Liminal Window: Issue 1 is the debut issue of the independent literary magazine by Jaiden Hordosillo.
To return to the table of contents, click the page numbers.
Music To Read To …… 2
Main Frame …………… 5
Out The Window …………18
In Sound ………… 21
Letters to Authors ……………… 25
In Rhyme …………… 27
Fiction Frame …………… 30
Gag Frame ………… 33
In Page ……… 34
In Focus ………… 37
In Mug …………… 40
Liminal Pitch Prize ……………… 43
Dicewrite ………… 46
Blackboard ……………… 49
Publishing Information …… 50
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Title: LW0001
Artist: Liminal Window
Composer: Jaiden Hordosillo
Runtime: 6:41
Original Release: March 5, 2026
BMI Work #: 78236080
ISRC: QZNWV2638457
UPC: 825100878348
Publisher: Liminal Window Co
© 2026 Liminal Window Co All rights reserved.
Free download.
— About The Column—
Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
Utilizing the multimedia capabilities of publishing a blog, I wanted to experiment with something I’ve always quietly done for myself: composing music to read to.
Music and reading have always gone hand in hand for me, as long as the music doesn’t compete with the attention being given to the prose.
It should exist beside the writing, not in front of it. Something atmospheric. Something that supports the moment without demanding it.
That’s why I decided to work in ambient music.
At first, it was difficult to decide where to begin. My instincts immediately pulled me toward the kind of ambient guitar work I’ve always loved in melodic hardcore– those quiet passages between the chaos that somehow carry just as much emotional weight as the songs themselves. For years, I’ve wondered what that might sound like if it existed as a genre entirely on its own.
But that approach felt too forward for what I wanted here.
So instead of harsh guitar tones, I began leaning toward something more atmospheric. Less performance, more environment. Distorted pads replacing distorted guitars. Filtered pianos standing in for melodic leads. And rather than traditional drums, reverberated textures and soundscapes shape the rhythm of the piece.
I’ve never considered myself the strongest musician, but I do take pride in my ability as a producer. That perspective allows me to focus on the minimalism of it all– building an atmosphere rather than a composition that demands attention.
Each issue of Liminal Window will have a score written specifically for it. These pieces are designed to be played while reading and will seamlessly loop so the music can adapt to whatever pace the reader moves through the text.
To retain copyright and authorship, each composition will be registered with BMI and other relevant institutions. However, they will not be distributed through streaming services. Instead, each issue will include a free download of its accompanying score.
Additionally, every track will be distributed to radio stations that support ambient and experimental music. Any revenue generated from those broadcasts will go directly toward helping sustain the publication.
In the end, these scores are simply meant to do what good background music has always done– create a quiet atmosphere where the words can breathe.
Because sometimes the best place to read a story is inside a sound.
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liminalwindow.blog/archive/musictoreadto
Visit the archive to read more from the column.
— About The Magazine —
Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
To me, the most valuable time in a story’s life is the moment that inspiration strikes a writer. Not the finished work. Not the applause, or the critique. I’m talking about the moment before any of that exists. Before the fire. The beat before the breath that the story will take on its journey into becoming what we will all know it to be.
It’s a fragile moment. Almost invisible if you’re not paying attention. Like an unwelcome house guest, it rarely announces itself or arrives with certainty or convenience. It flickers, hovering just long enough for you to either catch it or miss it entirely. And if you’ve ever been on the obsessive side of the pen, you know exactly what I mean. That feeling where something begins forming before you even understand what it is.
That is the moment where the author owns their words the most.
That’s what this publication is.
Stories from a storyteller’s point of view.
Not in the dissected, post-mortem way where everything is categorized and labeled until there’s nothing left of its original life. I’m not interested in podcast autopsies or glamorized social media copy. This isn’t just a publication for publishing’s sake, but a love letter to the craft I’ve dedicated my entire life to.
And I don’t say that lightly.
Writing has been the constant. The through-line. The thing that remained when everything else changed.
This love letter is about that liminal moment in time that exists only in the most intimate memories of a writer’s mind. The writing published here will serve as a window into that liminal space.
From that moment on, the words begin to belong to someone else. They grow through the lens of others. Writers crave ownership of their words more than anything, but those brief moments of ownership have become scarce as the goal to be published– or produced– has become the only reason people write.
