The second edition of Bundle Up! is in the 2026 Write Stuff StoryBundle, curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch! This collection of books covers topics from writing and publishing children’s books, to how to use Kickstarters as an author, to how to survive in the ever-changing world of indie publishing. All fifteen books in this year’s…
In James Pyles’ “The Wreck of the USS Hollander,” a deep-ocean research crew descends into the abyss to explore a long-lost WWII sub—and discovers that some crews never stand down, and some debts can only be paid in the dark. Excerpt Cora flipped a switch and the speaker grills fore and aft echoed with the…
In “Whispers of the Drowned,” Charles Eugene Anderson plunges readers into a 1941 Atlantic convoy, where a mysterious artifact recovered from the sea carries voices—and vengeance—far older than the war. Interview Questions Did a real place or moment inspire part of your story? Hi Jamie. It’s always good to talk with you. [Jamie is the…
Somewhere in Virginia’s Mournful Mountains, fifty miles east of Boring and forty west of Tenebrous, sits a town called Dismal Notch—where the librarian talks to ghosts, the sheriff is a werewolf, and a long dead ancestor won’t stop meddling from beyond the grave. In Debbie Mumford’s “A Dismal Death,” a midnight haunting kicks off a…
In “Above Us, Hell,” Alicia Cay sends a treasure hunter and his grandfather into the Caribbean deep, where a WWII submarine has risen from the Cayman Trench—and brought its ghosts with it. What they find below the surface is older, stranger, and far more dangerous than sunken treasure. Interview Questions Did a real place or…
In “Final Walkthrough,” Lou J. Berger sends a man back to his family’s old farmhouse to settle an estate—and settle a score with the past. What begins as a quiet homecoming becomes something far darker, as the pond behind the house gives up secrets that should have stayed buried. Interview Questions Did a real place…
November 1941. A British convoy pushes through the storm-tossed North Atlantic, and somewhere in the hold sits a relic that should have stayed at the bottom of the sea. In Charles Eugene Anderson’s “Whispers of the Drowned,” the ocean doesn’t just kill—it remembers. And what it remembers, it will not let the living forget. The…
When bone witch Nariah Boyd is called to a haunted parking lot on the city’s edge, she expects another ghost, another forgotten dead. What she finds instead is a nest—of bone, of memory, of sorrow so vast it reshapes the world around it. As a mother spirit stirs in the marsh, Nariah must reach deep…
In the quiet hills of Ireland, beside a sacred spring that no one visits anymore, a goddess waits. Dideacea is the last of her kind—ageless, alone, forgotten. For centuries she has watched the world move on without her. The sacred spring still flows. The question is whether anything sacred remains in the act of tending…
When Annie Griffith visits her great-uncle’s mountain home, she discovers that the nearby creek is more than just lively—it’s crying out for help, and someone needs to listen. Interview Questions Did a real place or moment inspire part of your story? There was a big, blocky rock with what looked like a sink on top…
