Well, that took longer than I expected. But raise your glasses and let out an ear-piercing wail of terror, because I finished my first short story of 2025!
As some of you remember from earlier this month, I was originally working on a witchy Halloween story, but that blew past novelette range into novella territory, and I promised I wouldn’t write any new longer stories until the ones I was already working on were finished and had homes. Thus, the witchy Halloween story got put away for later, and I started working on something new.
And thankfully, this story managed to stay in novelette range, at just under 9,300 words. “The Manhattan Well” follows a young woman in Victorian England meeting a young man from New York who relates his traumatic experience meeting a ghost related to America’s first sensationalized murder.
This story actually has a cool story behind its inspiration. I’m a big fan of the musical Hamilton (I’m actually seeing it live for the third time this summer), and a while back, I had the song “Non-Stop” stuck in my head (I even wrote a blog post about it). As sometimes happens when I have a song stuck in my head, I looked up the lyrics.
Here’s the song in question if you’re unfamiliar or just want to jam.
So, early in the song, when Hamilton and Burr is doing that murder trial, I always thought Burr was saying, “Our client says he’s innocent, call your first witness.” But as it turns out, when I looked up the lyrics, Burr was saying, “Our client Levi Weeks is innocent, call your first witness.”
This led me to ask, “Who the hell is Levi Weeks?” One internet rabbit hole later, not only did I learn about one of America’s earliest true crime stories (and if you’re interested, it’s a rather cool story, so I’d check it out), but I had an idea for a horror story.
And now that the story is written, is it any good? Well, it’s a first draft. It’s not supposed to be good! It’s just supposed to exist and have potential. And on that front, it fulfills both requirements. I’ll give it an edit and see about finding a beta reader later this year. However, I have to do one more edit of The Shape of Evil before I (hopefully) pitch it at StokerCon later this year, so that’s the focus now. After that, we’ll see where we are and what I feel I should be doing.
Anyway, that’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I just wanted to share the good news with you. If anyone needs me, I’m going to go celebrate and have a super-late dinner. Until next time, good night, pleasant nightmares, and don’t throw away your shot!
Rami Ungar The Writer 