A free Sci-Fi Comedy, from me.
About kebabs and the afterlife.
It took a while to write the story I am now giving away for free. And, at a time when I could really do with selling more books for money, I have decided in my infinite wisdom that I want you to have this book, whether or not you want to spend £1 on it.
I think you’ll like it.
Back in 2019, a marketing friend told me it was “Completely ridiculous” to cram 11 sci-fi comedy universes into one book.
But I had a vision.
It was a smart artistic vision, not a smart financial one.
Yes, I could have charged you for 11 novellas with WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? (note: this is not the free thing, the free thing is a few paragraphs away) but if you’ve got Who Built The Humans? (and you probably do have it by now, the link is really for anyone passing by) you’ll understand that it isn’t merely a short story collection. It isn’t just a shopping list of ideas I had over the years, packaged together just for the sake of selling them as one thing.
No, it’s much more than that.
It’s a Novelthology. A multiverse of weird that necessitated the coining of a new genre of literature. Not novel, not anthology, but some freak hybrid of both, the Novelthology is a new species of book which takes the best from both disparate cosmoses and combines them in twisted new ways.
Short stories dance and loop over and under each other, weaving together a complex and philosophical metanarrative that pairs quite nicely with the dark humour, weird characters, and silly alliteration-heavy comedy poems.
Few open mics understood it.
Those that did wanted me to read it again, right after I’d already read it.
No traditional publisher would have taken it.
Because they are often, in general, for financial reasons, unimaginative.
So I went my own way.
I self-published WBTH in 2020 on Lulu.com at first, owing to their superior paper quality (when they say cream, it is cream, not the off-white other companies put out). But they don’t have fantastic reach in the book markets, so I soon moved to Amazon, who I used as my stabilizers whilst I learned to ride the big boy bikes of Draft2Digital and IngramSpark. I am still repubbing the paperback to Gardners, so it can show up in more places.
This might mean nothing to you if you’re just in this thing for reading. Basically, I leapfrogged from printer to printer, finding greener pastures and bigger communities of people who enjoy my specific brand of weird.
Who Built The Humans? (the first one) contained 11 universes, split across 47 chapters, most of which function just fine as standalone stories.
Think, ‘slice of life’ but not boring, and not about peeling fruit or getting divorced and crying in the shower about the fruit but not the divorce, and it being a metaphor for something like the distance between us and fruit or something.
Scrap that.
Think, you’re an astronaut passing by an alien ship. Each story in WBTH is a window of that ship, and you can glare into it. It’s fine, the aliens invited you. They are putting on little shows in your mind as you fly past.
Both of these analogies are weird.
Anyway. The book was good. People liked it. They wanted me to write more. I wrote more. Some of this aofrementioned ‘more’ became WBTH2, here’s part of it. You get the idea.
HOLOGRAM KEBAB
I have made this story, about hologram kebabs, relationships, and the afterlife 100% free. Even on Amazon.
It was a pain. But I did it.
Why?
Because it’s the first story in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? TWO and I want it to have an audience before that book comes out.
You can get it here. Just click whichever button suits you.
I only ask that you leave a nice review afterwards. If you enjoyed the story.
Extra bits.
Sadly, WBTH2 funding has run dry at £66, which is enough to cover my prototyping of the book itself, but it’s not enough to keep me fed or get me to any interviews about my books any time soon, so I am again trying to find freelance gigs, which will mean the book takes longer to come out.
Maybe a year or two, or three.
I need kebabs myself, basically.
I know what the issue is, I am really bad at online marketing. The Earthloop Trilogy was almost fully funded in 48 hours last year, and I did hardly any online stuff for that, I just had a table at a ComicCon. But this year, I didn’t get into any.
I did get an office job for a bit, but for reasons too boring (personal) to disclose here I couldn’t keep it. Turns out I’m designed to be on stage or writing books or somehow doing both simultaneously whilst selling books on the stage, but not designed for city living. Many parts of me stopped working very quickly.
I need this writing thing to work out. I’m good at it.
Anyway, I made Hologram Kebab free in the hopes I might reach some new readers who don’t want to risk £1 on an eBook but who are more than willing to risk £4 on a risky kebab every few nights. Is that ironic?
There’s a joke there, but I won’t bite.
Get the book. It’s good. And it’s free.
It won’t be free forever.
So, maybe give the £1 you just saved to a cat charity.
Oh, and share this post please, more people will read the thing then.