walk and his eyes big and brown before a low-rider screeches nearby and a man with a blue bandanna over his face levels a shotgun out the window at someone standing behind Jelani and, after the bang, everyone scatters, leaving Jelani on the ground, staring up at the too-bright son for the last, longest two minutes of his life.

(Sorry, was that too rough? Was the doomed baby too much to start with? Maybe I should have gone with one of Ella’s visits to her brother on Rikers Island later in the story, seeing in a fellow inmate’s face that he is pretty sure this is the last time he gets to see his infant daughter before a guard he’s run afoul of beats him to death–and then seeing it happen a few hours before it actually does. Maybe I should have gone with a depiction of an “inmate rodeo” in Louisiana that looks and sounds as civilized as an undercard bout in the Roman Coliseum. Maybe the fact that I’ve got a few more options rattling around in the top of my head is more important than which one I chose.)

–

The thing I have always deeply appreciated about Tochi’s writing, regardless of target audience, regardless of whether the story leans closer to science-fiction or fantasy, is his ability to expertly toe the line between believable and fantastic.

And the thing that always hurts every time I read this particular work is that there’s too much detail for any of the source material to have been completely invented.

Riot Baby lives on two peculiar knife-edges: between reality and fantasy, and between depressing mundanity and vicious spectacle. He does a fantastic job of humanizing everyone we encounter on the page in small moments so that we can’t help but care when something puts them in danger. And when he has the opportunity to show us an injustice, he shows it from an unexpected angle and does not fucking hold back. We have to feel it too.

Even as it leans more towards the fantastic as the story progresses, as law enforcement gets “Augmented,” as entire neighborhoods get locked down with every angle of every street covered by video cameras, as parolee ankle monitors get replaced by implanted thumb chips capable of reading vitals and administering medication (and all of these things, by the way, feel one degree of separation closer to reality now than it did when I first read this book in 2020), we have to sit in these characters’ experience of the system they are prisoners of.

We have to feel all of it.

And that is the point, as far as I’m concerned. Feel someone else’s pain, and let that pain lead to fuller understanding, and let that understanding guide us towards being better to each other.

–

A bunch of us have been talking for months about how fiction is a measure of a society’s culture, about how the quality of writing we see daily on this platform offers some measure of hope for a better future.

Well, part of that ethos is relying on the power of great writing to help us process our discomfort with the way things are now, with what makes them the way they are.

I haven’t ever fully stopped thinking about Riot Baby since it came out five years ago. It is in my subconscious. It is part of my values system now: it dares me to try to be kinder, be more understanding. It drives me to try to leave any person I interact with feeling slightly better than they felt before they ran into me.

I can’t make you read this book. But I promise I will never stop recommending it. The discomfort is the point. That’s fucking empathy.

Yours, as always,

Tom Schecter, Championed by Simpulacra

Slater Henatay — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 09:30:42 GMT

Guest author:

Presenting the fiction of:

Tom Schecter: For Love of Grit, Grime and Wholesomeness

By Slater Ross Garcia (Simpulacra)

When I first joined the ‘stack in October, I admittedly had no idea what I was doing, in fact I wrote it off as another twitter because all the notes in my feed were cranky writers being cranky. I posted a few things and uninvolved myself. Then one day, Thomas Schecter found me.

At first our conversations were about music, Alice in Chains in particular, but a friendship quickly emerged, the mortar of which was our shared love of indie fiction. His good taste in tunes led me to his writing and I have never been more grateful for a discovery.

Thomas Clark Schecter

This article is part of Literary Salon issue #5.

For Love of Grit, Grime and Wholesomeness

The Shieldbreaker Saga is Thomas Schecter’s primary bread and butter, and that first chapter is easily one of the best first chapters of any novel I have ever explored, ending in a hauntingly inevitable bloodbath that is Shakespearian in soul and spirit. I found myself sucked in to a genre that generally tends to leave me with a bad taste in my mouth: Fantasy. But the world of The Disputed Lands isn’t just fantasy, it’s elevated fiction.

The Last of the Etela, Chapter 1

“And who are you to decide who lives and who dies?” spake the Goddess Vei in her high wroth. “Who are you to deny me that privilege…

2 years ago · 43 likes · 22 comments · Tom Schecter

Consequences are very real in Shieldbreaker, and the structure of his work is methodical, logical and so very fundamentally human. His work has a great many strengths. He is clearly a history nerd, he respects violence, he is obviously very technically skilled (his writing reads at once like real histories and Mastadon lyrics, punchy emotion, brutal logic), he loves his work, but more than anything, Schecter has a deep understanding of humanity. I would say that if he weren’t such a masterful artist, he should have been a therapist, because the actions of his characters are a tug-of-war between culture, history and innate traits. More than anything, I know Kareva, I know Alakuz, I know Sivridi. I have seen these people make these mistakes in real life (in gentler contexts, obviously). He understands fundamentally the recipe for a person.

Any good plot is motivated by character actions, but for Schecter, there is no sense of plot, no moment of contrivance. His fantasy feels real. I could call his work grimdark, however, the genre has been tainted by authors who use it as an outlet to create trauma porn. What Schecter has done is simply create a core logic to his world and to his characters, and brilliantly generated a web of consequences that splay out into an epic tapestry of storytelling. While this seems like Writing 101, it is a stranglehold on the basics that yields a masterpiece. And it is no hyperbole to say that if Schecter gets the eyes he deserves on his stories, he could single-handedly transform the grimdark genre into something that can be once again taken seriously.

It’s easy to find yourself immersed in the world of the Etela, the good news is that Schecter has more books planned, in fact he is currently working on Daughters of Vei, which is a prequel to the Shieldbreaker Saga, and it slaps my cheeks just as hard. He only has 3 chapters out as of writing, and each one escalates with the same white-knuckle severity as Shieldbreaker.

The Daughters of Vei, Chapter 1

Previously on Daughters of Vei… Kivli saw something that blew her mind…

a year ago · 21 likes · 7 comments · Tom Schecter

Furthermore, what Schecter also masters is the cinematic quality in novel form. There is much criticism of cinematic presentation in literature, however, for epic fiction, this is a positive.

And it is not cinematic in that it removes the other senses. You can smell the stink of blood, feel the vibration of anticipation in the warrior’s chests, taste the grit and dirt lodged between your teeth. His story loses nothing for its visuality, for its staging and its widescreen frame. Read Chapter 6 of Shieldbreaker and tell me it wouldn’t make for an A+ television adaptation.

Now, Schecter is a busy man. He’s got a family, his own business, he has created some remarkable fiction, and on top of it all, he is a vital piece of the indie arts community. Schecter is the Mr-fucking-Rogers of Substack. What this man does to promote other writers with the aim of healing creative discourse is unmatched in other corners of the internet; he truly wishes to build writer communities, create a backbone for indie creators that expands far beyond the usual bitter shitslinging we like to pretend is critique. We are, after all, indie writers, no one will save us but ourselves, and he knows this better than most.

Schecter has launched mutual aid campaigns for and , all the while waving the flag for Fiction is Culture, a small movement, that wishes to remind the reader that an act of creativity is something fundamentally communal; to remove the artist from the dingy none-bedroom apartment solitude and the inherent solipsism therein; he wishes to remind you to take a shower and take care of your fellow creative. In the indie lit scene, all boats rise with the tide. He walks the walk and talks the talk.

Introducing 'PABLO, MICHELIN POET'

We here at…whatever the fuck we’re calling ourselves, (un)incorporated, got together a few months ago when one of our own was in a dire situation and tried to use what clout and goodwill we collectively have accumulated on the Stack to put him in a better position to get out of it…

a year ago · 75 likes · 46 comments · Tom Schecter, Emil Ottoman, Nick Winney, ARC, M.P. Fitzgerald, Luke Warfield, Simpulacra, James Worth, Zivah Avraham, and Zani D

Introducing 'EMIL IS MY EDITOR'

If you’re part of the Substack fiction community, chances are you’ve heard the name Emil Ottoman many a time already. You can read his fiction right here—as well as some of the most important and valuable free writing advice you’re ever likely to see printed anywhere, full stop…

a year ago · 55 likes · 13 comments · Tom Schecter, Simpulacra, ARC, Zani D, Nick Winney, M.P. Fitzgerald, and Zivah Avraham

The man’s work is criminally underrated, but I could say the same for the man himself.

For that reason, I also have a full comprehensive review of Shieldbreaker and Vei on my secondary publication, My IBS (My Independent Book Selection [yes, that is the joke]).

Slater’s Substack

ReviewStack: The Shieldbreaker Saga Book 1 by Thomas Clark Schecter

Two warring factions set their stage in an inhospitable red desert just south of the Disputed Lands. The Poyhor, led by their Khoghon of Khogons —Ersev are conquerors, the Hodrir, lead by their dying Khoghon Vartya, are defenders. As the Poyhor approach, the Hodrir’s situation worsens dramatically; the death of a mostly beloved king, leaving a hair-trig…

a year ago · 5 likes · Simpulacra

Read his work, witness how he heals creative communities, and show him the love he deserves. If you haven’t discovered Thomas Clark Schecter, it is time to do just that.

—Slater Ross Garcia (Simpulacra)

T. P. Kaaos, Championed by Edward Marlo Ruiz

Edward.Marlo.Ruiz — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 01:25:22 GMT

Guest author:

Presenting the fiction of:

Dear Reader,

Welcome to another presentation of an absolute underrated gem in the fiction community. T.P. Kaaos and their publication: Alchemy of Ink. Which is full of wonder and sunshine, and sometimes, rain clouds.

