Status Update on exsilium

Status Update - Week 18 2026

Sun, 03 May 2026 11:11:19 -0400

Overview

ongoing writing projects
- weekly flash story GREAT has been edited and is done (for now)
- read GREAT at an Open Mic event in Guelph
- short story Corporeal Acquisitions is first draft complete
- weekly flash story Maeve Murray's is nearing first draft complete
- new weekly flash story has been started and is in the exploratory phase for concept
new blog post last week Collect > Outline > Draft
social links have been cleaned up and expanded

GREAT

I sent this piece out to several readers and received solid feedback on it. I also read the story (~1,700 words, so not really flash fiction) at an Open Mic event for writers in Guelph, Ontario. At a high level, I enjoyed the event. I am out of practice in front of an audience and will need to work on that. I also had some interesting conversations and got to hear a variety of narrative voices. I’ll have some more specific thoughts on the event in another post.

GREAT is fully edited and ready to go. The epub has been created and I was prepared to post it to Patreon. Then a random call for submissions showed up. I’m not chasing publication right now, but the submission theme perfectly matched the story. It felt like a missed opportunity if I didn’t submit. The down side is that the submission criteria requires first run projects. This means I can’t post this project to my Patreon just yet.

The call promises follow up on all submissions within 90 days. If the story isn’t selected, I’ll continue on getting this up on my Patreon at that time. If you’d really like to read this before then, drop me a message. I am active on all social media in my LinkStack.

Corporeal Acquisitions

This cosmic horror short story is now first draft complete. Current draft is just under 5,200 words.

A corporate acquisitions and mergers architect goes on solo retreat to a cabin on a private lake in the dead of winter. While planning her next takeover she encounters another predator with similar methods and appetites.

The next step is to edit and get it out to some readers for feedback.

I don’t have any plans for what to do with this story just yet. It’s largely dependent on feedback to determine next steps. I will get some samples of this up on my Patreon over the next two weeks.

Maeve Murray’s

This is the next story in the weekly flash fiction stories. I have a rough draft of this completed. It was originally intended to be a weird horror story. It’s still got those undertones, but morphed and is now fundamentally a relationship and break up story. I’m always a little surprised how things develop throughout the process of writing.

The goal for this is to get it cleaned up, out to readers, polished, and posted to Patreon for next Monday under the Singles Releases Collection.

New Weekly Flash Fiction

I’m still exploring ideas for the next weekly project. I try to avoid going into these with any pre-existing ideas. Finding an idea I want to write is part of this process. I’m currently toying with entities colonizing the individual and dissolution of self against a colonizing super organism.

I don’t know if that’s where I’ll end up, but it’s what has caught my attention currently.

Collect > Outline > Draft

New blog post last week Collect > Outline > Draft. This walks through what my current writing process looks like to get from the blank page to a completed draft. It also details how and why my current system developed.

I’ve resurrected my Bookwyrm account to accompany my GoodReads account.

I’ve also created a LinkStack page to keep all my links in a single place. This should be considered the source of truth for where to find me on the internet.

Status Update - 2026 Week 17

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:00:51 -0400

Overview

ongoing writing projects
- weekly flash fiction These Are Not My Memories added to Patreon
- weekly flash fiction GREAT is draft complete and out to readers for feedback
- short story Corporeal Acquisitions being written, currently in first draft
- new weekly flash fiction started and in the exploratory phase
set up blog at davidbragg.ca/blog
new accounts set up on Patreon and GoodReads

These Are Not My Memories

New flash fiction piece posted to Patreon. It’s free to read and includes an epub download option for paid Patreon members.

This is the first in what I’m calling the Patreon Singles Releases. Every week I’ll be writing a new piece of flash fiction and posting it to my Patreon this way.

GREAT

GREAT is my next weekly piece. It was completed over the weekend. Just awaiting feedback from readers and then this will go through the Patreon release process.

It was originally written as a three minute cosmic horror short film about right wing indoctrination via random video chat. I liked it as a script and I like it even more as a short story.

My weekly writing is supposed to be flash fiction. GREAT has settled in around 1750 words. A little bit more than what I was aiming for. That said, I’m more interested in following the story than I am an arbitrary word count. That may change in the future, but I’ll worry about that when I get there.

Corporeal Acquisitions

Another cosmic horror short story. It is continuing forward. I know the entire story at this point. I’ve collected all my little bits and pieces into a coherent, high level outline. I’ve started working through the outline on an initial draft.

The outline, in bullet points, was roughly 3500 words. As I’m working through it’s not growing too much. I’m about a third of the way through the first draft and it’s only grown by about 600 words. Expect the completed initial draft to be less than 6000 words total.

I’m aiming to have a polished first draft ready for readers before May 1st.

Untitled Patreon Singles Release

The next weekly flash project has been started. I am currently exploring ideas. I don’t have anything ready to go and am starting from scratch. It lets me work through what’s top of mind and see if there are any stories in there I’m interested in telling.

Published Blog

Set up this blog using hugo to generate a static site. It required a little bit of configuration, but not much. I’m pretty happy with the implementation. I’ve used Jekyll in the past. It was fine, but hugo feels cleaner to me. There’s a lot of similarity between to two.