What was once editors and directors shaping the later life of a story has now crept into its earliest stages. Not even the development phase is safe from being hijacked by other perspectives.
As writers, we crave community. This has always been the case. But that community has changed as the goal has changed, and the goal now has become to publish as fast as possible. From the moment someone has a good idea, they are bombarded with blog posts, YouTube videos, and digital courses telling them what to do and what not to do to be a good writer.
Our words are being judged before they’re even placed on the page.
There is no formula for good writing.
Learning structure is important. Some techniques can fix basic issues. But structure is not creativity.
There is no, and never will be, a formula for creative expression. And the moment you try to turn that into something replicable for a course, a blog post, or some random e-book, you strip it of the very thing that made it worth pursuing in the first place.
Generative writing is here to stay, and as writers, we need to accept that. Anyone can do what we do now if all we focus on is structure.
Our voice is the most important thing we have left.
Our voice is our word.
I am not against the use of generative writing. In many ways, it will make the worst writers tolerable. But in that same vein, it may make the best writers mediocre. I do use grammar assisting tools and consult editor models in the final moments of a story’s life. I knew I had to, or I was going to be left behind. I learned to adopt them early on when I saw from my first meeting with a producer that times had changed. He consulted his browser window as if it were another person in the room, feeding me its responses like they were his ideas. So instead of fighting it, I learned to use it in editorial ways.
While it never replaced me, I knew I had to learn how to co-exist with it. That moment with the producer was, however, one of the first cracks that splintered the ground beneath my writing career.
With that being said, I know it is time that I must talk about my previous work. This will be the last time I publicly speak about my screenwriting career.
Not out of bitterness, though I understand how it could be read that way. And not out of regret, either. Some chapters don’t need to be revisited to be honored. But its relevance matters here because the death of that career is the liminal moment that birthed this publication.
From a sixteen-year-old homeless kid traveling the streets to a thirty-four-year-old script doctor being paid around five dollars a word to write for studios, I actually achieved my dream.
I was finally a professional screenwriter in Hollywood.
And there’s a strange silence that comes after a sentence like that when you realize there’s nowhere else for it to go. Because culturally, that’s the peak. That’s the start of the happy ending.
But real life doesn’t follow narrative structure.
There’s a concept called the Hedonic Paradox— the idea that no matter what happens to us, whether we experience incredible success or devastating failure, we tend to return to a baseline level of happiness or dissatisfaction. We adapt. We normalize. We settle back into whatever version of ourselves we’ve been conditioned to be.
That’s something I didn’t understand until I was already there. Achievement doesn’t rewire you. Once you reach a certain point, you don’t become someone new.
You bring yourself with you.
So I found myself in the strange position of having everything I had ever wanted, and none of it felt the way I thought it would. Not because it was empty, but because my relationship with the work had changed. My stories were sacrificed for compromises as producers preferred systematic approaches. Hollywood hires you for you, and then asks you to become who they need you to be. The one thing I had always owned– my words– were no longer mine.
The thing I loved most in the world started to feel like something I was being paid to dismantle according to someone else’s expectations. Not maliciously. Just systematically. Gradually. Until eventually you realize you hate what you do. Because what you do is no longer what you started doing.
That realization destroyed me.
And eventually, like an over-traveled wooden bridge, something gave.
Overnight, my career ended.
Not in some dramatic way, but in that quiet shift where you realize you can’t keep doing something without losing the part of yourself that loved it in the first place.
I love writing more than anything.
I knew I had to quit.
For twenty years– from MySpace to TikTok— I had thousands watching my every move. I was an “influencer” before the word existed and long after it was vilified. Hundreds of thousands of people read my words while millions watched them acted out.
But when someone called me successful, my stomach churned.
How could I take credit for work that never felt like mine?
I needed to remove this feeling. I tried everything, but nothing ever seemed to work. Finally, there was only one solution left to try.
I deleted everything.
No archive. No backup. No slow transition. My email. My website. My social media. I even changed my number and got a flip phone.
It was all gone.
I had spent decades building millions of views and watched them disappear in less than sixty seconds, and for the first time since I was sixteen years old, there was no audience. No expectation. No performance.
