Writing

A cultist has second thoughts on the cusp of enlightenment.

This is a short story I wrote about a year or two ago, and is one of the first pieces I finished completely. It went through several rounds of edits and some beta readers before it was done, and I learned a lot in the process. It’s a bit niche, however, and I’ve not had any luck submitting it to competitions and magazines, so here it is in all its melancholic glory. ...

I have been thinking a lot about dystopias recently, prompted by a precarious visit to my old smuggling work-in-progress. My aim was to flesh out the world building and establish precisely the kind of dystopia the unfortunate main character lived within. Perhaps inevitably, as I waded into what I hoped to be a sea of multidimensional compelling dystopia, I found a shallow imitation of it. The obvious questions is: what makes a compelling dystopia? Is it a political satire, with the big bad government oppressing the people? Is it a social separation of different kinds of people based on class, or thoughts, or where they live? Maybe it is all of those things. ...

Writing is hard. Did I ever mention that?

I made progress.