Hope, Hope, Hope

Posted on June 27, 2025June 27, 2025 by Robert Tomoguchi

Manga drawing from Orly's Journals — A scene from Orly’s Journals Entry 33: “Hanabi”

Since my last post, I wrote two more short stories. The first, entitled Yote, is about my childhood best friend Gote. I wrote it in response to a call for submissions by The Sun for stories about nicknames. I felt so good about the story that I submitted it to two other journals as well.

Inspired by the No Kings protests, I wrote another story entitled Five Years. My beta reader and ChatGPT had strong, positive reactions. I haven’t sent it anywhere yet but hope to next week.

In an attempt to cheer myself up, I commissioned a manga artist to do a drawing from Orly’s Journals. I just saw the final yesterday and am very happy with it.

Speaking of Orly’s Journals, I’m currently 10 weeks ahead, and am currently writing Entry 66. I also added two new perks to my Patreon. The first is that I’m now posting screenshares of me writing, to show my writing process. The second is that I’m now calling out my favorite sentence/passage posted during the month and explaining what it means to me.

So, if you’re not part of my Patreon, I hope you’ll check that out. I hope you’ll also wish me luck with finding a publisher for my two new stories. Finally, I hope you like the manga illustration from Orly’s Journals Entry 33: “Hanabi.”

Forever Yours, Button

Posted on May 18, 2025June 27, 2025 by Robert Tomoguchi

I sent My First Scribble to three literary journals but have since stopped submitting. The reason is because I entered it into The Masters Review Anthology Contest and they don’t allow simultaneous submissions. It’s a contest for emerging writers. It’s a total longshot but it could potentially gain me a lot of visibility if my story was one of the ten selected.

Between wanting to keep submitting and since Fractured Lit just announced a flash fiction contest, I wrote another story on Friday called Forever Yours, Button. It’s a short story told from Mayuko’s perspective. At 213 words, it ended up being micro fiction instead of flash fiction, so I plan to submit it to other journals or enter a micro fiction contest.

I’d like to share both stories with you here, but I can’t publish them anywhere until I hear back from everywhere I’m submitting. Hopefully when you read them it’ll be on a journal website.

Again, please wish me luck.

My First Scribble

Posted on April 27, 2025June 27, 2025 by Robert Tomoguchi

This week I wrote a short story called My First Scribble. If you guessed that it’s a story about Orly, you are correct. But it does not use the word “vampire” once. This is because Orly is only six years old in the story and is not yet a vampire and has not yet met Yelena. The story is about the first time she learns of her ability to see the evil in others in her scribbling. Does that count as an origin story?

It’s short, approximately 1,400 words. It’s meant to work as a standalone story and will hopefully appeal even to those who have never read her trilogy or journals. I plan to send it out to literary journals and hope one will accept it for publication. Until that happens or until I’ve had my fill of rejection slips, I won’t be able to share the story. I hope you don’t mind me telling you about it anyway.

Please wish me luck.