Just silence. Like the snap of a match, I was free. And in that silence, something unfamiliar started to take shape. That empty space we’re all afraid to sit in for too long. A space I always rushed to fill before. But there’s something important in that pause. The most important moment of a writer’s life.
Inspiration.
It was in that space that I found my way back to the part of storytelling I actually care about. The raw, uncertain part that exists before anyone else gets a say in it. The part where the author exists as much in the prose as the words themselves.
I like to call that the liminal moment.
That was always my favorite part about writing. Whether it was the moment the idea first came to you, or the moment you first verbalized it to a room full of strangers.
Some of the best short stories I have ever heard were pitched in a Zoom call full of half-asleep producers who couldn’t care less about what the writer was saying. I always loved it because in that moment, the story didn’t need to be anything more than what it was.
That’s the space I want to explore with this publication.
Because that moment– the liminal one— is the only time a story belongs entirely to the person who created it.
Everything else is for everyone else.
You go all the way back to The Epic of Gilgamesh, and what you find isn’t just a story– it’s evidence of devotion. Of persistence. Of persons sitting down and carving meaning into clay tablets with no guarantee that anyone would ever read it. No system to reward them. No audience metrics. No financial incentive. Just the need to tell the story. And there’s something almost impossible to fully grasp about that. It took sheer dedication to create something like that in a world where survival itself was already a full-time job. Storytelling persisted from the necessity of creative expression.
Some would say that would change when publishing became an economic desire; however, I don’t believe that.
When Edgar Allan Poe published “The Raven” in 1845, he was paid a mere nine dollars (around $370 today); however, the mass media adaptation of this work has made hundreds of millions of dollars in its lifetime. Money that Poe would never see. If this is success, then why is success so desirable? And an even better question, would he have seen this as success?
Personally, I don’t think so.
He wanted to own his words.
In a letter to James Russell Lowell in 1844, Poe expressed this desire. “How dreadful is the present condition of our Literature! To what are things heading? We want… a well-founded Monthly Journal, of sufficient ability, circulation, and character, to control, and to give tone to, our Letters. It should be, externally, a specimen of high, but not too refined Taste.” He would go on to conclude with a sentiment this publication shares with his dream. “It should have nothing to do with Agents or Agencies. Such a Magazine might be made to exercise a prodigious influence, and would be a source of wealth to its proprietors.”
Sadly, the wealth of a greed-born nature is the desire for most storytellers now.
Be it focusing on the dollar amount or the total of views, there are too many people picking up the pen for the numbers. And numbers have a way of flattening things in ways that words never could. Numbers remove poetry and reduce something complex into something manageable and predictable. Something that can be replicated if you follow the right formula closely enough. But literature was never meant to be predictable. And when that predictability becomes constantly desired of you, it starts to wear on you.
And it did wear on me, just not all at once.
It was subtle. Incremental. It began with a subtle shift in how I thought about my work. A hesitation where there used to be instinct. Second-guessing began to replace curiosity.
I saw what Poe was talking about.
His dream wasn’t to become what he became. A synonym for broody imagery by a corporate machine. I doubt success to him would be measured by the countless “special edition” hardbacks that litter thousands of shelves worldwide. I don’t even believe he would have appreciated how his name has been immortalized with its association with the word “writer.” His dream was actually something simple and likely what all of ours is. A dream he never got to have.
To freely publish our words in black and white and inspire a community of those who love literature.
In that same letter to Lowell, he said about his desire to publish his own magazine. “…it should be boldly printed, on excellent paper, in single column, and be illustrated, not merely embellished, by spirited wood designs in the style of Grandville. Its chief aims should be Independence, Truth, Originality.” Unfortunately, Poe never got to have that. His one attempt failed quite quickly, and he never got to see this dream realized. Publishing was simply too expensive.
Had he had access to what we do now, I believe he would have dedicated his life to it, whether it made him rich or not.
The blog is a very powerful publishing tool. A tool I know he would have proudly used. That’s why I decided to publish this as a blog.
While a blog in the traditional sense is rather informal and advertisement-laden, I want to treat mine like the most formal of publications. Each issue will be archived across multiple repositories and formats. The series will exist in digital and physical form, preserved through libraries and archives so that the work remains permanent.
