Jack of Harts

I wrote Lifeboat for the Alien Family Traditions open call. While not accepted for the publication, it was a fun little palette cleanser to write. Most of my stories include a fair amount of destruction and death, as the Good Guys ™ fight the Bad Guys ™ in defense of the Fair Innocents ™ around them. This one I went in with a plan to write a story about a found family doing something that wasn’t violent. The original plan was a deep space rescue mission, but it changed as I wrote, and it became something entirely outside my plan as the story developed. That was a lot of fun. But it all started with the scene it started with. Some soldiers who grew up in wildly different places doing the whole “hurry up and wait” thing that anyone who has ever carried a weapon for Uncle Sam knows so well…

Lifeboat on Substack