Kaaos is the type of writer that…

This article is part of Literary Salon issue #4.

Kaaos is the type of writer that deserves every kind of flower that there is. They have done an absolute mountain of work in supporting this community and other writers within it.

But not only do they support others here, they also write damned good fiction. With the type of voice that sears the words onto your still beating heart. It’s the type of words that speak secrets to the soul and body.

They have a term for it; Kaaos Magic. Their writing is a spell that’s put upon the reader. Words that weave wonder and peace.

Like I said though, the words also touch on the rain. The clouds overhead that stick to the brain. In general, they have it all.

So like last time, I will let their work speak for itself. With some of my favorites they have to offer.

Where Fates Divide —

Three weeks of riddles, dust, and stars,
of whispered maps and midnight scars.
Through winding roads and weathered stone,
we chased a fate not yet our own.
You turn to me—our fingers tight,
your gaze a question edged in light.
One path will lift, one path will break,
one step decides the course we take.

Three weeks of riddles, dust, and stars…

Where Fates Divide

a year ago · 8 likes · 7 comments · T.P. Kaaos

In Kaaos fashion, this piece of poetry runs through a spacey narrative. Something you can decide on where it goes next.

The words wrap you something ancient, something wild. You creep along with the rhymes and crawling flow and find yourself immersed in starlight and sand. You feel the grains of sea salt against your skin as Kaaos describes it. The warm lush of the breeze. All of it creates an atmospheric world that you can’t help but stay in.

And Kaaos doesn’t just do stretching poetry, but they’re also sharpened in traditional fiction as well. I mean, all types of fiction honestly —

The Life of a Misunderstood Pest —

The nematode drifts beneath it, drawn to warmth.
A thread of breath, soft and seeking.
Its body curves through the roots like a question,
never asked aloud,
always waiting for an answer.
There is no language for wanting this deeply.
Merely closeness in the hope that something will remain.

The Life of a Misunderstood Pest

It begins with soil…

a year ago · 8 likes · 4 comments · T.P. Kaaos

This is one of my favorite pieces from Kaaos and this little pest has lived rent free in my brain since I read about it.

I feel this piece embodies what Kaaos does with their words. It is a cocoon to be wrapped inside. You mold with the shape of the story, the pace, the flow. You get into the feeling of it all. The feeling of a damn nematode. In relation to us, the human body and mind. And believe me when I say that ending double line HITS you. So please, feel free to take a better look..

And now, onto the graying shadows.

The Places Grief Broke —

You freeze, keys still in hand.
The grocery bag slides to the floor.
The porch light flickers.
You haven’t changed the bulb since—since before.
Their laugh catches the hallway light like a memory half-lived.
You step aside.

They knock like they always did—three quick raps, a pause, then one softer than the others. A secret only the two of you knew…

The Places Grief Broke

a year ago · 21 likes · 7 comments · T.P. Kaaos

Grief touches all.

Kaaos offers more on loss and longing too. Excellent pieces that put broken fragments together for only a moment. The work, as I have said, speaks for itself here.

In general, Kaaos is absolutely underrated. They truly deserve more eyes because what they write on top of being an actual nebula just begs to be inhaled like crack—to put it simply. Their voice blooms through every single piece they write and their grip on feeling is an actual wonder to behold.

It is the type of writing to admire. I cannot wait to see what the future holds for them because it is indeed brighter than how much they shine through already!

As per last time, below is a list of their most recent work to sift through:

Arms open like memory made real—a shape carved for unraveling, a cradle stitched from stillness…

The Holding

a year ago · 18 likes · 9 comments · T.P. Kaaos

She rose from flame with ash in her lungs and steel in her mouth…

Flameborn of the Storm

a year ago · 17 likes · 8 comments · T.P. Kaaos

a year ago · 8 likes · T.P. Kaaos

The World Made Me

Content Warning…

And I send you off with the meaning of Kaaos Magic understood. Thank you for giving us the time to present an awfully underrated writer. Keep a tissue nearby.

With blood, Edward.Marlo.Ruiz

Zachary Dillon, Championed by Amanda Coreishy

Amanda Coreishy — Fri, 30 May 2025 09:30:32 GMT

Guest author:

Presenting the fiction of:

Zachary Dillon

This article is part of Literary Salon issue #3.

Zachary Dillon, Championed by Amanda Coreishy

Broadcast to Alex: We’ve Been Watching You

We’ve been watching you Alex, because had a story to tell and he figured he could tell it better if he put you at the centre of it.

And he lets you tell it, placing us deep in your head space, so when the voices begin, we hear them too. We’re minding your own business with you as you jerk off to porn. One hand gets tired so you switch hands.

‘Stranger,’ says a voice.

Is someone peeping through your blinds at you as you pump your dick? You try to pass it off as a coincidence but something about the moment feels eerie and the voice is hard to shake.

How It Begins - by Zachary Dillon - I Hear You Watching

I Hear You Watching

How It Begins

This is the first chapter of I Hear You Watching, my novel based on my experience with hearing voices and paranoia…

a year ago · 11 likes · 7 comments · Zachary Dillon

We join you on the hike to Sulphur Springs where your friends suggest you try a hookup site. And we share your intense worry after you’ve been blackmailed by the sextortionist pretending to want online sex with you after she’s covertly made a video of you masturbating.

We’re with you as you battle intrusive thoughts about hooking up with a black woman for the first time, and we sympathise because so far the weirdness is still relatable, still within the range of normal.

Meanwhile, we can’t help but enjoy the way your story is told. Speaking for myself, I loved the visceral honesty with which Zachary writes your thoughts and feelings about sex; his cleverness in conveying the banal, making it interesting and human.

Here you’re exploring a hook-up site for the first time:

100% Clean - by Zachary Dillon - I Hear You Watching

I Hear You Watching

100% Clean

This is a chapter from I Hear You Watching, my novel based on my experience with hearing voices and paranoia…

a year ago · 4 likes · 5 comments · Zachary Dillon

Most writers would keep it minimal, but Zachary lets us really look, through your eyes. And no matter where your horny animal brain takes you, the sex writing never feels gratuitous.

The other thing I appreciate, Alex, is that by making you ordinary and relatable – you’re a young man with average prospects, ambitions and needs – it’s so much more natural for us to see that what happened to you could easily happen to any of us.

As you know, readers hear the smug and hostile voices broadcasting a disparaging running commentary on your every move and you’ll be certain you’ve been put into a sinister reality TV show without your consent. We watch your distress, unable to let you know these voices have been generated by your own mind. It’s painful.

You concoct explanation after explanation in your tech-oriented brain for how your torturers keep being audible but invisible. We witness how increasingly crazy and even dangerous you seem to the people around you; you glare at the mother of the toddler in the store, the one you think has been planted there by the masterminds of your torture; you accuse your neighbours of stalking you; you greet the police officers with a hammer in your hand after you’ve wrecked your apartment, convinced you’ve found the bugging device.

Zachary could have written a personal essay about his experience hearing voices. It would have been easier to write and faster to read. But it wouldn’t have the same impact as your story Alex.

Because every week we get to spend time with you, we care about you a little more.

Through Zachary’s novel you’ve real and persistent to us. A twenty-minute personal essay wouldn’t have rooted itself so deep.

Right now I’m desperate for the girl you hooked up with to find you and save you from yourself. And I’m too early in the story to know if she really will.

(At the time of writing, this is where I am: You’re Safe - by Zachary Dillon - I Hear You Watching)

I Hear You Watching

You're Safe

This is a chapter from I Hear You Watching, my novel based on my experience with hearing voices and paranoia…

a year ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · Zachary Dillon

Anyway Alex, I grabbed the opportunity to read I Hear You Watching because a story based on a writer’s real experience of hearing voices doesn’t come along that often.

When you see Zachary, thank him for the work he’s done with you towards reducing the shame society attaches to the experience of hearing voices.

The shame keeps sufferers and the people who love them silent. I Hear You Watching steps into that silent gap and invites us all into the conversation.

For anyone thinking of serialising a novel, Zachary Dillon does a great job of showing you how. I Hear You Watching isn’t paywalled, so you can observe how Zachary makes it easy to navigate between chapters; get oriented if you haven’t started at the beginning; and join him on his Substack chat where he takes questions and answers frankly about ‘hearing voices’ and the writing of I Hear You Watching. And yes, if you’re impatient or want to support his work with a purchase, he shows you where you can buy the book too.

the chapters - by Zachary Dillon - I Hear You Watching

— Amanda Coreishy

Pablo Báez, Championed by Dylan Bosworth

Dylan Bosworth — Thu, 22 May 2025 09:31:01 GMT

Guest author:

Presenting the fiction of:

Pablo Baez

This article is part of Literary Salon issue #2.

Pablo Báez, Championed by Dylan Bosworth

Pablo Báez, the Michelin Poet. Where do I begin?

His atted name appeared at the top of my feed—someone I can’t remember, asking somebody else if they’ve heard of this poet, Pablo Báez. It picqued my interest, as I hadn’t seen many people in notes at that time outwardly sharing specific writers (other than themselves), promoting them on others’ feeds.

I clicked, and when I clicked, I clicked again on:

Chrome Hearse Express

The Lobby

ship: Melquisedec…

a year ago · 20 likes · 19 comments · Pablo Báez

I thought this man was a poet.

The form struck me first, this dead, but urgent setting-up, and even in the black spaces between the simplicity of the words presented as data, there was tension.