Financing this will be done with the purest intentions, finding small ways to build capital without ever compromising the vision of the publication.
There will be no subscriptions or advertising. I will not maintain social media, nor will I track analytics on my readers. Even though this is digital, I want this to remain as private as the page has always been in history.
I hope that in 100 issues, we can all look back at this moment as the spark that started the beginning of my newly found career, and many others. I dream of stepping through convention doors and meeting thousands of writers who all have their own blogs, where everyone keeps their own gates– not waiting for permission or chasing validation– just writing and publishing. Because writing deserves to be treated as something permanent, even when it exists in a medium that feels temporary. And now, my words are mine for the first time in my career.
Welcome to the window into my liminal moment.
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liminalwindow.blog/archive/mainframe
Visit the archive to read more from the column.
— About The Column —
Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
When I began my career as a writer, the first piece of advice I received wasn’t even in English. For the life of me, I can’t remember what language it was, or even how it was spelled. That hasn’t stopped the advice from returning to my mind over the years.
What I do remember is the rough translation.
Sit silently.
Some writers interpret that as a kind of solitude– alone at home, tucked behind a keyboard somewhere, separated from the noise of the world. But over time, I’ve found that the advice meant something different for me. The most valuable lessons I’ve learned about storytelling have come from sitting quietly in spaces where I felt like I didn’t quite belong.
To sit silently among the loud.
It’s a funny thought, considering how much of my past career had me moving through places most people never get to see, yet the real stories were always happening somewhere outside of those spaces. I was behind the camera, behind the curtain, somewhere on the edges of things. That separation actually helped a lot. It took me to places I wouldn’t normally go to, and made me exist among them. I’ve never quite known how to move through a space as a member of the crowd. So when I had to, I sat silently and observed those who did know how to move through them.
And almost every time, I left understanding people a little more than I did when I arrived. I was always grateful for that.
Lately, though, since retiring from entertainment, I’ve spent more time in solitude than ever before.
Away from the world. And for the first time in my life, I’ve started to feel like I understand the world less.
Sadly, I can already feel that distance creeping into my writing.
So I know that it won’t be long before my characters start suffering from it too.
Out the Window exists to prevent that. This column is my excuse to step back out into the world– to sit quietly in places where I don’t quite belong, to watch, to listen, and to see what I might learn. Then return here to the page with whatever journalistic insight that followed me home.
Because sometimes the best thing a writer can do for their prose is to look up from it.
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liminalwindow.blog/archive/outthewindow
Visit the archive to read more from the column.
— About The Column —
Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
When I was growing up, my parents surrounded me with music. Not in the way many parents do. Mine were particular about it. They wanted to make sure I understood it in a way most people never quite do.
There wasn’t a genre I didn’t hear, or some piece of music trivia I wasn’t eventually bombarded with.
When my parents heard a song they liked on the radio, we didn’t just listen to the single– we went straight to the record store so they could buy the album. On the ride home, they would explain something I’ve carried with me ever since: if the only good song on the album is the single, then the artist probably isn’t very good.
Their standards for artists were high.
We would watch music videos on CMT after church, and at the bottom of the screen, a small credit would appear listing the songwriters. My parents were always the first to point it out. They would tell me when the artist didn’t write the song and start listing other songs that the same writer had worked on. They would do the same with directors and producers. I learned about Bob Rock as I learned about Metallica.
Music of every genre played in my house.
I remember being in high school while my mom had Avenged Sevenfold and Fergie on repeat, laughing at my sudden obsession with Led Zeppelin II and IV because, in her mind, I should have already known how good those albums were.
I remember my father once asking me to pirate some music for him after they lost a few CDs during their move to Iowa.
When I asked him which albums he needed, he said, “Biggie’s last album and Hank Williams Jr.’s greatest hits.” Considering that mashup of taste, I wasn’t at all surprised when he recently showed me Jelly Roll’s newest single.
I love music in ways I don’t think most people understand. I grew up learning about an industry I had no real connection to. My parents weren’t musicians. They weren’t promoters or bookers. Hell, they weren’t even regular concert-goers.
