Author: devadmin

First things first, because I know you love first things: There’s a new story! It’s called Slumber Farm Janitor and it’s about the future of elder care. Is it better than what we’ve got today? Worse? Only way to find out is to read it.

(Starting with After the Cops, I’ve been writing what I think of as ‘municipal science fiction.’ I still love a hypercosmic spacewar now and then, as a treat, but I also love to think about how things could be different, especially when mediated by new technologies. See also NECROCHROME. A few more should be trickling out over the next few months.)

Slumber Farm Janitor originally appeared on my Patreon, but if all goes well, I’m going to wind that down by shifting hosting and payments for new fiction to… right here! After decades of dodging it, I’m setting this site up for e-commerce.

What this means for me is, I’ll no longer be giving Patreon a cut and I won’t have to worry about their data breach screwing my fans, or about their executives making some decision that screws us both. If you have any hesitation about trusting payment details to me, know that (1) it all goes through Stripe and PayPal, like everything else and (2) I am more trustworthy than an internet business that depends on perpetual growth in order to rake in venture capital.

As soon as I can manage it, www.gregstolze.com is going to grow options for small monthly subscriptions, and I hope to kick it all of with an epic fantasy serial, The Moon Silver Crown.

Stay tuned. It’s gonna get good.

Patreon-ed last year, Years Away is now available here, you can click that link and read it, go on! It’s the story of a social worker who specializes in recovered kidnap victims, for reasons that become more and more apparent as the story progresses. It’s not horror or fantasy, and it’s about crime, but I kind of hesitate to call it one of my crime stories. Check it out.

In other news, Pragta of the Happy House successfully funded. If you missed out on the crowdfunding, or just hate Kickstarter for whatever reason, you can now buy it at DriveThruFiction. It’s the story of a teen girl who finds her way to adulthood while tending the needs of a feverish and injured courtesan while the two of them flee the destruction of their hometown. It’s a lark.

Finally, I’m putting Free Throw up on my Patreon this month. If you’re looking at fantasy and crime-lit, wondering “When’s Stolze going to do some scary stuff, as is appropriate to the season?” then check that one out. It’s my assay into Catholic horror, as distinct from horror that just happens to concern Catholics.

In the next four days, Pragta of the Happy House concludes on Kickstarter.

The good news is, it’s hit goal, it’s printed and laid out, it’s definitely happening and it’s ready to go.

The bad news is, I’ve made sixty print zines of it, each with a unique cover, and only thirty of them have been claimed. OH WAIT, THAT’S ONLY BAD NEWS FOR ME, FOR YOU IT MEANS YOU CAN STILL GET ONE!

Pragta is a high-fantasy disaster story in which a sheltered teenage girl and one of her mothers sees the only home she’s known destroyed and has to flee, penniless, in the hold of a ship full of strangers. (Other than the aforementioned mom, that is.) But she steps up in a big way, helping the ship’s doctor and getting charged with nursing Pragta–the city’s most beautiful courtesan, who is feverish and battling an infection on her injured foot. A few storms, pirate attacks and blackout drinking sessions later, lessons are learned, but there’s no happily ever after. At least not yet.

This is the third novella in a well-received cycle, after Ninki Goes to the Arcane Academy and Into Debt Goes Ank. If you read Ninki, remember how her best friend’s mom worked at the Happy House? Yeah. This is her. On the Cocorai, the boat that rescued Ank. But if you haven’t read those, no problem–this story stands on its own, but also, if you want the whole Borzhu enchilada, you can get the first two at a mild but pleasant discount. Hell, you can even pick up a cool patch as an add-on.

If that’s not enough to excite you, how about a free Unknown Armies story?

Mick and the Love was paid for on Patreon a year ago, and has thus matriculated out to the free library here. That system may undergo some meaningful changes presently, stay tuned for that–but what it means right now is, on schedule, you get a free story about a manly and alluring podcaster talking about love problems with a middle-manager/thaumaturge.

Hope you like it!

-G.

First, best and nicest—the Patreon process has yielded another monthly story, Mick and the Beef, in which our titular podcaster and ex-rock-star psychic gets involved with incel culture, family, and a reality show called American Beefcake.

Secondly, and almost as good, I’m gearing up for the next Borzhu novella Kickstarter, so start scraping together your couch change for that fantasy disaster goodness. You can read a few pages of Pragta of the Happy House here.

Finally, and least happy of all… Patreon appears to be in a position of choosing between Apple’s preferences, and the needs of its smallest and most niche creators (like me). Obviously, I’d be a fool to expect a crowdfunding site for creators to privilege creators over funding, so I’m looking for alternatives. Nothing’s changing immediately, but please—get ready.

I’m posting this on my 30th wedding anniversary, so I hope you can excuse me for being a little sincere. I’m updating the Patreon with the first romance story I’ve written with the intention of ‘this story’s going to be a romance!’ It’s called Gorgeous Synergies and it’s pretty funny. Also kinda long.

The inspiration for Gorgeous Synergies was something my wife and I saw on our trip to Vancouver as an early 30th anniversary trip, so, I guess today we’re coming full circle.

A year ago or so, I posted Granddad’s Mystery House on the Patreon, where it got a very good reception. Now it’s here, for free. It’s also a very sincere story. I dunno. Maybe as I age I’m getting soft and sweet. Read it and tell me what you think.

The Patreon has 54 subscribers, at the moment. I’d like to get it to 100 at least, and if you can’t pitch in five bucks a month right now, I get it. But it would also help me out if you spread the word. It often feels like social media, and the tech sector in general, have gotten actively hostile towards writers and artists, and about the only counter-punch we have left is personal connections. If you could help me out with that, it would mean a lot. Thanks.