When the prose that followed flowed like water—not merely smooth, but musically, rhythmically—I could no longer blink.

Pablo has beat to his prose, something I don’t see discussed enough. It’s intentional.

As Pablo begins telling his story, his sentences follow patterns. Nod your head to the first regular text of the piece and you get a tempo, a count in each sentence:

6, 6, 6

It goes on, but even more interesting are the word choices. Pablo employs alliteration throughout without sliding over that thin edge that separates talent from self-indulgence. When reading, too—notice that he seems to avoid the more guttural sounds that add hiccups to natural flow. His cultural/language influences bleed into his English writing, creating this lyricism that is distinctly, Pablo Báez.

I subscribed.

A better example of all of the above ran across the feed:

Chrome Hearse Express

Bitter Almonds

Tuesday, January 7, 2025…

a year ago · 19 likes · 17 comments · Pablo Báez

I could write several thousand words about Bitter Almonds. Not only are the qualities from the previous story ever-present, they’re even more refined. Pablo constructed something in Bitter Almonds I’ve never seen.

He suggests you listen to the provided music and follow along. It’s not just a story, it’s a show. An experience. And within each paragraph, you realize there’s more—there’s in-line rhyming, enjambment, meter, assonance—it becomes poetry, but not just poetry; song.

The kid had an interest in serial killers and unsolved crimes. It gave him butterflies. A visceral need to dive into the darkest corners of the web, following crumbs that mimic a yellow brick road with no Oz at the end. While others of his age would jack off, and search mat6tube for their most uber-niche porn clip, he spent time as a sleuth.

I don’t know if I need to say more on that. Count the syllables throughout that piece. Every word has syllabic intention. It’s like hip-hop, like an experiential song.

Pablo told me he thought of it like a lullaby.

This was my introduction to Pablo.

We’ve since spoken daily, kicking ideas back and forth, sharing drafts. What I’ve learned about him is this:

Pablo has an obsession with style and technique, and this push to understand form—not to succumb to its structures and tried rigidity, but a need to understand in order to render it useless.

With each piece, his heart leaks and pools in his fingers where they drive their true desires.

Words.

Not poetry. Not prose. Not story.

Words, specifically the only words that work, because despite the difficulty of some of his pieces, Pablo’s words (whether written in blooming prose, or typeset behind C: prompt malfunction) strike you exactly where they are meant to meet you.

Is Pablo’s work accessible?

No.

Does it try to be?

No.

It is purely artistic expression, a nicked vein that runs counter to the tug of formality.

Enough about the words, though. Life happened to Pablo. I’m sure you’ve seen the initiative to support him through a menu of fine dining recipes and poetry and more, so I won’t rehash the entirety of his situation, but the man needs help.

A job prospect fell apart and bills need to be paid, and this is important.

Pablo isn’t just a writer, creative, etc.—he’s one of the best people I know. He’s gone miles out of his way to support other writers, and, despite his current situation, still pauses to care for the people around him.

In the middle of his world collapsing, Pablo listened to me rant about the medical industry, FMLA, back pain of all things, and his main concern was making sure I was okay. I didn’t know what he was going through at that moment, because he was more focused on caring. On empathy.

The compassion, the kindness—this guy went to bookstores and talked my work up to the owners the first day I spoke to him.

On his own.

A soul of this caliber getting a deal this raw is unacceptable.

Here is the link to the Michelin Poet initiative. Read Pablo’s story, please. Read his work. When one in the community struggles, we all struggle. Let’s lift him out of the hole.

Introducing 'PABLO, MICHELIN POET'

a year ago · 56 likes · 30 comments · Tom Schecter, Emil Ottoman, Nick Winney, ARC, M.P. Fitzgerald, Luke Warfield, Simpulacra, James Worth, Zivah Avraham, and Zani D

—Dylan T. Bosworth

Richard Davis, Championed by Keith Long

Keith Long — Mon, 19 May 2025 09:30:37 GMT

Guest author:

Presenting the fiction of: (Richard Davis)

This article is part of Literary Salon, issue #1. Click on the link to check out the rest of the issue, which will continue as a work-in-progress until May, 21st 2025.

Making It Up as I Go Alone

by Keith Long

Alright folks. This. is Richard Davis. It is an actual crime that more people have not read his stories. His publication ‘Making It Up As I Go Alone’ is a hidden gem I have been following and recommending for a while but I recently went to his stuff and scrolled around. Folks lemme tell you, it’s all good. Rather than listen to me, let him prove it. Here are some excerpts from my favorites, lines or moments that have stuck with me for months after. Final note, I went looking for Right Hand Blues a while ago and couldn’t figure out who had written it — All I remembered was the story, not the title or author. Well, I’ve been reunited at last:

“The anaesthetist was a successful, flamboyant man in his late forties. His bottle blond hair complimented his fake tan and was shaped into a rockabilly quiff. His forehead was Botox frozen, and his contact lenses were purple. He wore a large white stone set on a gold pinkie ring and an odour of cinnamon wafted from the folds of his pale blue boilersuit. Business was good.”

Once inside the corridors of the hospital the man knew there was a good chance of receiving an injection and the man hated injections. It was not so much the juice they pumped into you but the way they did it with a thin needle penetrating a delicate vein. It was a soulless intrusion he found hard to accept. He feared needles but was also nervous beca…

Right Hand Blues

2 years ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Making It Up As I Go Alone

Right Hand Blues

“The lad sensed the approach and looked up at Batman’s masked face. He looked into the misty eyes, like those of a dead fish on a stainless-steel tray and felt sick. He jumped up and exited the tram three stops before his destination. He regarded himself as a tough nut who could look after himself, but Batman’s eyes had freaked the shit out of him.”

2 years ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Making It Up As I Go Alone

Batman Rides a Tram

Batman Rides a Tram…

Batman Rides a Tram

These are the “King” stories, which have too many amazing bits to quote and I love them (I think there’s another one my phone wouldn’t let me scroll back too, so go find that too)

The train carrying King arrives at Euston twenty-two minutes late…

King Smoke

2 years ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Making It Up As I Go Alone

King stands close to Platform One. By a pie shop. Pies from Cornwall. Mechanically reclaimed pig brains and spinal meat in pastry. Yum…

King Work

a year ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Making It Up As I Go Alone

“The man fights death. Never seen a fight like it. The powerful sense of self, sense of being. He knows it will have to end but only on his terms. Morphine dreams, eyes roll, lips grin, voice whispers and grunts through a wondrous fog bank of memories and recollections and fictions and elaborations.”

The wide brown door opens to reveal the man who dominates the scene. He lies on a computerized bed in a pale green room, room 311. He likes the Call Don’t Fall sticker on the glass bathroom door, and the binned tabloids with their loud headlines, King of the Orgies…

Club 311

2 years ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Making It Up As I Go Alone

Club 311

“The screen shows two bareknuckle fighters punching one another. Sat in the comfortable armchair next to the radiator, he watches them fight for hours. Eventually, his eyelids flicker as the heating smothers his brain. His chin touches his chest.”

Fresh from a long, hot, satisfying bath the man sits in a comfortable armchair; a damp towel wrapped around his hips. He watches an antique TV set perched precariously on a thin wooden shelf. The screen shows two bareknuckle fighters punching one another. Sat in the comfortable armchair next to the radiator, he watches them fight for hours. Eventually, …

Dead Hotel Space

2 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Making It Up As I Go Alone

Dead Hotel Space

“The sun was starting to dip when Sonny saw the old man’s familiar face grinning at him in a sly way. It was an aged, life-drained face with ruddy eyes, the grey skin gutted with deep creases around a hanging jaw. The shaved skull housed a brandy-soaked brain that misfired every nanosecond without fail. Possessing a pickled brain meant the old man was in a permanent state of semi-inebriation. It also meant he was pig shit ignorant.”

The heady smell of burned incense stinging his nostrils wakes Sonny from a void. It is accompanied by the taste of boozy puke lodged in the back of his throat. His head rests on the long, cold wood of a pew. It is where he passed out late in the early morning hours when sober thieves went to work. Unlike Sonny…

One Silver Jesus

a year ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Making It Up As I Go Alone

One Silver Jesus

Get readin’.

—Keith Long

You, too, can champion an author on Substack.

Sean Thomas McDonnell, Automatic Writer

Keith Long — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 11:15:35 GMT

Guest author:

Presenting the fiction of:

Let’s talk about Sean Thomas McDonnell.

But first, some business—in 3 parts:

1. Easily Manage Your Subscription

Every Section has a toggle. Toggle on the ones you want to receive and toggle off the ones you don't.

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2. Visit the Literary Salon Bookstore

The Book Salon

3. Not yet subscribed to Literary Salon?

Some of my essays are for paid subscribers only, and I have a special in place until I reach 100 paid subscribers. You’ll keep that discount for as long as your hold the subscription.

Now, the Champion series:

When I first joined Substack, Sean Thomas McDonnell was one of the first Substackers I found. I read his short story, The GOOD EGG…

There is a taste to this memory, and a texture, so vivid that to call it false would be to put at risk every memory I’ve ever had. To call it untrue would be to call my life nothing more than fiction…

The Good Egg

2 years ago · 72 likes · 53 comments · Sean Thomas McDonnell

and then thought about it for days. It’s strange and memorable, beautiful and simple. Since then, I’ve read every story he’s put out and some from before I joined the party. All of his stories are excellent, all of them stay with me, most of them have eggs.