What they were, though, were archivists. I wish they didn’t lose so many of their albums. Where students of sound now explore playlists on streaming services, I grew up surrounded by nearly a thousand CDs of everything one could imagine. My sister walked down the aisle last year to the same sound system that we grew up listening to, and it was far superior than some I’ve encountered on music video sets with national bands.
My parents appreciated music– and the cultures that surrounded it– no matter where it came from.
Those values will always stay with me.
My pen once helped silently shape the visuals people associated with a song, but now I am, in many ways, like my parents.
My love of melody has given me a perspective on an industry I technically have nothing to do with anymore.
But maybe that’s my place now– to shine a different perspective onto an art form that has become crowded with arrogant criticism and bleak dissection. Because you don’t need to be a musician– or work in the business– to appreciate a great composition.
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liminalwindow.blog/archive/insound
Visit the archive to read more from the column.
— About The Column —
Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
Every writer who sits down with a blank page is, knowingly or not, responding to the voices that came before them, just most of us never do.
Letters to Authors is my way of responding.
Rather than writing formal reviews or critical essays, this column takes the form of open letters to writers whose work I truly admire.
I once had a zine called “No Movies Are Bad,” and the point was to find something I loved in every movie I watched and write a reflective essay on it– no matter the quality of the picture. It taught me more about storytelling than I could ever explain, and I remember thinking, “How much would I love it if someone sent me a letter like this?”
That’s where this column came from.
These letters are not meant to dissect the work or place it under the sterile light of criticism. They’re meant to acknowledge it the way most readers actually experience literature– personally, emotionally, and often unexpectedly.
One thing that my zine taught me was that when a piece of writing truly works, something interesting happens. It stops feeling like something you’ve read and starts feeling like something someone told you. And when that happens, the most natural response isn’t analysis.
It’s a letter back.
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liminalwindow.blog/archive/letterstoauthors
Visit the archive to read more from the column.
— About The Column —
Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
I remember seeing J. Ivy perform on Def Poetry, and it completely changed the way I understood poetry. Up until that moment, I had placed poetry into two very separate categories: hip hop and academia. Poetry was something teachers talked about in classrooms. Rapping was something my friends did on the bus ride home.
They lived in two different worlds.
I never had much interest in what most of the kids around me were rapping about, though. Even back then, my tastes leaned toward the more thoughtful side of hip hop. I was listening to Dead Prez, Talib Kweli, The Black Eyed Peas (before the EDM era), and the more reflective songs of Tupac. I listened to what everyone else did, too, but when I was alone, those were the artists that stayed in rotation.
Then one day, I got my hands on Kanye West’s “College Dropout” and heard J. Ivy reprise his poem on “Never Let Me Down.” I was immediately enamored. It wasn’t rapping, it wasn’t poetry. It was a bridge between the two in a way that made sense to me. Proving that they could not only exist together, but combine in a way that elevated the words themselves.
I wanted in.
From that moment on, I began writing poetry. But no one I knew read it. And needing that youthful validation, I knew that there was only one decision left.
I knew I had to rap.
I was never the strongest performer, as my nerves would get in the way of my timing and disrupt my flow. But that didn’t stop me, and like any hood kid, I made a few bad mixtapes. Also, like any hood punk kid, I eventually found myself forcing my way into bands as the rapper.
So, as expected, I drifted away from poetry altogether. The interest never disappeared, but it changed shape. Instead of writing verses, I started leaning more into poetic prose to scratch the same creative itch.
Recently, though, something interesting happened. While reading through literary magazines, I realized how rarely you see slam-style poetry represented in their pages.
That realization brought me back to it.
In Rhyme exists as a place for that kind of poetry. Because sometimes spoken word isn’t meant to only be on stage.
Sometimes it deserves to be on the page.
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liminalwindow.blog/archive/inrhyme
Visit the archive to read more from the column.
— About The Column —
Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
Short stories are probably my favorite kind of stories. That’s likely why I fell in love with screenwriting and cinema as a whole. The idea of stepping into the life of a character– just long enough to experience what matters— before they disappear back into the ether of imagination has always felt powerful to me. That brief window into another life is sometimes all a story needs.