-G.

My fiction’s all over the place here. So, first up: A Pedophile Wrote Your Favorite Song. Can you guess what the trigger warning for this one is? Yeah, it deals with sexual violence, though it does not contain explicit descriptions. It’s also about telepathy and a meditation on who victimizes and who doesn’t.

Also, if you’ve somehow missed me crowing from the rooftops about it, Into Debt Goes Ank, a decidedly more upbeat high fantasy story, is Kickstarting now. As of this writing, two of the cool zines with hand-made covers are still available. But it’s only running for forty more hours…

Finally, if you’re not on the Patreon, please consider it. I’m trying to get to 100 followers by the end of the year, and if I have to tempt you with the Unknown Armies-based story Mick and the Crow Girl, well, that’s what I just added today. Thanks!

It is my great honor and delight to have a place with the Aurora Writer’s Workshop this summer, teaching a class on creative writing. The full details are here, but the long and short of it is, you can join me in a small group in which we explore the best individual way you can get your creativity operating. It frustrates me that a lot of writing advice is from well-meaning people who’ve found something that works for them and who then present it as the universal method that works for everyone. I don’t believe there’s one true way. If there was, we’d have found it by now. So instead, I focus on helping people identify the individual modes that work for them, and providing advice on how to implement those specific strategies.

In short, it’s tailored instead of uni-size. If you can reach the Chicago suburbs June 7-9, don’t you deserve to have advice that’s specific to you?

The other exciting thing I have going on is Into Debt Goes Ank, the second of the Borzhu fantasy-disaster novellas. You can read the opening of it here, and if you think that was cool and thrilling, wait ’til you see what happens when the town starts exploding.

Into Debt Goes Ank is on Kickstarter right now, where you pledge for it in electronic format or, for a bit more, get one of sixty printed zine copies, each of which has a unique cover hand-made by the author. (The one pictured above is one of my favorites.) Act now, as they say, while supplies last.

Oh, and if you’re concerned that you won’t be able to follow if you haven’t read the first Borzhu story (1) don’t worry, they’re independent and (2) there’s an option to get it cheap as an add-on. Enjoy!

-G.

First off, as you might gather from the image, there’s a new story up in the fiction library, and it’s called Letter From a Killer. Guess what it’s about? Yeah, grotty scary crime. Do you suppose a handsome cop shows up to make everything OK? Probably not, but I guess you have to read to find out. This one actually won the Richard Eastman Founder’s Prize for prose in 2021. Cool, huh?

This originally was published in Rivulets magazine in 2021, before hitting my Patreon in 2023, and now it’s here. If you’re not on the Patreon, please consider it. I know it’s a bizarre year, but I’d like to hit a hundred backers. That doesn’t feel like too big an ask, if I’m the one you ask.

In other fiction news, the sequel to Ninki Goes to the Arcane Academy is going to hit Kickstarter on the 25th of this month! I’ve got sixty zine copies of Into Debt Goes Ank printed and uniquely hand decorated. Here’s one of my favorites.

Hard to tell from the scan, but the letters are in gold ink. And… the top of the T got cut off there, but I swear it’s there in the physical print.

That’s the news for my fiction, but the final thing I want to talk about is your fiction. This summer, June 7-9, the Aurora Writers Workshop is hosting a seminar and I’m one of the instructors. If you’re in the Midwest and want to pick my brain and see what’s in there after thirty years of writing, editing, designing and developing, sign up now! There are limited spots and I’d love to get a full class. Thanks!

-G.

This month’s free story is up, and it’s called Dialogue With Fury. Word of warning on this one: While I produce a lot of dark stuff here, this one touches on some particularly evil behaviors, right at the final sentence reveal. It’s a mix of rural Gothic Americana and the ancient Greek avengers of those who harm their kin, so… yeah. An ugly piece of work, but one I’m proud to submit under my name. Just walk with caution, OK?

This story initially appeared on my Patreon, and I’ve just uploaded a story there that basically serves as my hate mail to LLM fiction. It’s called Philo Cornforth and the Great Cosmic Winnowing.

Thanks for your support and interest. If you’re on the Patreon already, double thanks. If you recommend it to a friend, triple. If you aren’t on the Patreon, hey, this is the year I’m hoping to get it to a hundred backers. That sounds reasonable to me, but I can’t do it alone.

-G.

If I understand correctly, Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day are to coincide once more in 2029, and then that’s it for the whole of the twenty-first century. Zounds! How am I, a beloved anti-realist, frequent Christian, uneasy cynic and aspiring romantic celebrating this rare conjunction?

Well, I’m mainly ignoring it. My wife and I have a Valentine’s Day tradition of writing letters to one another and sealing them up for a year, and last year’s had a surprising number of déjàs vu. (“We’re sitting by the fireplace,” “We just saw the campus dance troop,” “I didn’t get into the pottery class I wanted,” and “Hopefully people get REIGN soon” were all uncomfortably accurate.)

But, however you’re celebrating 2/14/2024, I hope you enjoy Mitchcraft. It is not about love or Christianity, it’s about selling art that turns out to maybe be cursed? Probably. Probably cursed.

Meanwhile, over on my Patreon, we’ve got a story about a magician possibly committing mayhem. Literal, to-the-legal-definition mayhem, not just casual floppy metaphorical mayhem. (Look it up! You’re online already!) Or maybe he doesn’t! Either way, I had fun writing it, and I hope you have fun reading it, either on Patreon or, twelve long months from now, here.