I am ashamed to say I did not know what an Automatic Writer was when I first subscribed to Sean Thomas McDonald’s publication. After learning the meaning of the term, I felt it fit perfectly (and is clever to boot). The voice and feel of any Shawn Tom McDonahugh story is one of beauty and terror and thought. One of my favorites of his is STICKS…

Bless these hands that grow tired and weary. Bless these hands, which are dedicated to You. Bless these hands, which test and rebuild us. Bless these hands that are Your…

Sticks

a year ago · 71 likes · 50 comments · Sean Thomas McDonnell

which still haunts me regularly. It has the feeling I’m trying to describe; beautiful words melted down and poured into a mould of horrid ideas. And there is always enough strangeness — enough mystery — to make me immediately reread his stories. I know for a fact I scrolled immediately back to the top and reread Sticks, and LAKE MOTHER…

A manic whisper urges me on, and I oblige, but what it is I’m giving in to, I cannot say…

Mother Lake

a year ago · 80 likes · 72 comments · Sean Thomas McDonnell

and Good Egg.

Another thing that needs mentioned is Sean Terrance McDowell’s activity and support of the Substack community. If you were unaware, the musically inclined hands of Stewart Timothy McDimmidome have been involved with or directly responsible for several huge projects on Substack. The Substack Zone, inspired by the Twilight Zone’s 66th anniversary (and now available in it’s entirety as the drop-dead gorgeous Midnight Vault — hubba hubba) was the brainchild of Swan Thong Nickleback and J CURTIS. Soon after, the Dark Tidings Substack event took the 12 Days of Christmas in a chokehold and Seamus Taylor Macintosh delivered the memorable SWANMASTER.

Twelve Days of Christmas—Dark Tidings is a Substack special holiday event. Each day beginning Friday the 13th, we’ll count down to Christmas Eve with a dark tale featuring one of the gifts from the c…

Swanmaster

a year ago · 59 likes · 31 comments · Sean Thomas McDonnell

And I guarantee you he’s got more community creations planned, so peel those eyes.

As a final mention of two other favorite stories of mine, see [5][7]

a year ago · 59 likes · 34 comments · Sean Thomas McDonnell

【5】【7】

TW: Gun Violence…

And DANEL

I watch the yarrow bend beneath the weight of my piss and think of our baby boy, George. Will he have sea-green eyes flecked with gold like me? Or will they be hazel, like …

Danel

a year ago · 46 likes · 38 comments · Sean Thomas McDonnell

Alright then, bye.

You, too, can champion an author on Substack.

Today’s flash fiction for paid subscribers:

Andy Futuro: the horror and the music

Thaddeus Thomas — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 09:30:21 GMT

Presenting the fiction of:

Andy and I represent two ends of a spectrum, in one sense. In another, we’re both pursuing the things we’re passionate about. For me, that includes essays about line techniques for our fiction and building communal efforts to find our audience. In doing so, I’m following my own advice, which is that fiction is a hard sale on Substack. Draw them in with nonfiction. However, Andy proves the power and possibility of focusing on art alone.

Art: fiction and electronic dance music. Horror fiction to be specific.

Let’s talk about the pure artist, Andy Futuro.

But first, let’s take care of some business—in 4 parts:

1. Easily Manage Your Subscription

The Literary Salon posts very often, but it doesn’t have to flood your inbox. Pick what you want to receive.

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To choose which series come to your inbox, go to:
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2. Grab a Free Book and Support our Promotional Efforts

And visit the new Literary Salon Bookstore

The Book Salon

3. Need an editor?

Allow me to recommend Emil Ottoman.

4. Not yet subscribed to Literary Salon?

Some of my essays are for paid subscribers only, and I have a special in place until I reach 100 paid subscribers. You’ll keep that discount for as long as your hold the subscription.

Anna: Hey, Lisa, could you check with the landlord and see if we can get a blackout period for the cameras? I've seen some leases where the cameras go off for certain periods, usually at night…

Now, the Champion series:

Anna: Hey, Lisa, could you check with the landlord and see if we can get a blackout period for the cameras? I've seen some leases where the cameras go off for certain periods, usually at night.

Lisa: Hi Anna!

First, would you mind using the term housing provider? “Landlord” is an old-fashioned term, and it’s a little disrespectful to someone allowing you to stay in their property. Some people consider it a hate slur.

Anna: Oh. Yeah, sorry. No problem. Wasn’t my intention.

Lisa: Thanks! Let me check about the blackout period.

Provider, Andy Futuro

One of Andy’s recurring motifs is the horrific as the new normal. If there’s a theme that speaks to the everyone’s experience of the first quarter of the 21st century, this is it, and perhaps it also explains the broad appeal of his often experimental and literary horror. People relate. It speaks to us about the world we live in, through the warped mirror of tomorrow’s possible evils.

He moves us away from the comfort of the horrors that kill us to the discomfort of the horrors we learn to accept.

It’s not enough to say that Andy writes horror and horror sells. Horror abounds. Andy does something uniquely Andy and disquietingly relatable. In addition, while I consider Andy’s work literary and experimental in form, the writing itself is always accessible.

He’s become a case study of mine as I wrestle with the question of how to keep the reader without losing your soul. To work backwards through my recent points, students of literature often want to sound lofty and complicated, like the works they appreciate—but when those authors speak of their work, it surprises us to find they often made their choices as the most straightforward and clear way to tell the story they wanted to tell. I see this quality in Andy’s writing.

We’ve already discussed his relatability, but what do I mean by “something uniquely Andy”?

In Notes recently, someone asked how writers avoid recycling ideas as she fretted over the concern that she keeps returning to concepts similar to what she’s done before. Andy knows this isn’t a concern. There is a familiarity that crosses between certain stories, but what they have in common are traits we come to identify with Andy in this period of his writing—like Picasso’s blue period. He need not worry about changing it up too soon nor holding onto it too long. He need only tell his stories in the best way he can. His present period is defined by forms that read like artifacts left behind.

What I’m about to share is not usual for the Champion series, but some time ago I asked Andy to share his writing process with us. He says:

First of all, I don’t know shit. Now there’s a clickbait title.
Maybe after I’ve finished a hundred novels I’ll know a little about writing.
Still, I have to get something down, so here are some brief, freeform reflections on how I go about the act.
I hope it can be useful.
When I write a story, I can’t let myself think, I want this to be good or bad. I can only think, Does this succeed at what it is trying to do?
If I care too much about whether people like one experiment or another, I will chase the experiments people like. And I’ll lose the desire to experiment.
And while I need to serve my readers, I think that there are experiences other than liking or disliking something.
That maybe you don’t have to like something, or not like all of something.
Maybe you can just find it interesting.
And while you’re interested, you let go of the judgements and gain more of an experience.
Whether you like the experience or not.
And that is what I seek out in the art that I enjoy, be it music, paintings, video games — an experience.
With an experience, there’s no sense in thinking, What should happen? Instead I think, What could happen?
I try to keep that mental space open. In the space of possibilities, ideas inevitably emerge, and the ones that inspire the most curiosity are the ones I follow.
So then it becomes important to write. To not get bogged down with commas or sentences or even chapters.
To just write and get words on paper. Regardless of where they go. And not worrying if they’re good or not. Or what tense they’re in. Or if they adhere to a popular formula or not.
I don’t worry about structure at all, except that it’s fun to play with. After all, I’m not trying to craft a specific, predefined outcome. I’m trying to open myself to the possibility of what can emerge.
And so I let the words fall where they may.
In practicing the basic skill of generation, I can improve. I can generate more, and raise the quality of the generations.
If I’m concerned about being good, or worse — perfect — then what I’m really trying to do is avoid discomfort.
I’m trying to forestall the emotional response I will have when someone dislikes my experiment. Which is inevitable.
But, aha, it’s just an experiment. It’s not good.
People are free to like and not like it. And even if they dislike it, well, they still experienced it.
If I try to be good, I’m actually trying to find certainty
Certainty that I will be liked
That my time wasn’t wasted
That this will pay off financially
That my skills are useful.
That I am respected.
That I can be what I want.
That the people who mocked me will eat their words.
But there is no certainty.
There is only the infinite unknowable of possibility.
It’s harder, but kinder to myself to accept possibility.
Then I can focus on the writing.
And enjoy it.
Enjoy the flow of it and let it go where it may.
And not try to control it in some way that was popular in the past.
Maybe that will work to chip away at the doubt.
But it would also lessen the enjoyment of writing.
So I choose the possibility.
Which means accepting the unpleasant possibilities.
And also the pleasant ones.
Like, maybe today I just have a really fun day making something.
And maybe a few people will like it.
And maybe I’ll be the next big name.
And maybe not.
Maybe someone will call me a hack or a poseur or a wanna be.
And maybe I am.
There’s no point in fighting it.
The doubt never goes away.
It can’t.
All I can do is exhaust myself with mental gymnastics to try and avoid it.
Which only adds misery to unpleasantness.
It’s not about silencing the doubting and fearful parts of myself.
It’s about crowding them out with the confident, decisive, and creative parts of myself.
To do that I have to write.
And I have to share.
And sharing is embarrassing.
And, of course, we avoid embarrassment, because it’s uncomfortable.
So, I want to be embarrassed.
I want to flush red with shame at the stupid thing I said, or the chapter that fell flat.
I want wring my pores of sweat when the chorus calls out, You suck!
Yeah, probably.
Or maybe not.
If I can sit with my embarrassment, I can increase my tolerance for being embarrassed.
And be able to sit with even more embarrassment next time.
And then my brain won’t perceive it as threatening.
Just some noise, an annoying little buzz.
I don’t have to pay attention to it.
I can just go back to work.
And share some more.
And readers will like some things more than others.
And again, I have to resist calling them good and bad.
Everything can be its own thing.
Everything can be its own experiment.
I don't need to ascribe an artificial trajectory to my style.
I can’t judge my progress in terms of how liked I am.
But how willing and able I am to put myself out there.
I’m not a good writer.
Nor do I want to be.
I also don’t want to be a bad writer.
I just want to be a writer.
And a composer. And a maker. And a doer.
A person who values creativity.
A person who lives his values.