Because of that, I’ve always been drawn to writing as many stories as I could. I never felt the need to dedicate years to writing a single novel when a story could exist perfectly within a smaller frame. In many ways, my career as a script doctor was exactly that: working within the form of the short narrative. A treatment– when written well— reads like a short story. A finely written treatment doesn’t feel like technical planning. It feels like prose.
A great example of this is James Cameron’s Avatar. The treatment– not the script— reads almost like a piece of narrative fiction. That’s how I always approached the work.
Short stories also have a uniquely American legacy. While much of the literary world was still rooted in the traditions of the European novel, American writers were experimenting with something different. Writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and later writers like Ernest Hemingway were shaping a form of storytelling that embraced brevity, atmosphere, and impact. Their work didn’t simply condense the novel– it invented a new way of telling stories.
That tradition would eventually influence cinema itself. Some of the most powerful films ever made began as short narratives, ideas that captured a moment, a character, or a conflict before expanding into something larger.
The reason many people say “the book is better than the movie” is the same reason someone might prefer a novel over a short story if they encountered the novel first. Each form simply tells the story differently.
But the heart of American storytelling– the place where ideas are tested, voices emerge, and stories first breathe– has always been the short story.
That’s what Fiction Frame is meant to celebrate.
Every story I never published, every script I never sold, every treatment that never made it past the early conversations– those are the stories that will live here.
Because if the movie theater is the home of cinema, then the literary journal is the home of the short story.
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liminalwindow.blog/archive/fictionframe
Visit the archive to read more from the column.
This becomes more complicated when you learn that I considered placing myself on every cover, writing in a café. I’m not. But I did consider it.
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liminalwindow.blog/archive/gagframe
Visit the archive to read more from the column.
— About The Column —
Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
I’m not much of a novel person.
I’ve tried to be. But I’ve never quite agreed with the way the publishing industry has convinced us that the quality of a book somehow depends on how many pages it contains.
Because of that, I’ve often found myself strangely disenchanted with the bookstore. Thousands of books– most of them eighty thousand words or more.
Even when the description catches me, I know I may never actually finish it. Sometimes I’ll fall in love with a book immediately and still not have the time in my life to read it all the way through.
It depresses me a little.
A lot, actually.
I’ve tried everything to fix that feeling. I’ve learned how to speed read. I’ve played audiobooks at ridiculous speeds. I’ve even experimented with breaking books into “episodes,” the way television structures its stories.
Nothing ever quite worked the way I hoped it would.
I’ve always wanted more stories in my life. But the truth is that there simply isn’t enough time to read everything that deserves to be read.
So when a book does catch me– when something pulls me into obsession— it surprises me every time. Sometimes it’s a novel. Sometimes it’s a comic book. Sometimes it’s a strange little literary zine I found by accident.
Whenever something makes me want to read, I want to document that experience.
I’m not interested in rating books, reviewing them, or judging them. There are enough places for that already.
What I want to write about here is the feeling of encountering a book– the way it pulled me in, the moments that stayed with me, and the strange afterglow it leaves behind. Because sometimes the most important part of reading a book isn’t finishing it. Sometimes it’s the moment that makes you stop and think.
And if we’re lucky, maybe one day books will become a little shorter– so we can experience even more of these incredible writers while we’re here.
⊞
liminalwindow.blog/archive/inpage
Visit the archive to read more from the column.
— About The Column —
Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
Cinema will always be my first love.
It gave me everything I have today– my spouses, my home, the entire life I have. Leaving it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
But cinema can be toxic.
Everyone believes they’re a genius, or listens to one’s podcast, dissecting and discarding. To truly love cinema is to be removed from cinema. The further I stepped away, the more I fell back in love with it. Good ones, bad ones– it doesn’t matter. As Dalton Trumbo once said about a “bad script”, “there’s always a good story in there somewhere.”
I’ve always believed that part of loving cinema means exploring all of it. The masterpieces, the failures, the forgotten films that almost worked. Somewhere inside each one is the reason someone felt compelled to make it.
That’s why I watch movies.
Over the course of my life, I’ve kept a documented list of every movie I’ve ever seen. Which right now sits around 1,400 films.
That’s roughly 126,000 minutes of my life spent sitting in the dark with a screen.
