A Stephanie livestream? Now?
How it's going, where it's going, and why.
If you are reading this email within the first hours of its release, I’ll be writing Stephanie stuff live on twitch.tv. It doesn’t cost anything to watch.
Can’t be bothered reading this email and want to skip to the livestream?
Hello all.
It’s been a month since the last Stephanie post. So, where is she?
Right now she’s dying, but the book is more alive than ever. Stephanie’s impending ‘demise’ is a second inciting incident, concrete proof that she’s right, that her whole world really is simulated.
And ‘dying’ is the best way to avoid dying.
I’ve just completed my first two shows at the Manchester Fringe, proving myself as a time-travelling sci-fi poetry comedian, telling jokes about alien abductions to a double-booked wedding, yelling when the mic broke, and throwing aliens into an audience more than happy to frogmarch the pint-sized plastic probers out onto the perve-pocked pavements of Manchester. On my last day, I saw a drugged-up man readjusting his privates in the middle of the street with such ferocity that I was half expecting a cartoonish popping noise (or grisly horror noise) to indicate he had finally located his manhood and, in his desperation to locate it, tore it off by accident. The shortest manhood discovery, in more ways than one.
Why am I telling you this in a Stephanie update?
Because, as always, she was somehow involved.
On the last night of my show, I asked the audience to pick from three subjects. Love, Love a bit darker, or Simulation theory. They chose simulation, so I read out ON-SIMULATION from WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?, which many of you may have noticed not only included a prequel for THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, but a comedic universe of slam poems about the folly of human experience, the end of time itself, and crab ghosts.
You may also know that some of the poems in this book within a book (more on that later), including ON-SIMULATION, had a character within called Sci-Fi Stevie. Now, only a handful of people have noticed some of the secret layers to the book (meaning a lot of people still think it should have been several books) so I’ll save you the digging and say this.
Sci-Fi Stevie is an alternate universe Stephanie.
Her love of Sci-Fi, her dead-end office job, her inclination toward Tin Foil Tim, the conspiracy theorist who thinks life is a nightmare inside a robot with PTSD. All of it makes sense again if you remember Stephanie from later chapters, which is why the book can be read in any order, and should probably be played through thrice in a year, like your favourite record.
So THE STEPHANIE GLITCH is a bit more complicated to write than a standalone novel, even though it is one. I want to be careful that I know the next few books beforehand. But that isn’t actually why updates have been so slow.
Stephanie is by far my weirdest book, so I doubt the average publisher would want it. That means I’ve had to go self-pub again, but I wanted to do it differently this time round. I learned a lot from publishing WBTH.
So, I am preparing a manuscript to send to Unbound books. That’s why updates have been slow. I’ll be sending it out later this week, and eventually we will find out if the book becomes available to vote on.
If you’re not familiar with Unbound, it’s essentially like LegoIdeas for books.
If you’re not familiar with LegoIdeas, it’s a crowd-pushing platform. People can vote on what books they want to see, with the winners eventually being put up for crowd-funding and getting publishing contracts. I like Unbound and have done for a few years.
I am going to write some Stephanie tonight, for part 8 of this newsletter. You can come and watch me writing it if that suits you. I’ll be going live in a few minutes.
You can watch my livestreams on Twitch.Tv for free. Most of them are dark comedy, chit chat, and Minecraft stuff (yes, all at the same time, I have a unique niche). The writing streams are a bit rarer, but I’m working on improving that.
They also contain the odd bit of comedy, but it’s mostly me ranting about simulation theory and writing fight scenes and mind-bending dialogue on spaceships or collapsing planets.
You can also become a Patron to support this Substack, see stories before anyone else, and get exclusive content, such as videos and a statue in my Minecraft world. It’s more robust than a paid subscription here on Substack (which gets you into the archives of ancient posts), as you can dip in for a month, grab everything, and skitter away into the night. It’s free to follow, so you can hang around there and see how you feel before doing the money thing. I’ll be putting more content on it soon, so it’s worth waiting for next month!
Patreon support, book sales, and any and all donations given to me all support my publishing efforts. A good example is last year’s ComicCon, the insurance for which I managed to buy with Lego sales alone (because I also run a small Lego shop, for when book sales dry out. Let me know if you want to see it, this post already has lots of links). Because I could afford insurance for ComicCon, I was allowed to sell my books there, and if the tower of WBTHs fell on anyone, I wouldn’t lose everything I own in court.
And if you were wondering what I listen to when writing and not on stream, here’s one album that’s helped me through the last Stephanie chapter.
See you on the stream!