✒ Editor’s Note
Welcome back, Talestack Readers!
Greetings from the merry madness of March…
Your Editor confesses that March is my FAVORITE month! Despite this time of year giving us many tastes of “false spring” here in my neighborhood, I love the increasing feeling that we’ve turned a seasonal corner. And there must be some similar feelings in the fiction community, because spring is shaping up to be a BUSY time, around here!
Case in point: this issue is packed with projects, released books, and even some fun opportunities to connect through submissions. Lots to explore!
As always, please hype each other up in the comments. Go visit, explore, give virtual high-fives, and let your colleagues know that you’re with them.
Have a fantastic week, and happy writing!
S.E. Reid
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📣 Announcements!
Finished Projects:
story whale of story whale bedtime stories has just finished up a first full kidlit novel on the platform, called The Beast of the Forest. Excerpt: “Everyone in town had heard stories about the Beast of the Forest. Some said he was ten feet tall with purple skin. Apparently, if you were within fifty yards of him, his tongue could shoot out of his mouth like a frog's tongue and snatch you up. The tongue would then promptly retract back into his mouth so that he could swallow you whole. Or at least that was what all of the town parents would tell their kids...” Read Part One here!
Vince Wetzel of Salted Wetzel with a side of mustard has concluded his five-part serial, The Intern. Synopsis: “Javier has the opportunity of a lifetime. As an intern for a major league baseball team, he'll spend the season learning the game, enduring pranks, and finding love. Told over the course of a baseball season, The Intern is a ‘prequel’ of sorts and sets the stage for the novel Lose Yourself, out April 2.” Read Part One here!
S.E. Reid’s episodic serial, a paranormal mystery (with a side of seafaring strangeness)—called Freelance and Fishmaids—has just finished its first 12-episode arc. Synopsis: “After getting fired from her job as a small-town journalist for moonlighting as a paranormal investigator, Caroline Phelan is urged to go freelance by her informant, a mysterious man she knows only as ‘the Captain’. Armed with her trusty camera called Scully, Caroline travels to Ferris Island’s paranormal hotspots and learns surprising lore along the way. But in her search for the strangest stories on Ferris Island, she comes face to face with a few of the island’s deepest secrets, some of which still echo through time.” The story will continue with a “second season” in Summer 2024!
New Projects:
Leanne Shawler has just launched an alternate history romantasy series called The Môrdreigiau Chronicles, “which seeks to immerse the reader into a world where magical diaries can be found, mythical sea dragons roam the seas, and quests for Arthurian objects just may save the world from ecological destruction.” The first book is called A Grail for Eidothea and is set in 1814 on the west coast of Wales. (Leanne adds, “Did I mention there are sea dragons?”)
Michael P. Marpaung and Scoot have released their first short fiction entry to their collaborative science fiction project, Bima Sakti. The story is called The View. Synopsis: “On the flight to Jakarta, Randy Sanderson got a good look at the LASK.”
E. H. Lau of Lotis Heroes Musings published the first short story—called The Witch of the Gingerbread House—in a new series called Red Riding Hood Saga - Further Adventures of Red Riding Hood. From E.H.: “The new series is a sequel (technically interquel) to the original Red Riding Hood Saga trilogy, and it follows Red as she searches for a cure for her beloved Princess Snow White.”
Debs Stott’s The Curious Questers fiction series is just entering its second season over on Of Mappery. Debs explains, “My whole fiction series is retrospectively written as stories around abstract art maps I've created. So the maps act as prompts, but also contexts and locations for the stories. The stories (which all form a whole) follow the characters as they have adventures in and around the fictional map places.” Read the first episode of Series Two here!
Fiction writer Michael P. Marpaung has just started a poetry Substack. Check out V is for Poetry here!
📚 The Bookshelf
(Titles listed in order of release date.)
L.C. Marino’s haunting psychological horror, Burn The Girls, is now available on Amazon! Release Date: 2/25/24
Lisa Kuznak’s adult literary fantasy, The Highwayman Kennedy Thornwick, is now available on Amazon! Release Date: 2/27/24
The first book in Brooke Tiedt’s New Adult urban fantasy series, Imprinted, is now available on Amazon! Release Date: 3/4/24
📝 Submissions Bulletin
A reminder from the terror-loving team over at Macabre Monday: the deadline for the latest Wicked Writing Contest is looming on March 18th! If you’re a horror writer—or you want to try your hand at some spooky tales—head quickly over to the contest page to check out the prompt, guidelines, and how to submit!
The newly-formed Qstack, a directory of LGBTQ+ creators on Substack run by Mr. Troy Ford, is calling for submissions—including fiction! Check out the Submissions Page for details and guidelines.
It’s almost time for the second Gibberish Writing Competition, hosted by Scoot! In his recent March Update post, Scoot included the following details about the upcoming GWC24:
It's to help discover and amplify up-and-coming Substack fiction writers with less than 200 subs.
Five contestants are chosen to "compete" (really against themselves) in three writing challenges.
Detailed and personal feedback is given on each story to help these writers grow.
It is NOT for the faint of heart!
The details of GWC24 will be announced in a more detailed post coming March 8th to Gibberish, so be on the lookout!
❤ Shout-Outs
Jonathan Delp would like to shout out Lynn Embick of Mundane Magic, a writer who has been super supportive of his writing journey, and who is so razor-sharp consistent in her own. From Jonathan: “By the time your new Talestack goes live, Lynn Embick will be passing the halfway point of writing a new story for 71 straight weeks as she bases prompts on an entire tarot card deck. She’s at 35 straight weeks without missing a week, and I know that she is a ‘working writer’ with a full-time job like the rest of us. So, congratulations to her.”
Got something you want us to publish? Have any questions, comments, or feedback? Send it all to:
talestack.editor@gmail.com
I may be slightly biased but the announcement that "Freelance and Fishmaids" will have a second season just made my day!!! Yahoo!
Thanks for these! I don't have a ton of bandwidth to keep up with everyone, but I love the brevity and ability to peek in there quickly to see what everyone's up to.