And I don’t regret a second of it.
This column is simply a reflection of my thoughts on cinema. My unique perspective of love and appreciation for the art form that gave me my breath.
And little by little, I hope I can help spread that appreciation to you.
⊞
liminalwindow.blog/archive/infocus
Visit the archive to read more from the column.
— About The Column —
Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
In 2024, I was diagnosed with prediabetes. That diagnosis launched an unintended journey: saving myself from a preventable future. I started by educating myself about food– and what I found was disturbing.
Sugar is everywhere.
It’s hidden in things you would never expect.
Worse, sugar’s presence often isn’t clear. “Low sugar” isn’t “low carb.” “Zero sugar” isn’t “zero carb.” Carbohydrates turn into sugar, so hidden carbs become the real culprits.
Coffee culture turned out to be one of the biggest offenders.
Most coffee shops don’t actually offer true sugar-free versions of their drinks, which left me with very few options. So I stopped buying the syrup-loaded drinks and started making my own at home, and I discovered something else along the way– I was saving an incredible amount of money.
For years, I had been paying premium prices for drinks that were quietly killing me.
So I decided to change that.
Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to recreating coffeehouse drinks at home– low carb, low sugar, and at a fraction of the cost. It turns out most of them are surprisingly easy once you know what you’re doing. I did finally beat prediabetes and lost nearly 80lbs in the process. This column exists for anyone who wants to take their health– and their wallet— back into their own hands. These are the recipes, tricks, and experiments that ended up working for me.
This is what’s in my mug.
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liminalwindow.blog/archive/inmug
Visit the archive to read more from the column.
— About The Column —
Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
I have always said, “that any great story can be broken down to five words.”
The Liminal Pitch Prize is a recurring feature of Liminal Window that celebrates the art of the pitch. In an environment where attention is fought for as much as money is, being able to do this is an important asset.
The goal is not to summarize a book, but to capture the moment that a reader will never forget.
Because sometimes five words are all you have.
Each issue, submissions are reviewed, and one headline is selected as the Liminal Pitch Prize Winner. The winning pitch is published in the magazine alongside the author’s name and includes a link to the writer’s published work.
In addition to the winner, several standout entries are recognized as Shortlisted Mentions, listing their names, but not their pitches, so they can resubmit for future issues if they want to.
The winning author receives the Liminal Pitch Prize seal, which may be used on book covers, websites, or other promotional materials. Each winning pitch will also be archived and minted on the blockchain as part of the permanent record of the prize.
So, what’s your pitch?
liminalwindow.blog/liminalpitchprize
Visit the page to learn more about the prize.
I have always been obsessed with building game systems.
While working as a screenwriter, I was constantly expected to generate new ideas. After a while, I started experimenting with ways to do it faster– systems that could produce story concepts from scratch. Eventually, I built one that worked a lot like a tabletop RPG: roll the dice, and let the results shape the story.
Every great literary magazine has traditionally included some kind of word puzzle, and I wanted to take part in that tradition. I experimented with several formats before landing on this one.
And this one is brilliant.
Dicewrite begins with a prompt and a set of story “slots.” Each slot contains multiple possible options. Roll the dice for each category and fill in the spaces provided. Once the slots are filled, read the prompt as a continuous piece and let the structure guide the story that emerges.
What appears is yours. Interpretation is part of the process. You’re free to take the outline and turn it into whatever story comes to mind.
To make the system easier to use, I coded it so (.blog) readers can simply press a button– no physical dice required. Just another perk of this being a digital publication.
Alright, even if you’re not particularly interested in the mechanics, I promise the numbers behind it are worth looking at.
The outline contains 22 story slots, and each slot has six possible options.
That means every generated story requires the system to make 22 independent choices that shape the characters, setting, conflict, twists, and ending.
Mathematically, that creates 6²² possible combinations—more than 13 trillion unique story outlines.
Even changing a single slot– while leaving the other twenty-one the same– creates a completely different narrative path. The system isn’t just producing variations of the same story; it’s exploring an enormous landscape of possible plots.
To put that scale into perspective, if you generated one new outline every second, it would take more than 420,000 years to produce them all.