I’m currently hosting this under my heavyliftingindustries.com domain. It will likely move at some point to its own domain. I’m not in a rush to do that. A new domain will come when I’ve got the income to pay for it.

Patreon and GoodReads Accounts

As I’m working on moving forward with writing, I’m setting up some new accounts to supplement that work. This is being done to have a single lane of focus. I have historically had a lot of interests, hobbies, and paths I’ve chased down. I’d prefer to minimize pollution across those streams.

A Patreon account has been created. The first piece of writing has gone up. It’s a flash fiction piece called These Are Not My Memories. It’s posted in a regular post under the members free tier. I’ve also created an epub download version that is available patrons under the paid tier.

A GoodReads account was created to eventually claim an author account. I’ll get there eventually.

My Mastodon account is a notable exception here. I’m continuing to use that as a primary account and I don’t see any real need to create a dedicated Mastodon account for writing.

Status Update - 2026 Week 16

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 10:39:19 -0400

Overview

resumed work on short story Corporeal Acquisitions
started and completed flash fiction piece These Are Not My Memories
started flash fiction adaptation of short film script GREAT
completed two new blog posts
installed and started using taskwarrior and timewarrior
created template repository for new writing projects
wrote xq tool for extracting questions from files

Corporeal Acquisitions

In 2023 I was looking for a writing outlet and considering revisiting prose. I started working on building out a cosmic horror short story at the time. I had put around a week’s worth of effort into figuring out what story I was telling and building some basic structure.

I’ve resumed work on this project and have a much stronger sense of the story. I’m still organizing and outlining with the intention of starting into a draft this week. I have a loose expectation of when I’ll have a reasonable draft completed, but largely using this to get a sense for how long a project of this length will take me to write.

These Are Not My Memories

The switch from screenwriting to prose means there are a lot of skills to build up. Many of these skills haven’t been exercised since I was a kid. I’m going to need consistent work on those. In that spirit, I’m working to write a flash fiction piece every week. The goal is reps, not polished pieces for release.

The first is These Are Not My Memories.

Like the majority of my writing, there’s an undercurrent of horror. It’s a piece about tech, identity, and capitalism as an uploaded consciousness in a bot with no back ups.

GREAT

Another flash fiction piece that’s just been started. It was initially written as a short horror film about right wing indoctrination. It was originally written to be a low budget, three minute short.

Given the amount of film scripts I’ve written over the years, it seemed like a good idea to see how I feel about the adapting process while continuing my goal of writing a flash fiction piece each week. This is largely a test to see if I’ll adapt more pieces in the future.

Two New Blog Posts

The Time is Now documents where I’m currently at in my writing and the rationale behind switching from screenwriting to narrative prose.

Writing for Flow talks about some of the processes and structures I’ve put in place to ensure minimal disruptions in the writing process.

taskwarrior and timewarrior

I predominantly write at a Linux terminal. This is part of my attempt to minimize disruptions in the writing process. I also like minimal systems to keep track of what I’m doing and how much time I’ve spent on each task.

taskwarrior is a highly functional task list application. I’m using it largely as a source of truth for the projects I’m currently working on. At any point I can bring up my task list and see at a glance what needs to be worked on.

timewarrior is time tracking software. This ties into taskwarrior and can be configured to automatically start tracking time whenever a taskwarrior task is started. I like time tracking as it’s a measurement to see how I’ve performed in the past and to extrapolate how long something new might take me in the future.

Template Repository

I’ve taken a lot of tools from my life as a software developer into writing. Version control using git and source code hosting sites are major ones that I’ll elaborate on my usage more in the future.

I have a consistent, basic structure for my writing projects that includes Makefile tasks and pre-commit tasks for automatic clean up and formatting.

Since I tend to follow the same basic requirements and structure for each project, I’ve created a template of that structure and saved it as part of a repository that can be reused and updated as necessary.

It saves me the repetition of setting things up from scratch or copying and pasting for each new project.

Created `xq` Tool

As I discuss in the Writing for Flow blog post, one of my tools for minimizing the disruption of writing is to drop questions or ideas separate from the current line of thought inline, using the Markdown checkbox (- [ ]). This ensures that questions and notes are captured without breaking my writing flow or requiring large context switches.

xq is a small command line application written in Go that extracts these questions out of a document for me. The default behaviour is that it will extract the questions from a specified input file and append them to a file called open_questions.md in the same directory.

It supports custom input and output files, as well as a flag to keep the questions in the original file while marking them completed (- [x]).

It is a minimal tool created to handle a specific problem.

Status Update on exsilium

Status Update - Week 18 2026

Overview

GREAT

Corporeal Acquisitions

Maeve Murray’s

New Weekly Flash Fiction

Collect > Outline > Draft

New Social Links

Status Update - 2026 Week 17

Overview

These Are Not My Memories

GREAT

Corporeal Acquisitions

Untitled Patreon Singles Release

Published Blog

Patreon and GoodReads Accounts

Status Update - 2026 Week 16

Overview

Corporeal Acquisitions

These Are Not My Memories

GREAT

Two New Blog Posts

taskwarrior and timewarrior

Template Repository

Created xq Tool

Created `xq` Tool