Author: Chris Tullbane

Dear 2018,

You’ve been a year.

I didn’t include an adjective, because I’m hardpressed to pick just one. So let’s settle for the obvious instead. Like your predecessor, the much-derided and ranted-about 2017, you’ve successfully persisted for almost exactly 365 days. Sometimes it felt longer. Other times–like the entire holiday season–it felt shorter. But I’ve done the requisite calculations, consulted a multitude of experts in the field, and offered up pastry sacrifices to the Oracle at Delphi, and I can conclude, with a fair bit of certainty, that you were, in fact, a year.

And that, as they say, is that.

Now, if you are looking for adjectives, I can do that too. Just be warned that it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

2018 is almost over, and 2019 is waiting out there somewhere in the weeds, flush with unknown potential and (presumably) bad intentions. Before the new year arrives, I thought it would be fun and topical to look back on the year that was.

Next week, I’ll cover the three 2018 accomplishments I’m most proud of, and the week after that will detail three challenges I’ve struggled with all year. But this week, we’re going with something a little simpler; cold, hard, analytical data.

That’s right… in a blatant case of Instagram-copying, I’m sharing this site’s five most viewed posts in 2018.

The Storm in Her Smile has now been shared in its entirety here on the site, and people seem to be enjoying it. In the near future, I’ll do another edit pass, and then post the full story as a separate page under the Short Stories menu, like I did with my prior short, The Stars That Sing.

In the meantime, let’s talk about the story itself. What went well? What didn’t? And what ended up confusing the hell out of me?

After four weeks, we’ve finally reached the end of my latest short story, The Storm in Her Smile. Last chapter, the Queen of Smiles finished the job that brought her to Mobile, sending Arturo Melendez to his grave. Now, all she needs to do is find whoever stole her electric motorcycle so she can get out of the city alive.

The problem, of course, to paraphrase Kathleen Turner’s character in Romancing the Stone, is that bastards have brothers…

Welcome back for the next installment in my latest short story, The Storm in Her Smile. The mysterious mercenary known as the Queen of Smiles has finally recovered from being literally scattered across Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, and is closing in on her target, Arturo Melendez… crime lord, Hydromancer, and all-around bad guy.

It’s time to spill some blood, and she’s pretty sure it’s going to be his.

Welcome back for another installment in my latest short, The Storm in Her Smile. In the first two chapters, we met our (anti)heroine, a mysterious mercenary known as the Queen of Smiles, shortly after her arrival in Mobile, Alabama. She’s already killed one of the three brothers who run that city’s biggest crime gang, but her primary target, Arturo Melendez, remains alive and well. Worse, he’s now set a trap of his own down by the bay.

Rather than spend weeks canvassing a city she barely knows, the queen has decided to just go trigger the trap and see what happens. After all, given the violent things she’s capable of in this post-apocalyptic, superpower-driven world, what could go wrong?

That’s what she (and we) are about to find out.

Happy November, everyone!

As promised in my last post, it’s story time once again! 2018 has been a fairly unproductive year for fresh writing–I’ve been mainly occupied with editing, revisions, and the always entertaining query process–but I have managed a couple of short stories. I posted one, The Stars That Sing, earlier this year, and was happy to get some great feedback on it. Now it’s time for a new short story, The Storm in Her Smile.

Yes, I know; it’s actually November now. In your timeline, anyway. In my timeline… okay, it’s November here, as well, but given that I didn’t have a status update last month, this one is going to have to suffice! For those of you playing along at home, you may remember I had big plans for…

Happy Halloween! I’ll have a larger update on Friday, full of thrills, chills, and sadly unrealized potential, but in celebration of Halloween, I wanted to share a small, somewhat spooky snippet from See These Bones. No context… no backstory… just a simple case of boy meets girl that isn’t so simple at all. As always,…

  If it feels like this so-called Summer Wrap Party has been dragging on for weeks, that’s because it has. Thankfully, (for you, me, and the bent-but-not-yet-totally-broken laws of physics), today’s post is the final installment. Cue the trumpets and fireworks! Then, segue into sad trombones, because the only thing longer than this wrap-up is…