Distant Times and Vextro Unplugged

I participated in my fourth Vextro anthology! The 2025 theme was "Vextro Unplugged," which everyone interpreted in different ways. This was a smaller one with just four entries, but I think they're all bangers. 

My entry was Distant Times. It's a collection of flash fiction I've written with my local writing group. At the time I got this together, I had about twenty pieces. I picked eight of them I particularly liked, polished them up, then figured out how to present them as a website, ePub, and PDF. (I also went back and updated Wayward to have proper web and ePub versions.) 

Formatting fiction for web is non-trivial. It took a while to figure out how to make the web page and ePubs look nice to me. There's a lot of overlap thankfully — behind the curtain, ePubs are just zipped up HTML/CSS files with some extra metadata. I generated the PDF with Pandoc. In the future, I'd like to build a pipeline with Pandoc that easily generates a web page, ePub, and PDF from a markdown file. I plan to release more prose fiction online in the future, so I want to make it as straightforward to maintain as possible.

I really like the eight pieces I picked. Many of them have the violent immediacy that I think characterizes a lot of my storytelling. A few go for something different though, in ways I think strengthen the overall collection. My favorite piece is probably A Wake (which I based the thumbnail image off of), but reader reactions have been pleasantly varied in terms of favorites. The total word count of all eight stories is a little under 10,000 words — give 'em a read if you're interested!

War in the Gut Biome by Sunday

Some quick rundowns of the other entries (plagiarizing my own itch comments since it's been a few weeks):

• it's easy and it gets easier by nilson. nilson is a champion at creating warm wet human texture in whatever medium he works in. This one is a short 3d walk-around game; like all his works it pulled me in and didn't let go, I felt something welling in my chest the whole time I played.
• War in the Gut Biome by vitasunday. PDF zine mixing RPGMaker assets and tropes with local LA food culture. Pure joy from start to finish, had a big grin on my face the whole time I read it.
• SIMROT by wasnotwhynot. Wuzzy writes stories that sit in my spine and spiral inward, tightening and tightening the more I read. This one shares some elements in common with Whole Numbers, another recent fave from their output. This one is meaty at 12k words, and I really enjoyed the journey it took me on.

I love my cool brilliant friends and I love participating in these jams. I can't wait to see what everyone makes next!