A. B. KEUSER

Alien Slug Suffocation
Imagine it for a moment. Cold, gelatinous slime covering over your face. Goop drips down your neck. You hold your breath as long as you can, but… the slug has latched on. The suction is so strong, your skin starts to burn,
Then you gasp. But there’s no air between you and the slug. The slime fills your mouth. Fills your lungs.
Struggling only brings the black oblivion of death closer.

Gravity Reversal (Crushed)
We don’t set foot on hostile alien ships anymore. It’s been decades since they figured out how susceptible we are to gravity shifts… how easy it is to kill us with a simple adjustment of a slider on a console.
But sometimes, you don’t know they’re hostile. You don’t know that your alien boyfriend has discovered proof you’ve been cheating on him (Ignore the fact that the person in those pictures is definitely not you--jealousy doesn’t care about things like that). So a candlelight dinner turns from hot and heavy, to just plain heavy.
He watches you with pai…

Happy first Wednesday of the month fellow IWSGers, and happy National Novel Writing Month!

I’ve done NaNoWriMo several times at this point. I’ve won, I’ve lost, I’ve deleted all of my progress on day 15 and had to HUSTLE to get to 50k before the deadline.

As someone who has written ~120k in a February, 50k spread out over 30 days isn’t as daunting of a task for me as it may feel to other people.

The thing I, personally, struggle with when it comes to that 50k is having the focus to make sure they’re all from the same book.





1. Take it seriously… but not too seriously.

Writing fiction can be a special kind of torture. Writing on a deadline is it’s own beast. So the most important thing, when it comes to NaNo is that you take it seriously. There are some people who can throw out 50k on a whim. And there are others who get tangled up in their work and spend a lot of time staring at a blank page.

I will point out that staring at a blank page is a completely valid part of writing. Thinking…