A few stories by to get you started:

Andy Futuro

Provider

a year ago · 72 likes · 51 comments · Andy Futuro

Andy Futuro

Disposal

5 Stars: The Experience of A Lifetime…

a year ago · 121 likes · 113 comments · Andy Futuro

Andy Futuro

11:11

a year ago · 70 likes · 64 comments · Andy Futuro

Ignoring the monastic aspects of writing, storytelling is a shared experience between the author and the reader. The reader contributes in the telling of the story, and as the author needs inspiration—an emotional connection with an idea—in order to create, so does the reader.

Readers want to be inspired to spin visions from our words, and the aspect of Andy’s stories we most want to replicate is his ability to provide that inspiration.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Subscribe to Andy

You, too, can champion an author on Substack.

Greg Lemon: You'll Never Walk Alone

Victor D. Sandiego — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 09:30:47 GMT

Guest author:

Presenting the fiction of:

About two years ago, when I started Dynamic Creed, I not only wanted to publish my fiction, but also to find others with compelling risk-taking work. A few months in I found Greg Lemon and his publication You’ll Never Walk Alone.

Let’s talk about Greg Lemon.

But first, some business—in 4 parts:

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2. Grab a Free Book and Support our Promotional Efforts

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The Book Salon

3. Not yet subscribed to Literary Salon?

Some of my essays are for paid subscribers only, and I have a special in place until I reach 100 paid subscribers. You’ll keep that discount for as long as your hold the subscription.

I remember the day of my cosmic awakening like it was yesterday and tomorrow and today…

4. Preview select chapters from my WIP:

Deeper Stories: a Fiction Writer’s Guide

I’m turning these essays into a book, and you can grab a draft sample when you subscribe for free. (Available to current subscribers, too.) I’ll be announcing pre-orders for the whole book soon!

Free for new and existing subscribers. Learn more here:

Deeper Stories

Now, the Champion series:

I’ve been fascinated with Greg’s virtuosity. He has a way of slowly dipping into something that at first may seem to be a tranquil pool of dreams. In one sense it is, but it’s one that soon starts to churn with an underwater volcanic energy.

Greg’s work requires attentive reading. At times he weaves long complicated thoughts together in a wholly articulate stream, one punctuated with joy and sadness and madness and precision, and one that leaves us in a state of wonder. There’s a certain scientific quality within Greg’s stories. That’s not to say dry or academic. Far from it. His stories are carved and created with an exactness that gives them a brilliant shine.

Without giving too much away, I’d like to touch on two of Greg’s pieces. They both start off somewhat innocently, but like a magician who transforms a dove into a tiger , both stories are not what they first seem.

Moon Shot

You'll Never Walk Alone

Moon Shot

a year ago · 8 likes · 5 comments · Greg Lemon

I remember the day of my cosmic awakening like it was yesterday and tomorrow and today.

So begins our journey from the mystical to the natural to the surreal as the young narrator discovers that one thing after another has altered. Falling leaves suspend in midair; strangers have familiar noses; communication takes on new forms. And surrounding all odd events is something not only of importance to the narrator himself, but to the entire universe.

Near the center of the story, a sort of gravitational vortex forms, an intense orbital whirlpool that swirls the reader around and around, and in the swirling, forces us to come to terms with the difference between what we assume to be true and what actually is. Or, as Greg puts it:

An infinite loop of life

Like most of Greg’s work, this piece drags our suppositions and assumptions into the light where we see that they’re not what we may have always believed them to be.

Please Don’t Feed The Wall

You'll Never Walk Alone

Please Don't Feed The Wall

This story is my submission for the monthly Symposium of the Soaring Twenties Social Club. This month's topic is “E_ection…

2 years ago · 6 likes · 5 comments · Greg Lemon

The little doll sat on the shelf in the Freedom Center gift shop, and Matilda just had to have it.

Starts off pretty innocent. Girl. A doll. But in very short order, we realize that we’re in deeper than we thought.

But when Matilda picked the doll up and examined it more closely, a greater truth began to reveal itself to her. Beyond the coifed facade lay something more. A wounded child lost in the dark, crying out for help. An injured husk in search of its soul.

I don’t want to spoil the read, but allow me to say that Please Don’t Feed The Wall is not only humorous and absurd, it’s also an indictment of our inability to see beyond what’s pitched to us as everlasting truth, and a loving criticism of the status quo. It’s also grounded in a reality that only differs in degree and detail to that which we currently experience, one in which long lines of people simply accept without questioning, and fail to learn from what came before. It’s fitting, too, that Matilda, a child, sees things that others don’t. All in all, a topical and beautiful piece.

is a writer that treats his readers as smart and capable. His insights and expressive prose lead us gently to places we may not have seen before. Take a read of these two pieces and others. I think you’ll enjoy. I know I do.

— —

is the author of Dynamic Creed. He writes creative fiction from his home in the desert on the edge of society. Stray dogs and scorpions welcome.

Subscribe to Dynamic Creed

You, too, can champion an author on Substack.

Nathan Slake: Fiction (mostly)

Rhys Hickmott — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 09:31:12 GMT

Guest Author:

Presenting the fiction of:

But first, let’s take care of some business—in 4 parts:

1. Easily Manage Your Subscription

Every Section has a toggle. Toggle on the ones you want to receive and toggle off the ones you don't.

This is part of The Re:Write Series.

To choose which series come to your inbox, go to:
https://literarysalon.thaddeusthomas.com/account

If you have a complimentary paid subscription that’s ending, if you do nothing it will revert to a free subscription.

2. Grab a Free Book and Support our Promotional Efforts

3. Not yet subscribed to Literary Salon?

Some of my essays are for paid subscribers only, and I have a special in place until I reach 100 paid subscribers. You’ll keep that discount for as long as your hold the subscription.

When I was young, I was terrified I might go blind. For the best part of a year, I would wake up in the night, convinced that I had lost my sight. This process repeated for many months until, suddenly, it went away. The fear was superseded. What I’m trying to say is, I became haunted by something else. I’ve never told anyone this—not even my wife, to wh…

4. Preview select chapters from my WIP:

Deeper Stories: a Fiction Writer’s Guide

I’m turning these essays into a book, and you can grab a draft sample when you subscribe for free. (Available to current subscribers, too.) I’ll be announcing pre-orders for the whole book soon!

Free for new and existing subscribers. Learn more here:

Deeper Stories

Now, the Champion series:

A Piece Of Slake - By

Due to Substack's insistence on flooding it's users with notes and political slop, it is hard to find fiction pages on substack let alone those of high quality. However, I have found some premium prose on the page of

Slake is an author known for his abundance of short stories posted to Substack. Most of his stories are from the first person perspective and narrate an event that happened to the main character.

He writes in numerous other styles, however, from what I've read, first person horror is his bread and butter.

A common title formula with his work is the Dr Strangelove formula. Title: Or (insert descriptive sentence) and they often serve to benefit the story in ways titles rarely do, that is especially the case for one of the stories I will be discussing.

Slake has a lot of work to his name so here are my three recommendations for starting with Slake:

SLAKE

At the window

2 years ago · 55 likes · 79 comments · Nathan Slake

At The Window:

This was my first experience with Slake's work and it certainly serves as a good introduction to his style.

When you read At The Window it's the kind of story that is just realistic enough to be believable. If it was posted on a paranormal forum rather than a fiction substack, the theories would be spreading like wildfire.

Slake plays it completely straight, which is something many authors struggle to do. The urge to indulge, to put something outlandish in there, it's too much to bear for most, but not for Slake

If there's anything you should read from , it's At The Window

SLAKE

The watcher

The moon lit the structure from above, imparting its argent glint upon that which had appeared in the night. There was no doubt as to what it was, its two upright posts supporting a crossbeam thick and worn, a solid piece of timber from which dangled the lone noose, its end suspended above a raised platform. A gallows. A gallows impossibly set upon the …

a year ago · 40 likes · 84 comments · Nathan Slake

The Watcher:

This tale is extremely similar to At The Window. It is a first person account of a young man who has an encounter with a supernatural gallows.

Also like At The Window it has a stream of consciousness style to it. The Narrator goes from describing the noose to detailing the thoughts of the ants that are swarming his body on the floor.

It is a narrative that has a sense of Lovecraft to it. You're given this scenario that is simultaneously mundane yet monstrous and the rest of the narrative serves as a reflection on what happened.

SLAKE

Mise en scène

Wilson Burke’s back is to the door. It’s bad practice, he knows—the kind of thing his father told him off for as a child—but it's not like it matters down here. There's only the three of them. Four, he corrects himself. There's only the four of them. Probably no-one else on the whole floor. That’s not true, of course. There are others, but he shuts that…

a year ago · 34 likes · 28 comments

Mise-En-Scene:

Out of the three stories I've selected, this one is the wild card. This is due to the fact that it is a third person narrative rather than first person.

