An astronaut jumps forward in time.
One week remains until my 31st birthday, in which I will launch the pre-orders for WBTH2 and the special edition WBTH1 hardback.
All this week I’ll be telling you about the projects I’ve been working on around that, how they connect, and what’s happening inside the multiverse.
Visions of the future.
The first thing I want to show you is this cover for THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE, a new(ish) novella. If you were here around this time in 2022, you may have bought a signed book from me at ComicCon and hopped onto this newsletter. If so, you may have read a beta version of the short story WHALE which I have since expanded, renamed, and repackaged. As with many of my longer stories, the first draft was available exclusively to my subscribers here, for a limited time.
The final version is a touch darker, deeper, and weirder.
Here’s the cover (not final, but it’s pretty good).
And I am aware that that particular shuttle is a Nasa one. In the story Galina Agafonov joins a global effort to intercept an alien object outside of Jupiter’s orbit, believing it to be our first contact with aliens. Aliens who need rescuing.
The story follows Galina through a freak accident on board, leading to her being catapulted millenia into the future.
Anyone who was here last year will recognise a hint to its first title, Whale.
This story is a standalone novella, though it does click into the wider multiverse.
It will be out in eBook soon, and paperback slightly less soon.
Another strange vision
I’m a big fan of this cover. It would have worked brilliantly for WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? but, since this story was in WBTH, it makes sense to use it here.
Yes, this one is a reprint. If you have WBTH you don’t need it, and I’m working on ways to efficiently show new readers what stories are in what collections. If a short story appears in a larger book, it will say on the product listing.
So, you’ve probably got this one, but it would be nice if you downloaded it anyway. I’ll be making it free soon and putting it on Amazon and a load of other places. It’s not big enough to warrant a paperback (unless I reformatted it as a poetry collection, in which case it is 8 modern poetry collections thick) so you won’t be seeing it on shelves any time soon, unless you’re in the Matrix.
Gnawing through the archives
You’ll have noticed by now that I’m putting a lot of stories out this summer. That’s because I’ve had a few of them waiting for a while. I wanted to refine how I publish things (I do all this myself) so I made sure to learn from authors I liked, and also learn from publishing practices I don’t like. There’s a lot about the publishing landscape that I’d like to change, and I can subvert the norms by publishing stuff myself.
A good example being hardbacks. People have asked for a WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? ONE hardback since the first month of its release in 2020, but I stubbornly refused. Why? Because my philosophy, and by proxy the Halfplanet Press philosophy, is that a book needs a damn good reason to be made into a hardback.
For me, that reason was exclusive chapter header art and new content.
Because apparently 127,000 words, 47 stories, 11 universes was not enough.
It’s a book you can read again and again, getting something new from it each time. And that was by design.
Every single story, from every single universe, is placed so that it not only communicates in a strange meta way with the stories either side of it, but so that the stories either side of it are not stories from its own universe. The structuring of the book is a crystalline, mathematical beast. That alone took me a few months of the development time.
And I had no idea if anyone would notice or care for the first year of its existence. I sold one book every six weeks on average.
Then one day it picked up, and people began complimenting the strange geometry of the book. I realised I had an audience out there somewhere.
Hi, nice to meet you!
So a lot is happening.
And I am glad you are here to see it. THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE is such a 1970s sci-fi pulp themed title that I want to read the story and smell its ancient yellowed pages, but I already know what happens.
An alien frog sells a dead human on a future space market.
And some other stuff happens too.
It’s fun. You’ll like it.
Coming soon. A special edition of WBTH1. All sales will be counted toward the funding for WBTH2.
A quick disclaimer. My brain is very tired for various personal reasons, so if I don’t reply to your comment or email quickly, please know that I have read it and will get to it when I feel capable of giving you an intelligent response. I’ve had to cancel a lot of cool outside stuff recently to preserve my mental health, but I am glad I did it because writing WBTH2 has fixed my brain in the same way WBTH1 did that time I lost my childhood home and [redacted], then [redacted] a [redacted].
Oh, I’ve added a computer into my newsletter that warns me when I start to sound like a TV talent show contestant. As soon as I try to tell you that my [redacted] was a [redacted], it electrocutes my right testicle and redacts what I typed out. No sob stories here, just a very quick and unpleasant zap.
To conserve my energy and make the best stories I can, I’m only going to be working on WBTH2 and other writing projects for the foreseeable future, cutting back a lot of other stuff so my head doesn’t start to smell of smoke.
My final outside project is this. My own comedy night.
After this I shall vanish into the ether. But I’ll keep posting here and writing.