Cross-Time Inspiration

A few weeks ago, I was reviewing some of my many unfinished manuscripts. Truth be told, I have a LOT of stuff haunting my archives (and that includes countless files on my hard drives and hardcopies in my file cabinet) ranging from screenplays to short stories to one pretty good urban fantasy novel. While a lot of it is worthy of deletion, there are a few odds and ends in there I really should bring to completion someday.

One of those is a pretty solid start of a contemporary zombie story tentatively titled Bumper Crop. I could definitely see revisiting that one and even finding a potential buyer by the end of this year.

At the beginning of April, I was approached to write a new tabletop roleplaying game adventure by one of my publishers. The offer was fine, the timeline was doable, and I felt confident that I could deliver something fun for them. I signed the contract and cleared my schedule.

As I usually do when starting a new project, I began filling a blank page with ideas. Typically this borders on stream of consciousness with random words and phrases, doodles, bulleted lists, etc. Just word vomit to get all the cylinders firing.

In this particular case, one of the first things I wrote was a reference to the aforementioned zombie story followed by a few "what if" variations. Within an hour, the skeleton of an idea was staring up at me from the cluttered page, and that afternoon, I had a new document open and the project began in earnest.

A complete first draft was down and ready for playtest within a couple weeks, the result of which (including a character’s unfortunate demise) inspired a few essential adjustments and then "v1" of the manuscript was in my publisher's hands.

A few days later, we exchanged a couple emails, a handful of much-needed edits were made, and "v2" was off!

I am now waiting to hear back regarding this updating version, but I'm feeling quite good about it and delighted that a fragment of a short story I started two decades ago inspired me here in 2025! I’ll update you all about this project anon, hopefully with something wonderful like cover art!