It is also a wild card in the fact that it contains numerous twists and turns that keep the reader guessing and asking "Just what is going on here?" The twists are so good that I am not going to go into the depths of the plot. The only clue I'll give is that the title is more literal than you may think.

Out of all his works this is the most "conventional" however, that does not mean the work lacks in the strange charm all Slake's work has.

In conclusion, Slake is a writer with a solid talent and is always a fun read. He is humble and artistic in the descriptions of his stories and despite their brevity and lack of large scale plot, they always leave you thinking more profoundly than you were prior to reading.

A little about me:

I am Rhys Hickmott and I am a Welsh teen author who will soon be going to university.

I've always wanted to be a storyteller but it's only in recent years that I found literature to be my medium, despite my stories sounding more like comics or movies.

I have published numerous pieces of fiction over the past few months including:

Usurper - A story about four American soldiers in a Middle Eastern country who seek shelter after committing a war crime

Underman's Amulet - A brutal Western heist story about the dissolution of an outlaw gang and the petty meaningless of violence

From Franco & From Grenier - Two zombie apocalypse stories told from the diaries of survivors. Based on the videogame Project Zomboid

Henchman's Homelife - A story about a supervillain's henchman whose life is ruined by a change in his homelife

Grant's Last Stand & He Really Thought He Was Somebody - Two stories about members of the same domestic terrorist organisation.

Throughout my work I play with perspective and genre conventions. I hope that as well as reading Slake, you may find time for my works as well.

— Rhys Hickmott

You, too, can champion an author on Substack.

Bence Adok: The Great Beyond

Blace Alcock — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 09:30:37 GMT

Guest Author:

Presenting the fiction of: of The Great Beyond

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If ever there was a doomsday prophet and poet together, it would be Bence Ádók. Both classical and contemporary, he marries his poetry with a stark sense of impending doom, but it sings. Like sitting on an old cedar-rail fence and watching world war 1, nonplussed, just watching as Mother Mary emerges from the trenches and walks the length of No-Man’s land.

His publication The Great Beyond achieves its namesake. The works he publishes are otherworldly, violent and beautiful works, always surgically focusing on the primal realities around us. His work is a type of literary revival of the dramatics dominating the baroque period of arts. His work is literary chiaroscuro.

Even his prose works on a level which not a lot of writers today are able to reach. His is the tuning fork of words. Beautifully somber, unafraid to ask readers to dwell on its meaning, which have been thoughtfully layered over each other into a tidy swaddling.

And he backs up every single word he writes with precision. He knows writing. Even when he took the time and edited one of mine, I received a small essay’s worth of feedback on things he observed and interpreted, things I hadn’t even realized before. He thrives on the deep blue intricacies swelling and churning within writing and he invokes them in full, never missing and always managing to shock me with the images he conjures.

Bence Adok channels this miasmic sense of religiosity. His poem “Gomorrah” exemplifies this:

Black rolling fields bend forward

for the rain to pierce

the land that starves

moaning when sin

invades the core of the fruit

the flies eat him from within

His recent poem “Kinizi Pál” takes a step back from the apocalyptic poeticism to pay homage to the poem’s namesake, a Hungarian general who battled the Ottomans. The poem is styled similarly to greats like Beowulf or The Green Knight. Stylized with a few modern flourishes, Bence is more concerned about the myth of the man rather than the factual (oftentimes less exaggerated) events. This poem sings with the unrhythmic sounds of swords a-clatter, with just a hint of those beautiful physical metaphors which made Robert E. Howard’s descriptions of Conan ring with lyrical brutality.

As the raging rapids, the thing tottered

legs long as wizened trunks of trees,

Kinizsi surged strong as a storm from

the rolling river and approached

the great giant of fur whose bones

were bound as tough as bronze,

whose breaths were winds of Winter,

jaw agape with steaming savage hunger,

Kinizsi beheld it a titan thudding towards him.

Oil paints, that’s what Bence writes in. Thick, rich, lush, vibrant. A veritable renaissance of words steeped in classical ideas and themes. His poems are sweeping events indicative of the classical poet-playwright, sweeping assertions firmly affixed in Christian and religious imagery and ideas. I’m picky when it comes to writing. I prefer my classics. But is one of those few writers I find myself waiting anxiously for new work to come out. He’s a gem polished when people read his work.

If you come out of this at all curious, go check out this wonderful doom-seer of a poet. And when he does decide to grace us with a novel, be sure to get a copy. Incredible writers are hard to come by, but by supporting them, they can get the recognition they deserve.

This concludes my rambling.

A faery portal to logging off

Thaddeus Thomas — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 11:02:51 GMT

The Champion Series

Guest Author:

Since I don’t have a lot of time right now to spend reading and scrolling, I knew that my author choice would be based on impulse, on reading a story and thinking this is it.

Enter , author of “Notes from the Edge”.

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writes fantasy, my favorite type of fantasy, which I would call modern fairytales (not necessarily implying a modern setting). Her stories are infused with myth, folklore and often a strong sense of ambience, of the transforming influence of our immediate surroundings. In my favorite short story of hers, “Skellig”, which describes the spiritual journey of a medieval Christian monk at the edge of the world and deservedly won a Lunar Award here on Substack, the natural world as a teacher becomes a literal character:

“She is earth, slate, grass and sea - and that is why he can’t escape from her. No matter how much he works, no matter how much he prays, he is inhaling her with every breath; with every minuscule raindrop, she is caressing his skin.”

Her prose is concise, carrying across the love of the beauty inherent to our environment and life itself. Her stories are often based on British folk tales or Greek mythology, such as her serialized novel “Underworld”, a reimagining of the myth of Persephone.

Multiple of her short stories, such as “Changeling” and “Selkie Skin” are set in modern day, and the blend between modern reality and the metaphorical, fantastical is effortless. Often, the characters are modern, but subject to the inevitable pull of the mythical, which ends up taking them over by the end of the story. This is something that I find myself strongly relating to (in the metaphorical sense - I have yet to be kidnapped by a faery).

My favorite aspect of her writing, however, is the effect upon reading: There is a wholesome tranquility to it. When I finish a story of hers, my impulse is not to keep scrolling, but to close the app and be present for my child, maybe take him exploring in the neighbourhood. With the amount of distractions available in this day and age, this is the kind of fiction I enjoy most nowadays:

Fiction that is not indulgent, that, while maybe sucking you under for a little, always washes you back up on the shores of your own here and now.

If any of this sounds like your jam, I urge you to check out “Notes from the Edge”

———-

This Ode to Katherine Kapodistria was written by , author of ”Poor Translations.”

Dunmorian Worlds

Thaddeus Thomas — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 12:31:27 GMT

Today’s Champion post is written by , who tells us:

I’ve made no secret of my real-life friendship with , but it would be a mistake to think that I champion his writing because I like the guy personally.

If anything, our friendship only compounds the mercilessness of my criticism—as Ian will be the first to tell you.

Honesty (and trust) from an editor can be hard to come by. You might think that I offer that to Ian simply because he’s my friend. You’d be wrong.

Instead, I’ve spent I-don’t-know-how-many hours reading, pondering, and analyzing Dunmore’s stories for one simple reason: he’s a damn good storyteller.

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Dunmorian Worlds

Recently Ian shared a draft with me and asked one of the most important questions a writer can ask: Do I have something here? Is this story worth pursuing?

I told him something that I’ve found myself saying more and more lately:

“You’ve got a solid story here, man. It’s very Dunmorian.”

What exactly do you mean by that? he asked.

Let me tell you.

Every piece of Dunmore’s fiction has its own poignant sense of place.

Lumping this feat under the word “setting” does it a disservice. The world of his stories is so irrevocably braided into his narratives that it functions like a character all on its own. That remains true whether the story brings us leaping over pure glacial streams or into the fecal gutters of an overpopulated city. It’s the kind of thing you can’t edit into a work—it has to be there at the first conception of thought.

Dunmore writes high fantasy. For the genre, setting is the fulcrum of the narrative; if the setting fails, the story fails. Most of us fantasists settle for a secondary world which won’t break the story, and if we’re lucky it will add a memorable flavor.

Dunmore puts that standard to shame. His settings don’t add a bit of flavor, they add backbone. They are like bedrock beneath the narrative. Even when the fantastical arrives—in the form of a ghost, or a werewolf, or a spellcasting presbyter—it usually feels like finding the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The shape of the picture was already there, but only now is it seamless.

The distinct sense of place is a hint of something deeper within Dunmore’s writing; paradoxical as it sounds, he often manages to craft a fiction of unbridled reality.

Yes, even in fantasy.

A Dunmorian story is one that contains exactly zero sugarcoating, but never reaches for cheap shock value. More importantly, it does not bend to the lazy, grimdark nihilism of other so-called “realistic” fantasy.

Sometimes, the unbridled reality takes the gritty form of a character accidentally urinating on another man…

When I swung to regard him, so drunk was I that I brought my golden stream with me and blessed the highwaymen’s shank with its warmth. (A Luten in the City)

Sometimes, it appears more poetically in those moments of breath between faster action…

The pottage continued to seethe upon the small brick oven, its aroma mixing unpleasantly with the soldiers’ damp equipment laid out to dry by its heat. Rain danced on the roof. Somewhere outside a bolt pulsed from the sky and drew the white shape of shutters on the opposite wall. Hammerstrike followed. (How a Magister Fights)

Often, the reality of a story is bone-deep. It shows up in humanity’s willingness to kill, rob, pillage. But it also shows through tiny acts of charity—a bit of bread for a starving girl, strong drink for a freezing man—that bring redemption greater than suffering. It can show up both in the death of the innocent and in a character’s resolute choice of hope over despair.

