Random Short Stories and Novellas (2024 - 2026)

Random Short Stories

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

• "Pleasing the Queen" by Selina Coffey, 2015. (read July 2024)
  I needed something to listen to when walking and this was only an hour long. I originally thought I'd listen to it twice because I always have trouble getting into things and because my mind wanders when I walk. Yeah. When it got to the adult content, I had second thoughts about it. Actually, the thing that really got to me was the terrible AI voice doing the reading, devoid of all emotion, including during the sex scenes. The bot also can't handle dialogue with short sentences between the two parties. It was hard (so to speak) to keep track of who was saying what. Weirdest was the end when the voice switched to make to thank the listener -- the book takes on a new perspective if a man was writing those scenes. But, no, the author is female. Anyway, I downloaded the short story (novella, actually) to read. I skipped the preview.
  It was okay. Nothing special. But reading it was better than listening to that bot. Fully the last 20% of the download was a preview of a book. The entire denouement featured a wedding following by detailed descriptions of their love making after the plot had been resolved. The plot: the new Queen arises to power when her parents are killed. Her older sister is already the wife of a Elven lord. Her councilors all agree on a single candidate for her spouse (totally political in nature as these things are), and that Lord tries to work spells on the Queen to make her desire him. She rebuffs that and does the nasty with an old friend instead who helps save the kingdom.
• "Sweet Maiden" by Ginney Patrick, 2023. (read July 2025)
  This was a booklet that I picked up at World Fantasy Con in Niagara Falls, NY, 2024. Ginny Patrick is the pen name of Virginia Smith.
  Carin MacIntyre is the daughter of the cook of Lord Rimple. On her eighth birthday, he takes a walk in the wood where a unicorn finds her. The unicorn asks her to come away with her, but she can't because it would hurt her mother. The unicorn promises to come again and take her when she's ready. Life takes twists and turns by her seventeenth birthday, when Strathofire is repulsed by how she's changed. Would this be the last time she'd ever see him?
  It was a cute story. The story was about 22 pamphlet-sized pages.
• "A Conspiracy of One" by Leonard & Ann Marie Wilson, 2020 (read July 2025)
  Dark Goddess Chronicles, 28 pages, stapled. I'll call this one a novella, not a short story.
  This was a booklet that I picked up at World Fantasy Con in Niagara Falls, NY 2024. The DGC are fairy-tale themed, inspired by them in a "ripped from the headlines" television show is inspired by real-world events.
  The conspiracy involves the assassination of the queen, which is witnessed by her body double/lookalike/decoy. She has to escape, which she does with the help of alternate personalities, who may or may not be other people (including a young girl and a panther) and who gather in a court that may or may not exist solely in her head. Jenilee escapes by pretending to be the queen, and so she ends up at a party that the queen had been invited to, only to find that everyone is shocked to see that the queen is still alive. Now, she has to escape again.

• "Mud and Brass" by Andrew Knighton, 2014 (read June 2025?, possibly sooner)
  I don't know when I read this. I'd forgotten about it until I was cleaning books I'd already read from my phone. (I leave them on my iPad, usually.) I vaguely remember downloading it. (I just checked my email and saw that it was April 2025.) I probably read it not long after that.
  Good Reads lists this as 26 pages, so I'll call it a novella.
  I honestly couldn't remember much about the story until I saw this description on Good Reads: How far would you go for love, or for justice, or for the perfect gearwheel? Thomas Niggle grew up a mudlark, hunting for scrap on the polluted banks of the River Burr. One of the countless poor living in the shadows of Mercer Shackleton’s vast factories, he has dragged himself out of poverty using his mechanical skills. An encounter with Gloria Shackleton, the Mercer’s daughter, offers Niggle the possibility of love, but it also offers something else, deep in the heart of the Mercer’s domain. What hope can the future hold for a boy raised amidst the mud and brass? A steampunk story of romance, vengeance and twisted technology.

  So, basically, a story of haves and have nots mixed with a love story and a tale of revenge, as a mud person takes on a technocrat.
  Again, I don't remember much, but I didn't hate it. I'd remember that. So it was an okay story.
  As with most steampunk, unless it's written by someone I know, it's likely I read it because I want to know how to write steampunk stories, preferrably a good one.

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• "Mud and Brass" by Andrew Knighton, 2014 (read June 2025?, possibly sooner)
  I don't know when I read this. I'd forgotten about it until I was cleaning books I'd already read from my phone. (I leave them on my iPad, usually.) I vaguely remember downloading it. (I just checked my email and saw that it was April 2025.) I probably read it not long after that.
  Good Reads lists this as 26 pages, so I'll call it a novella.
  I honestly couldn't remember much about the story until I saw this description on Good Reads: How far would you go for love, or for justice, or for the perfect gearwheel? Thomas Niggle grew up a mudlark, hunting for scrap on the polluted banks of the River Burr. One of the countless poor living in the shadows of Mercer Shackleton’s vast factories, he has dragged himself out of poverty using his mechanical skills. An encounter with Gloria Shackleton, the Mercer’s daughter, offers Niggle the possibility of love, but it also offers something else, deep in the heart of the Mercer’s domain. What hope can the future hold for a boy raised amidst the mud and brass? A steampunk story of romance, vengeance and twisted technology.

  So, basically, a story of haves and have nots mixed with a love story and a tale of revenge, as a mud person takes on a technocrat.
  Again, I don't remember much, but I didn't hate it. I'd remember that. So it was an okay story.
  As with most steampunk, unless it's written by someone I know, it's likely I read it because I want to know how to write steampunk stories, preferrably a good one.

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• "The Chief's Boss" by E. Chris Ambrose, 2019 (read February 2026)
  This was a little booklet that I picked up at a convention, probably from World Fantasy Con in 2024 or Phil Con 2024. This booklet was at school, and I think it was with a pile that had been in a locker in summer 2025, so it's probably not from Reader Con in Boston or Phil Con 2025.
  The booklet is basically a short story over 28 pages, probably around 4,000 - 5,000 words. It's billed as "A Bone Guard Adventure", not that I knew what that was. Having read it, I'd say it's likely a prequel to the three books advertised in the back (two out, one coming soon, as of 2019).
  It's a quick, little story about a rescue in Afghanistan in 2003. A female scientist has been captured by al Qaeda and the spec ops Goon Squad is going to go in to rescue her and take out everyone else. Grant Casey is the new kid on the team with a plan to ride in and see if she's still alive and if she can possibly rescue her before the rest of the team attacks.
  The Sarge, Gonsalves, calls Grant "Chief" because he's native. This confused me at first. He's not native American, he's from the area, which is why he's able to approach the al Qaeda hideout on horseback. I didn't get the connection with "Chief" if there is one.

  I'm not advertising, but since this story isn't on Good Reads, and a search for "Bone Guard" gave me wildly unconnected results, I'll list the website in case I want to check this out. (Odds are that I'll pass along the booklet in a Little Free Library.) It's BoneGuardBooks.com
  A quick check shows: there are 7 books, the website redirects to a different publisher, and the little twitter account for Ambrose doesn't exist. I honestly only went looking because I wanted to copy one of the logos or find an image of the cover of this story. I'm not scouring social media if he gave up on Twitter and his publisher couldn't bother to update.




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