FicStack Curation #21

Photo by Quentin Rey on Unsplash

For writers, the equinox carries its own particular resonance. It's the moment the scales tip: darkness ceding ground to light, the long interior season of winter giving way to something more open. There's a reason so many stories begin in spring. It's the natural grammar of the new chapter: the world turning a page, committing to what comes next. This week's curation post, coming a day after the Spring Equinox, feels fitting for that threshold - stories gathered at the hinge point, where something is always about to begin.

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Sandolore Sykes, In the Inversion Field

People like to take swings at the fiction community on Substack. Fine. But it’s worth paying attention to what’s being built here instead of the noise. Trevor Cohen’s “Day in the Life of the Writer” was an open call, and the response was huge. I didn’t expect to be moved. I was.

Writers describing their days—their habits, compulsions, strange private rituals. Everyone is completely different. Everyone is the same. This is one of the best that came in: “I wrap myself back up with a lollipop earworm that drills a hole through my head until I’m shaking and it’s 10am and I have to eat something. My bones and meat are heavy getting out of that bed, dragging through the CandyLand Glop of a morning…” —MM Rossi, “The Day in the Life of a Cannibal Writer”.

Then Trevor Cohen and RM Greta take it further. As they put it, they “imbibed the days of 100+ writers… to create a composite week,” filtering it through their own lives. One week made out of hundreds of writing lives. Week of the ___ Writer. If the trolls and the infighting are making you tired, this is where to put your eyes.

Wendy Russell, Sass&Sage

This week’s picks ended up orbiting death, which was not planned but does feel thematically on brand for fantasy. One drops you into fortress walls, refugees gathering outside the gates, and a young prince who handles diplomacy with a knife. The other follows a god of the underworld who wanders into the world of the living for a taste of life and immediately becomes fascinated with a woman whose soul is already marked for death. Very different scales, very different vibes — but both openings grabbed me straight away.

• “Chapter 1” in The Last of the Etela by Tom Schecter, The Shieldbreaker Saga.

  A fortress on the edge of collapse, an empire demanding submission, and the young prince who answers with steel instead. This first chapter opens with a fortress already stretched to breaking — refugees gathering outside the walls, a legendary king dying in secret, and an invading empire finally knocking at the gate. What I enjoyed here is the way the chapter shifts perspective to widen the lens before dropping us right at the feet of the man who’ll have to deal with the consequences. We see the tension through soldiers on watch, through the envoy who arrives expecting easy submission, and finally through Kareva himself — the prince who discovers, very quickly and very messily, what leadership is going to cost him. By the time the dust settles at the gate, the political stakes — and Kareva’s temperament — are crystal clear.

• “Part 1” in The Mark of Death by Aetherias Moon, Dragons and Moonlight.

  This first chapter takes a very different approach to fantasy, bringing mythic stakes into a modern setting. Enos, god-king of the underworld, slips into the world of the living for a taste of life and finds himself captivated by Celeste — a dancer whose soul burns brighter than anyone he’s seen before. There’s only one problem: she carries a Mark of Death, and Enos can already see the cracks spreading through her life force. What follows blends sensuality, mythology, and inevitability that leans into the quiet tragedy at the heart of the premise — the god of death falling for someone he knows he cannot save.

Melina Chapa, Midnight Letters
It’s strange how, in a moment when I am happy and excited, dreadful and disturbing stories are the ones that call me. I suppose it’s the need for balance: not too much of just one thing, but a variety to choose from.
Each of the stories I picked for you this week is unique in its own way, although similar enough to frighten you.
I hope you enjoy being hunted by them as much as I did.

• “The Imagination of Barnaby - Par 1” by Rebecca Watson (Rebe), Stay Weird Press.
  How often can a good memory or belief turn into something awful? How many times does something we loved as kids turn out to be fake? Rebecca brings a disturbing element to her story by showing how one of our memories can be sour and unwelcome, told by someone despicable. When I tell you that this story gave me goosebumps, I’m not lying. Enjoy it!

• “The Development” by Abhishek Banerjee, The Banerjee Codex.
  Abhishek has a way with words that goes deep within you, making you feel something. In this microfiction, set in one of his already posted stories, he presents a world where apparently nothing changes, except that we are living the consequences of the main character’s choices, and they are not good ones. Enjoy!

• “Sender[Null]” by Chris Hicks, Disco Insomnium.
  How many places that we frequent don’t have ghost stories? I bet most of them, if not all. And what about offices? These spaces are where we do our jobs and where a lot happens. Being a corporate worker myself, this story gave me the creeps because there are a lot of emails that probably shouldn’t have been sent, a lot of meetings we dread, and a lot more. Chris did a wonderful job of mixing trivial jobs and their vocabulary with a chilling, dreadful twist. Prepare yourself!

Connor Mancuso, Ink and Entropy
This week my picks drifted into body horror and graphic violence, which feels about right considering I’ve been neck-deep in inspiration for my upcoming body/cosmic horror novella, The Cup. These are the kinds of stories that don’t just unsettle you in the moment, they cling to you afterward. One gives you revenge dressed in silk and bone, one rots through history with something hungry hiding inside it, and one turns ritual, flesh, and song into something genuinely nightmarish. Different settings, different textures, but all three got under my skin in exactly the way I was hoping for.

• “The Grime Lingers” by Charlie Walls.
  This story feels filthy in the best possible way. It opens amid bombardment, broken bodies, and a doctor moving through suffering with something deeply wrong lurking beneath the surface, then keeps peeling back time and decay until the horror becomes something older, hungrier, and more embedded in the building itself. I loved the way this one handles the atmosphere. Everything feels diseased, starved, and contaminated by memory, and the violence never feels cheap. It feels baked into the walls.

• “Do Not Let Her Sleep” by Marius Creed.
  This one leans hard into ritual horror and absolutely nails it. A watcher tends to a woman hidden away in an old dairy, forced to keep listening as her lullaby holds something terrible in check. The body horror here is unforgettable — the warped body, the wired jaw, the flesh splitting open when the song fails — but what really hooked me was the sense of dread underneath all of it. The story understands that sometimes horror is not about stopping the inevitable, but enduring what it takes to delay it.

Inga Jones, Thriller Tips for Writers
This week, it’s warm and sunny. My garden is starting to wake up. I wanted to find stories that embody change because change often brings on the most interesting emotions and actions.

• “The Curtain Falls” by Luke John, Microcosm: The World in Small Scenes.
  I loved the dreamy feel of this story. Abandoned places are magical because we get to dream up what they held in the past, and this story explores that feeling well.

• “Yellow First,” by Mindfullofit
  In “Yellow First,” we meet a character who doesn’t have a lot of autonomy. However, she at least has a choice of whom to trust. I love the construction of this story. It’s a snippet, yet we can feel so much from just a few words.

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