On a more specific level, I appreciate Dunmore’s commitment to the craft of prose writing and the commitment to play to the strengths of the written medium. In “Wyrmslayer,” he displays the grotesque appearance of serpentine monsters while also implying the grim barbarity required to slay them. Then, using only a series of images in a character’s mind, he shows that character’s past, motives, wounds, insecurities, and failures.

“Esteemed subjects and friends,” he began. The hall echoed with cheers. […] He faltered as he looked at their faces. Two hundred men stared at him. Among them, he was youngest. He had trained for this hunt for over a year, yet here at the start of his journey he felt not a speck of the brimming virility this whole company seemed to embody. Every step, every toast, every morsel of food on this journey was as choreographed as a court dance, as empty as the nag’s gaze, as shallow as the rain puddles on the flagstones.

He thought of his mother and her smothering affection. He thought of the tears she’d shed when the expedition had cast off from Vilkinia’s quay a few days prior, and the mortification he’d felt at her bawling even as the fleet left port. He thought of his father, who hadn’t even bothered to be there, likely in another town with another of his many mistresses, busily producing more bastards.

Rain tapped on stone. Burning logs popped and spat. Smoke drifted into the young man’s eyes. Surely, it was smoke. Why else would he be smudging away tears? Why else would the Guardsman put an arm around him and mercifully ushered him away? Why else would the lodge’s merriment have ended so soon and so somberly?

Other writers would bend their narratives to “show” these things or would find ways to shove all this into dialogue. Not Dunmore, because he uses prose do things visual media cannot. And the story is all the more intimate for that.

Prose, of course, often comes down to taste. There are those who use prose to show a movie in the reader’s head, leaving the medium’s unique tools unused. There are also those who stretch every sentence to the edge of its own logic—speaking almost entirely in metaphor—as a way to get the most out of every word. Personally, I prefer neither. I want both, interspersed. It’s what I think delivers the best impact for most stories. Dunmorian prose hits that mark.

I’ll tell you one more thing I love about a Dunmore story: it will always give you something new.

It’s all high fantasy, but he can tackle disparate subjects and story structures. It’s something many writers strive for but few accomplish.

Everything I said above was about depth, but Dunmore has breadth too.

In his corpus of work you can find first-person ghost stories and third-person action-adventures. You can find stories that read like dark fairy-tales, and monster thrillers packed with symbolism and ethnic division. A Dunmore story might be interspersed with metered poetry or with philosophical treaties.

I’m afraid I’m making it sound eclectic. It’s not. Each of these conceits serves the story in which it lives. Nothing is extra. There are tragedies and comedies. Happy endings and melancholic ones.

And under it all is that same bedrock of place and realism.

Not sure what else to say. I just think it works!

They say you should write the sorts of stories that you want to read. That motivation doesn’t work for me all that well, because Ian Dunmore is writing those stories faster than I am. You should read them.

— Eric Falden

Dougherty's Bestiary and Where to Find It

Thaddeus Thomas — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 12:03:07 GMT

The Champion Series is brought to you by Literary Salon. Discover fiction worth talking about.

Jane Dougherty's Bestiary

Dougherty's Bestiary and Where to Find It

is a writer not limited to one form. Publishing both poetry and short fiction on Substack, her stories are frequently sourced from the myths and legends of the Celtic and Norse peoples, either directly or carrying echoes, although her inspirations go far beyond this and her range of written work is wide. Her stories have been published by Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Lucent Dreaming, among others Jane’s fiction isn’t often gentle; she writes of the points at which a life changes, loses innocence, loses faith or love, gives itself over to darkness:

Under stone

I’ve seen writers post citing ‘Macabre Monday’. I don’t know what it is or where, but here is a short story that might fit. I am certain it’s Monday, if nothing else…

a year ago · 21 likes · 19 comments · Jane Dougherty

Not always: there is love and light, too, but she’s not predictable, and sometimes the love is of a sort that will break your heart:

Jane Dougherty's Bestiary

Lola

The boy shuffled about on the piece of cardboard. Better than sitting on the ground but he was still frozen. The dog raised her head from her paws and looked at him. He reached out and scratched her ear…

a year ago · 27 likes · 42 comments · Jane Dougherty

Jane has books publishing this year: a historical fantasy series with Northodox, and a historical reconstruction of the Pasiphaë myth with Legend Press.

While I admire and look forward to Jane’s short stories, it’s her poems that produce awe in me:

will we sing this year alive
with violet and muscari blue, sky-swept,
play the damp tree bark green with unfurling,
shout with geese and cormorants
winding skeins above the river

Jane Dougherty's Bestiary

Orfeo

Orfeo the weight of sorrow, hope, distrust, was too great to balance on the staves of lyre-music. Understandable distrust made you turn, the shade, too light to make a leaf-patter in the living world, unheard, you saw, drawn back into deeper dark, a plaintive twist of fading notes, a hand clutching empty air…

a year ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Jane Dougherty

Using images, echoes of myths, cadence and rhythm, all the ways words convey place and mood and meaning, her poetry touches me deeply.

Both in her prose and poetry, Jane’s writing speaks of a lifetime of reading, the influences of writers like Yeats and Joyce reflected in her work. Coming from a family of poets and artists, having spent a year learning Irish, self taught in Italian, delving into the Norse roots of Yorkshire dialect – language and its nuances, the words whose meanings are subtle, local, untranslatable – this all clearly matters to Jane, and that is reflected in her stories and poetry. So too are the deeper meanings of myths, and a sense of the turn of the seasons and the years, the moments and repeated rhythms that become our lives, captured and expressed.

Jane’s three collections of poetry are: night horses, thicker than water, and birds and other feathers

— Marian L. Thorpe

My substack:

If you want to champion a writer, you can. See details in the link below but feel free to send your essay in at any time. Word limit: approx: 500 words, but I won’t reject based on length.

Jane’s Bio:

Pushcart Prize nominee, Jane Dougherty's poetry has appeared in publications including Gleam, Ogham Stone, Black Bough Poetry, Ekphrastic Review and The Storms Journal. Her short stories have been published in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Lucent Dreaming among others, and her first adult novel will be published in July 2025 by Northodox Press.

Her retelling of the story of Pasiphaë will be published by Legend Press in winter 2025/2026.

She lives in southwest France and has published . three collections of poetry, thicker than water, birds and other feathers and night horses.

I was brought up in Yorkshire, in an Irish Catholic community. We were a bookish and artistic family, father and grandfather wrote poetry and mother painted, and I was always a reader, but developed a fascination with language in general. Yorkshire dialect, it turned out, was descended from Old Norse, which explained why it sounded like a foreign language, and why my Pseudo-Norwegian characters in The Darkest Tide sound like Yorkshire folk. I taught myself Italian because although I've never lived there, Rome that l've visited often since I was small, is the city that I feel most affection for. After university I bluffed my way into a job with a Paris wine merchant, took Irish lessons for a year at the Irish College, and never went back to the UK.

I started writing for my teenage children who, being good republicans, complained about the fantasy books in the library, all deposed princes, rightful thrones, and other royalist propaganda. I wrote them something different and never stopped. I had a few false starts with publishers. The first fantasy series that I took back from the publisher, and a second YA sff series that would have been okay if the publisher hadn't decided to go full-on romance, leaving my very unromantic series high and dry.

Although I've written a lot since then, mainly adult, spec-fic, historical fantasy, mash-ups of Norse and Irish myth, a Yorkshire Gothic novel, a double time-line mystery and a historical reconstruction of the Pasipha myth, I wasn't getting any agents interested. Then Northodox, a north of England publisher, accepted a historical fantasy series, and at more or less the same time, Legend Press accepted the Pasiphaë story. I'm hoping this might drum up some interest in the other stories. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying posting short fiction and poetry on Substack.

One Writer's Legacy

Thaddeus Thomas — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 18:31:15 GMT

is the author of the award-winning historical fantasy Empire’s Legacy series. Her Substack publication History, Landscape, Birds and Stories is here.

By of Thin Air Fiction

MARIAN L. THORPE LIVES at the intersection of eloquence and understated.

She creates worlds rich in culture and landscape, while shunning lardy expressions and hyperbole. Her landscapes set moods and drive scenes forward. Her stories espouse themes of divided loyalties as she must have felt herself at times, having homes in Canada and the United Kingdom.

She calls her fiction work, such as the Empire’s Legacy series of eight books, historical fantasy, minus the dragons and magic. But they are much more.

Likewise, her short stories and poems are adept at transporting readers into the drizzle and sunshine, the mountains, rivers and villages of the Middle Ages, in lands reminiscent of Scandinavia, northern England and Scotland.

The short story Escape illustrates the simple beauty of Marian’s skill at creating mood and establishing pace. It’s on Substack at

History, Landscape, Birds & Stories

Escape

So many people! In the fifteen years and more since the Marai had taken me and Niav, Eluf had kept me on his farmstead, several days inland and many hours’ ride from the next settlement. Once Niav had died, her babe with her, there was no one to speak to, not in my language. And Eluf forbade me teac…

a year ago · 3 likes · Marian L Thorpe

The story, set in a Scandinavian-like place, lays down its marker in the first few paragraphs. Readers are shown a rugged landscape, as a captive bride narrates the gathering of the clans for her daughter’s wedding.

