Saturday, July 3, 2021

Encore: “Market Futures” • by M. Ian Bell

 

While looking through the archives for things worth promoting on our shiny new Twitter feed, (https://twitter.com/StupefyingSF), I began to realize that I was favoring flash fiction and drabbles. Before anyone gets stuck on the idea that we are yet another online-only short-short-short story market, I decided I needed to find a really good representative of the kinds of stories I’d like to see and publish more often. 

Then I remembered this one.

Two murder victims: a depraved old artist and a promising young schoolteacher. Plenty of people with motive to kill the former but not the opportunity, but not one person with a grudge against the latter. Something must connect the two murders besides the unusual cause of death—but what?

Detective Ellouise Nielson has had some tough cases before, but this one is setting a new high bar…
Herewith, the encore performance of “Market Futures,” by M. Ian Bell. If you’re looking for something to do tonight besides light off fireworks, you’ve exhausted all your choices on Netflix and Amazon Prime and tonight’s movie on Svengoolie (“She-Wolf of London”) is one you’ve seen so many times you can recite the dialog in your sleep, why not give this chilling future crime story a look?

You can start reading right here…

Enjoy,
~brb

3 comments:

Arisia said...

I'm enjoying reading this story again, but I'm curious. What's its word count?

~brb said...

@Arisia - Just a page shy of 10,000 words.

Arisia said...

@~brb For all three parts? Somehow it seems longer. Or just part 1? That would make it a novella. I'm interested in the lengths of what you've published in the past.

Maybe you picked this one to prove a point about not publishing only very short stuff. And I know the submission rules can change. And they're closed at the moment anyway. Have you changed your mind about story lengths since you started Stupefying Stories?