As we close out 2025, I’m excited to announce a new short story publication: my story “Career Transmutation” has just been published online at 4-Star Stories!
This story has been looking for a home for a very long time – I wrote its first draft in one sitting in a coffee shop back in March of 2016, and I’ve been shopping it around to various venues since the end of that year. In addition to being my story with the longest first-draft-to-publication time to date, it’s also my first published fantasy story. My inspiration was the thought “What if life for professors in a fantasy magical school setting were more like real-life academia?”, which was probably a more original thought back in 2016 than it is today, though not by a lot – much more developed novels on this theme that I’ve read just in the past year include R. F. Kuang’s Katabasis and Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent.
Finally, I should clarify that, as I wrote this story long before I ever started teaching at Morehouse, it shouldn’t be taken as a commentary on the academic climate at Morehouse (or any other institution I’ve been affiliated with, for that matter), and none of the characters in the story are based on real people. I hope you enjoy it, and happy holidays!
Daniel J. Peterson 