Readers are immersed in the culture of the people. They are dropped into the dark north, the isolation depicted in the landscape and in the determined, practicality of Lady Jordis of Eganstorp.

Yet for all its descriptive feel and sense of place and people, readers are not once jolted away from the central story by awkward recitals of the surroundings or back stories. It is all fluid, one cohesively told tale. It is a talent more writers should heed.

In this excerpt, pacing and the sounds of the words themselves elevate the sense of quiet and stealth as the escape unfolds:

I took off the new shoes: my feet were used to being bare, and I would be quieter. I pulled my shawl up over my light hair, and slipped onto the jetty. I could just see Dugi on his boat. Eganstorp, where I’d grown up, was a coastal holding. I knew boats. I slid over the gunwales, barely rocking the little craft.

As a footnote, Marian writes Escape was originally written as a writing group challenge to craft a story of hope. The characters were pulled from one of her novels, but it is a stand-alone story.

Then there is the Hrothgar and Hryllingur series, loosely based on Beowulf, a work of immense achievement.

This story is no modern retelling of the ancient tale. It is a new story based on three translations of Beowulf.

In it, Sorley, a young poet and musician, sings the story of a monster raiding on the marshes.

Here is an excerpt from the part when the monster Hryllingur crashes the hall and sets upon the sleeping guards:

Giving to the fates
Their futures, Heorot’s hall-guards
Drowsed in the dark. All but Bjarndýr:
Wakeful, watchful, waiting for his foe,
For his oath to honour.
Hidden by night came
Hryllingur, cloud-shrouded, hunting
Hrothgar’s hall, bright bale-fire burning
In his eyes; his heart angered, empty,
Holding naught by hatred.
In ire he wrenched wide
The door of oak and iron bars:
No barrier to doom. Blood lust
Leaping, Hryllingur laughed long
At warriors asleep:
So simple to slay!
Flesh for feasting; hunger quenched.
One sleeper taken, blood and bone
Devoured: Bjarndýr next to bear
The creature’s deadly claw.

Hrothgar and Hryllingur is a poem worthy of study. Marian’s trademark skill of ensuring every word hefts its share of the workload is spotlighted.

We find more examples of this in Marian’s informative, contemplative strolls through the marshes and fields of the English countryside.

A piece titled Walking to Snettisham takes readers down pathways near the English east coast. The piece describes the scenes as though readers were travelling with the author, while history strolls arm-in-arm on the journey. Marian’s father walked the route 100 years before.

The story blends present and past in a colourful mosaic. We see the present, hear the chirping in the wind, and feel the damp in passages like this:

There’s usually fair birding along here: finches and tits near the houses; green woodpecker and curlew in the pastures, sometimes oystercatchers. Buzzards hunt the rabbits, and red kites soar, hoping for roadkill. (The muntjac fulfill that hope, in spades.)

All the while, a much older story lurks underfoot. We’re told that about 14 separate hoards buried between 150 BC and 100 AD, were unearthed here, and make up one of the largest discoveries of prehistoric precious metal objects ever. A large collection of Celtic art was also discovered.

And to bring it home, Marian adds human touches.

Excerpt: The ploughman that found the first piece thought that he had ploughed up part of a brass bedstead. The Snettisham Treasure.

There is so much to love here — the feeling of a landscape infiltrating all, the vivid stories realized through the use of simple word choices, even while understanding that anything this good is never simple.

I leave you with the ending of Snettisham. It makes me feel like I am home, even though my home is nothing like it.

Permissive paths take us past a marlpit, now filled with trees, and across the old allotment grounds — where, to our delight, the first butterfly of the year, a peacock, flutters by. Two hares are boxing in the field of winter cereals, and a red kite is perched on a pole. We walk down a steepish lane where grain mills once stood, past the lumps and bumps of medieval water management in the neighbouring fields (which almost always have curlews), past the 17th century tithe barn and the jackdaws playing around the tower of the church where my great-grandparents are buried, and home again.

By Terry A. Fries

See below for Marian’s biography.

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Biography of Marian L. Thorpe

Once a scientist, once an educator, now a writer of poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction.

I grew up in a small farming town in southern Ontario, reading voraciously and roaming fields and woods with my dog, not quite fitting in as a first-generation Canadian in a community settled by United Empire Loyalists, hearing the stories of “home” from my grandparents and parents.

Now I call both Canada and England home, and almost everything I write is informed by my love of landscape and place, and by the questions of divided loyalties and multiple loves, and the meaning of home.

I have written all my life. My first adult published work came in my mid-30s, with poetry, followed by a long unpublished spell, due partly to the demands of work and caring for my aging parents, partly due to a lot of travel, and partly due to my dissatisfaction with anything I wrote.

In the late 1990s, I began writing the book that became my first published novel, Empire’s Daughter. I retired for health reasons in 2015, the year it was published. Cutting-edge treatment (thank you, Canada’s universal healthcare) meant another 10 years of life (to this date), which I used to write another seven books, all in one series.

I have birded (and generally observed nature) all my life, since very early childhood. It’s an avocation that has taken me to witness the endless light at both ends of the earth: summers in the Antarctic and the Arctic.

I have taken part in foot safaris in Botswana among lions, visited mountainsides in Mongolia and was rewarded with the unbelievable sight of a snow leopard in the wild. Nature has taken me to the Platte in March surrounded by thousands upon thousands of sandhill cranes and snow geese, to the marshes of Norfolk and an equal number of pink-footed geese.

Now with that first fictional series complete, I find myself wanting to return to non-fiction, and specifically to writing about the intersection of landscape and history and nature.

This was, actually, my first venture into serious writing when I was 17, a study of the coming of spring that was cut short by mononucleosis.

I joined Substack with that in mind, got sidetracked by its fiction possibilities too, and the place-writing took a back seat.

I had two Substack publications: Landscapes of Memory; and History and Imagination. I set it up this way to separate place-writing from fiction. But that wasn’t working for a couple of reasons — Notes always come from my main site, which is History and Imagination (now renamed History, Birds and Imagination) —and I was simply holding back on the place writing, awed by the quality of the nature writing I was reading.

I’ve always changed directions about every seven years throughout my adult life, either changing jobs entirely or changing the areas of responsibility within a job. I’ve been restless for a few years now, and I recognize it’s time I did something different. Not that I’ll stop writing fiction — there is a new series well underway, but I need it not to be all that I do.

My books aren’t mainstream (or even tributary) reading. They have their niche following, they’ve won some awards, and I know I am at least one (unrelated to me) reader’s favourite author. I’m comfortable with that.

Assuming luck and medicine give me another 10 productive years, what do I want to do with it? That’s what I’m exploring right now, and largely on Substack.

The Most Underrated Author on Substack

Thaddeus Thomas — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 13:45:56 GMT

is the most underrated author on Substack. His Scrapbook publication is undefinable, other than to label it as he has: experimental prose. He writes stories that don’t look like stories,

Oh—! (in surprise) Naturally, you might think, in surprise. Oh—! What else but surprise? But then you already imagine alternatives— the songsaid Oh— of a launching into ballad, or the delighted Oh— with which one greets a pup. (You are not…

＃１１４

a year ago · 5 likes · Jack Nagy

he writes surveys that do look like stories.

a year ago · 3 likes · Jack Nagy

＃１０４

HEY, READER …

he writes thoughts that looks like an acid trip,

Your addictions are like crack to me. Nothing better than two lungfuls of secondhand smoke to a non-smoker, retrieving a dropped quarter in the gaming room and slotting it for frail Aunt Julie. ‘Kind young man’, she says. Lady, the pleasure’s all mine. At festivals, I loiter in the bottleneck of the portapotty queues, make ‘em shove past me with a co…

＃９４

a year ago · 6 likes · Jack Nagy

— he even writes About pages that look like stories (check it out, it’s hilarious). His stuff sometimes falls more neatly into genres like scifi

Written for my partner in 2020 as part of a birthday present. Dug out while sorting old presents into cloud storage, and posted with her blessing…

＃１１０ ▪ The Plaque

a year ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Jack Nagy

or litfic or fantasy

In our village, the custom was to float all problems down the river. An elder would etch your worries on sal bark and cast them into the water at dawn. Then fisherwomen by the ocean would look for aloft bark and scoop it in their nets. If your problem made it downstream by evening, it was worth further effort or arbitration. If it caught on a branc…

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a year ago · 7 likes · Jack Nagy

but you never know what you’re in for except that it’ll be extremely well-written. There have been numerous stories where I learned more about writing just by observing the way Jack does it.

Another thing I respect is that for Nagy, it’s clearly not about becoming popular. It’s all about the craft — the creation, the expression. All of his story titles are numbers. Many can’t even be commented on, and I get the sense it’s because for Nagy, it’s not about the praise or the recognition — it’s just about the art. You can just tell that he will write things worth reading, with or without a reader, and I respect that so much. I have restacked so many of his stories that at one point I worried people would become annoyed.

Please, do yourself a favor and read some of his stuff. It’s sometimes weird. It’s sometimes funny. It’s always excellent.

- the craft of Jack Nagy has been presented to you by of Loser’s Fiction AKA Nagy’s Biggest Fan™.

Loser’s Fiction

PUSH

This is an answer to the Open Call of Sum Flux’s second Volume, a project begun initially by Sandolore Sykes, and contributed to by many insanely talented others. Peep the prompt here and join the fun…

a year ago · 23 likes · 21 comments · Keith Long

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