First draft of 'Bugged Out' has been completed!

My next story, 'Bugged Out,' is ready for editing, coming in at around 37K words. I'm going to sell this one as a 'short', which is somewhat laughable given how long it is. I'm also considering lowering the price for 'Bull Moon' by a dollar as well, to get it in line with 'Droneship,' which has done rather better than I had expected.

Stay tuned for an announcement on that when I get this story released, which will likely be either the week of the 3rd or the 10th. At the moment, I think it's more likely to happen earlier, but plans can always change depending on how the editing goes.

This story is derived from the list of story outlines I put together December of last year. There are three additional story outlines from that time that I haven't gotten to yet, and I think I've decided that the next one will be 'Repopulated,' a small, fun tale about an alien invasion with slug like parasites.

In some ways, that might be considered similar to this story, but 'Bugged Out' has something unusual about it, which readers may not like - it's a pure parasite/MC story, but there are no smutty elements involved with it.

I'm not sure when I realized that was where it was headed, but once I was halfway done, I decided it didn't really need any of those elements. Does that make it a weaker story? Possibly, but I'll let the readers be the judge of that.

Effectively, it's all about the body horror and the mind control, so I leaned into that as hard as I could. I think, overall, it has some interesting twists, so I do hope that my regular fans will enjoy it!

As far as that goes, I consider this to be an experiment, one which may or may not be repeated depending upon how successful it is and where my muse takes me. I'm excited to get it done and released!

Synopsis

"Going on a hike with her friend shouldn’t have been this frightening. She might not like her friend’s choice in husbands, and his dog was more than a little annoying, but spending time in the fresh air usually was a rejuvenating experience.

Sure, there was always the chance of an encounter with wild animals, but she hadn’t expected them to be confronted by a stranger that looked like he had a gigantic beetle lodged in his throat.

And she certainly hadn’t expected to pick up a similar parasite which had embedded itself into her brain, telling her where to go and what to do.

As her body is converted by the parasite, she struggles to understand the sarcophagus sent to her in a vision. Its brightly colored death mask and the paintings on the walls must mean something, but only her friend holds the key.

Perhaps some of the beetles nesting in her body can convince her to tell the truth…"