#30secsf

You

Come on you crazy cats, what are you waiting for? 30 Second Sci Fi is free as an e-book. Check it out on Amazon and get your copy. Hurry up, because it’s the book’s one-year anniversary and it’ll only be free until Sunday.

If you don’t have a Kindle, no problem - download the free e-reader app to your phone or tablet and you’re good to go. 

I was panting, heart racing, sitting up against the alley wall with my legs splayed out in front of me. Harris leant over me, hand on my shoulder. 

“Easy buddy. That was a shifter. That’s what they do,” he said. 

There was a little panic in his eyes. Neither of us had expected it would affect me so much.

We’d been responding to a break-in alarm. I’d turned the corner into the alley behind the factory to see someone there, dressed in black, with a hood. He was doing something at the cargo door entrance. When he’d triggered the alarm we’d just happened to be patrolling nearby. Lucky. 

Or not.

“Hey! Police! Down on the ground!” I shouted, levelling my weapon at him.

He froze, then whipped off his top, revealing a scarred black body laced through with boils glowing like embers. His flesh seemed to erupt then, growing thousands of extremities like a fast-motion video of grass growing through a decaying corpse. When he ran, he was a pair of legs sprinting under a writhing mass of cilia.

I had collapsed.

“There’s an explanation,” Harris was saying. “It’s like when you open your jacket to make a cougar think you’re getting bigger. Animals get confused, so you get an advantage. Only these guys do it in eighteen dimensions. So it gets us too.”

I didn’t care how many dimensions there were. If there were shifters on my beat, I was going to find a different beat.

It’s been a year since 30 Second Sci-Fi was published as a book. To celebrate, I’m giving the book away for free from today until Sunday. Check it out on Amazon and get your copy. 

If you don’t have a kindle, no problem - download the free e-reader app to your phone or tablet and you’re good to go. 

Hey sci-fi fans. You need to tune in here tomorrow, Wednesday November 4th, because you’ll like the 30 Second Sci Fi news that’s breaking here then. In the meantime, here’s three more stories to whet your appetite. 

Bloodlines

Addicted

Heads up! There’s some 30 Second Sci Fi News coming tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s some more stories to whet your appetite. 

Mr Bear

The Ambassador's Body

Sentience

Heads up! There’s some 30 Second Sci Fi news coming up tomorrow. 

In the meantime, here’s something to whet your appetite. 

Remember the good old days when you were getting a new story here every day? Well today you get three.  

Dinner Party 

Court Martial 

Timing

Hello! It’s good to hear from you again! 

It feels great. I’ve been able to explore so many worlds and characters that I can barely keep track of all of them! The challenge has been a fantastic motivator, beyond writing as well. I’ve collaborated with a few people on a bunch of different projects with great results all around. 

I’m a little nervous though. I want to keep writing beyond the challenge, but I’m not sure where to keep going. Maybe a few longer short stories here and there, maybe a novel. There are a lot of options that I need to sort out. 

Thank you! I really appreciate it. Your words are incredibly kind and motivating for me. Let me give you (and everyone else) some reasons to get excited for after the year is out. 

Writing Contests

I love writing contests. After getting a spot in Arkham Bazaar’s convention magazine I did a quick search to find more contests to enter into. I have a small-ish list of ones I think I could submit to and I plan on writing entries for as many as possible. 

Videos

I love the videos that Artifexian made of my stories, I really hope we can work together again sometime in the future. My friends are working on making a small LLC dedicated to making short videos and I have approached them about turning a story into a live-action short. They said yes. So we’ll see how that goes. ;)

And Beyond!

I want to write more and more. What you see above is my first stab at an outline for a longer (shooting for 75k) piece I intend to start working on before the end of 2015. I have zero idea how long this will take to write, or even if it will be good, but I want to give it a shot. 

Writing has become something important in my life and all the positivity I have been getting from everyone following this blog and in my personal life has been downright heartwarming. 

The 30 Second Fantasy challenge will be done on 9/14, but Eric Lange will not be done with writing. 

- Eric 

Thank you! I’m still trying to figure that element out too. ;)

I started writing last september when I first started this challenge. If you’re interested in starting to write as well, I highly recommend starting now with short stories. 

I first saw 30secsf ‘s blog and really wanted my friend (who wrote some short stories at the time) to make the fantasy equivalent of it. He balked so I thought it would not hurt to give it a try. 249 stories later, here I am. 

My overall time investment in this is about the length of a regular hobby, half an hour to two hours per night. Despite not being able to put full-time into it, I still feel like I have significantly increased my ability to write creatively.