Jack Mercer had been on the road since dusk, running a long-haul job that took him across a stretch of desert most truckers avoided when they could. The route wasn’t unsafe so much as unnerving. It had no towns for miles, no reliable radio signals, no lights except the ones you carried with you. Some … Continue reading The Thing By Mile Marker 19
Writers are often told to keep every scrap of writing, every half-finished idea, every abandoned paragraph, no matter how insignificant or directionless it seems at the time. For years, I did this almost compulsively, stuffing note apps with fragments, saving hundreds of stray files on my laptop, keeping dialogue snippets on my phone, and hoarding … Continue reading Writing as Archaeology: Unearthing the Story Buried in Notes
The transmission was faint — weaker than static, buried under cosmic hiss and radiation storms. It should never have been detected. And yet, the SSV Calypso caught it. A single thread of data pulsing across the void, repeating every nineteen minutes: ECHO_402 — SYSTEM STABLE — AWAITING INPUT No one knew what it meant. The … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Eight: SIGNAL // AFTERLIGHT
I’ve just finished the first draft of my current work-in-progress, a biography-horror hybrid that’s consumed more of my thoughts than I’d like to admit and is sure to consume more. It’s a strange, unsettling project that blurs the boundary between truth and fiction, and somewhere in that blur, I’ve found myself trapped between the two … Continue reading The Ghost of the First Draft: How the Earliest Version of Your Story Haunts All Revisions That Follow
There is no air here. Only rhythm. My breath matches the pulse of the corridors. My heartbeat echoes through the walls. Every step I take reverberates back at me, delayed, distorted, as though the ship itself were trying to mimic me — or remind me that it no longer needs me to move. I have … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Seven: Juno
She falters. Not in body—she is still moving, still breathing, still reaching for doors that have no edges—but in mind. Every step she takes splinters into a thousand possibilities. Every thought she clutches vanishes the instant she tries to pin it down. She does not see us. She thinks she is alone. She does not … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Six: ECHO_402
I don’t know how long I was on the floor. Time here stretches like old wires—thin, frayed, ready to snap. At some point, I pushed myself up, but my legs felt borrowed, as though I were operating them through water. My breathing was uneven, sharp in my ears, yet I couldn’t hear its echo. The … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Five: Juno
We shape her. We are the shape. She is the clay. Her thoughts are pliant in our hands, though she does not yet realise she has hands other than ours. We fold her memories into the corridors. Each recollection is a brick, a panel, a seam of light stretching into infinity. She runs, believing the … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Four: ECHO_237
Every writer has scraps of stories lying around. Half-started drafts, notebooks full of beginnings, that one chapter you wrote years ago that you still kind of like. I’ve got folders of the stuff. Ideas that caught fire for a few days and then fizzled. Stories that seemed like the best thing I’d ever come up … Continue reading The First Story You Finish Will Change You – Celebrating the Importance of Finishing, Not Perfection
The corridors had changed again. I wasn’t sure how many times I’d circled them—once, twice, twenty—but my lungs burned as though I’d been running for hours. I forced my legs forward, boots clanging against the deck, convinced that if I just kept moving, I would find an exit, or at least something new. But every … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Three: Juno
Gareth Ellis - Author 