And since each issue of Liminal Window will feature a new Dicewrite prompt, that means 13,366,809,647,616 possible outlines per issue.
Take that, writer’s block.
***
Go ahead, give it a shot.
“The Ruined Wedding“
Prompt Written by: Jaiden Hordosillo
Not every wedding day goes as planned. Unfortunately, our protagonist— ⚀[character modifier] ⚀[character type] —is about to learn this the hard way.
In a ⚀[genre tone modifier] ⚀[genre modifier] ⚀[genre] set in ⚀[setting modifier] ⚀[setting], their morals are tested when a ⚀[character modifier] ⚀[antagonist type] interrupts the ceremony by ⚀[inciting incident], in order to ⚀[threat reveal] the wedding.
At first, the situation seems manageable, but when the protagonist ⚀[first event] , things suddenly change, resulting in a ⚀[first event outcome] exchange with one of the other characters.
But as tensions rise, it becomes clear that the antagonist ⚀[threat’s motive reveal].
Everything turns out ⚀[second event outcome] for them when ⚀[second event] .
Suddenly, ⚀[pre-reversal], shifting the floor underneath everyone involved. With no other options, the protagonist ⚀[third event], resulting in a ⚀[third event outcome] turn that pushes everything toward the story’s final moments.
In the end, it is revealed that ⚀[final reversal] .
The tale crescendos for the protagonist as they ⚀[threat outcome] and we are left with the image of ⚀[climactic image] to close out our story.
DICEwrite™
A story generator created by Liminal Window.
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The Blackboard is the only space in Liminal Window reserved for others. The magazine will never carry traditional advertising, but it will always remain open to collaboration within the literary world. Here you may find conventions, independent publishers, bookstores, authors, fellow journals, or other projects worth discovering. Each feature is drawn by hand and offered as a gesture of community– helping writers and readers find one another while keeping the publication independent.
If you’re interested in appearing on the Blackboard, please reach out here.
Publishing Information
Title: Liminal Window: Issue 1
Author: Jaiden Hordosillo
ORCID: 0009-0005-4147-4231
Publisher: Liminal Window Co
EIN: 39-3928958
Publication Date: 3/15/2026
ISBN: 978-1-956116-08-3
ISSN: pending
Library of Congress Control Number: pending
Edition: First Edition, Digital
Word Count: 7,450
Language: English
Genre / BISAC: FIC002000 – FICTION / Anthologies
Dewey Decimal: 808.8
Edited by: Jaiden Hordosillo
Illustrated by: Jaiden Hordosillo
Reference Photo Photographer: Grace Fuller
Layout Design by: Jaiden Hordosillo
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19059285
IA: archive.org/details/liminal-window-vol.-1-no.-1
GIT: github.com/LiminalWindow/issues/releases/tag/v1.0.0
Digital Proof of Existence:
SHA–256
accf08f7 89268d9 16a25a9 b3d8119
6cee0d 53ddc56 c41384d aa904a2 5910cef3
This document was cryptographically sealed
and anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain
via OpenTimestamps.
Music:
“LW0001”
Written by Jaiden Hordosillo
Published as Liminal Window
Published by Liminal Window Co
USPC: 825100878348
ISRC: QZNWV2638457
BMI: 78236080
ISWC: pending
© 2026 Liminal Window Co All rights reserved.
Digital Edition Archived In:
Internet Archive
Zenodo (CERN Data Repository)
Figshare
Institutional Deposit Targets:
Library of Congress (United States)
Duke University Libraries, Durham, NC
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, Chapel Hill, NC
North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, NC
Durham County Library System, Durham, NC
International Legal Deposit Targets:
The British Library (United Kingdom)
National Library of Scotland
Library and Archives Canada
National Library of Australia
This publication exists as a digitally archived artifact across multiple independent preservation systems, with ongoing efforts toward institutional and legal deposit in national and international archives. Each system serves a distinct role in ensuring long-term accessibility, citation integrity, and redundancy of record. All versions and deposits are considered part of the official publication history of Liminal Window.
Liminal Window: Issue 1
© 2026 Liminal Window Co All rights reserved.
This work may be shared freely in its original form. Excerpts may be quoted for critical or scholarly purposes with proper attribution.
Published in the United States of America.
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