Happy birthday! (To this Substack)
+ Huge news about ALL of my books - forever.
I’m a bit late, but it’s been a weird week for me.
I have been on Substack for three years!!!
On the 13th of November 2021, at around 1am (probably, you know what I’m like) I set up a Substack account thanks to a recommendation from fellow Science Fiction weirdo John Coon, who I met as a guest on my podcast Strange Stories with Phillip Carter (I’ll be reposting that ep here soon).
That podcast has since been renamed because writers were ironically afraid they had no strange stories to tell… which was a blessing in disguise as I can now go for a much more ‘me’ podcast, a comedic talk show in which I will try to mine humour out of absolutely everything.
I have been here for three years
It’s been a strange three years. Personally, pretty weird. Professionally, pretty clarifying. I have realised, through conversation here and on X (twitter) that…
I do not want to ‘query’ my books any more
This is big news.
I won’t pretend I am making millions of sales, but I am pretty sure I’d be making less if I was anxiously writing and rewriting emails to agents who create ‘manuscript wishlists’ so hyper-specific that the only chance they have of finding the writer they want is if they open a door to a parallel universe and meet a more writerly version of themselves.
That is to say, some agents are pitching ideas which they can, and probably should, write themselves. Otherwise, their criteria are too specific. If I was to ask for submissions, I would simply say
BE WEIRD.
But is weirdness welcome these days?
The publishers are at it, too
I have feared for a decade or so that publishers were saying no to the more interesting stories in favour of playing it safe. This fear crystallised in my mind in 2015 when I spoke to some authors as part of my degree research and found that even if they got accepted, they’d had important plot points hacked out of their manuscripts, titles changed, and deep messages twisted and rebranded. This is beyond editing. It is the mangling of a dream.
I sat in a lecture at a writing event one summer, put myself as close to the front as possible because I’m a nerd, and I saw firsthand the silent devastation on an author’s face as she recounted meetings with the marketing people. They took her book’s title away, and with it - she implied - they took away its identity. She said all this while awkwardly smiling, sat beside her agent and a rep from the publisher. The marketing team kicked the fun out of her book, and I felt she was trying to warn us.
I don’t want that to be me.
Taking risks
At least four times in the last year I have spoken to agents and publishers, and had the phrase ‘risk-averse’ bounced back to me. I am being pushed back for being weird, sometimes before I even submit a story, and I’m not even that weird. It’s not like I’m pitching Who Built The Humans? (my first book, which was a novelthology of interconnected sci-fi, comedy, and poetry, compiled into something deliberately reminiscent of a 1960s-styled best-of collection, and which readers can navigate in almost any order).
No, I was pitching something more normal.
The Stephanie Glitch
It’s a book about a psychic teenager who discovers the world is ending. Also there’s a dimension-hopping astronaut who can summon physical objects into the world with her mind, including oxygen into her own lungs, and a technological crown which lets her astral project into other realities. Throw in a bit of black hole cosmology, time travel, and simulation theory, and you’ve got The Stephanie Glitch.
See. Nice normal book. Normal book for normal people.
But not normal enough. It’s been swifly rejected by almost everyone I pitched it too, and I really went for the ‘indie’ looking people, the types who might be more likely to say yes. The type I thought might want to read it.
But even if someone finds a book fun, doesn’t mean they’ll think it will sell.
To be honest, I am tired of it.
I am tired of waiting for someone else’s approval.
So I took my own risk.
But is it really a risk, if I know I will succeed?
The big ‘risk’.
On the 25th of October 2024, at precisely 11:30pm, listening to a 2016 remaster of David Bowie’s WIN, I spent £380 and purchased 100 ISBN codes, and started the work of allocating books to them.
Every single book I’ve talked about before, from the collections to the poetry, anthologies and novels, will be published by ME. With these 100 ISBNs I alone hold the power to put these books out. No more wasted time querying.
No more sanded edges.
No more careful emails.
No more careful tweets, either.
SAY HELLO TO THE FUTURE.
Here are some of my upcoming books.
Seven Stories about Astral Travel
Seven Stories about Time Travel
Seven Stories about Space Travel
Five Futures for AI
Who Killed The Humans?
Earthloop: The Swamphenge Incident
Earthloop: The Furukawa Paradox
Earthloop: The Planet Thieves
Earthloop: Tombs of The Tekekk
False Vacuum
Branch Density
P[l]ot Holes
The Other One
The Padlocked Fridge
Who Chilled The Humans?
Rod Grasper and the Suspiciously Shaped Sausage of Doom
Rod Grasper and the planet with knives that came out
Macabre Multiverse volume 2
The Cosmic Comedy Collection volume 2
Planetary Overlap
And more books I’ve probably forgotten about.
All of these will be published by me.
Because I am sick to death of meandering around digital corners, hoping for scraps of approval from people who aren’t my target audience. There’s no way to navigate that psychological landscape without putting dents and holes into my stories, and I refuse to damage them so they fit through the correct hoops.
I am staying weird.
I am not writing books for boring people. I am writing books for you.
I make this choice now, publicly, so I can’t change my mind in the future. I’ve had a good experience with short stories before, but for novels, I am done querying. I can do it myself again.
Because I want my big books to remain odd.
I remember pitching Who Built The Humans? to one friend, and she said
“Why the fuck would you put comedy poetry in a sci-fi book? Wait, it’s you.”
It is me. This is what I do.
100 ISBNs.
Who needs a publisher?
I am the publisher.
But wait, there’s more!
In a few weeks I’ll be relaunching my Patreon. It now comes with discord integrations, meaning my supporters can listen to live podcast recordings (and on some tiers, even join as a heckler). You’ll also be able to join voice workshops, and get a thank you gift on my two-year Minecraft world. I’m thinking naming trees and gravestones after supporters.
There will be more, and I’ll do a proper announcement soon.
Thank you
Whether you showed up yesterday or were part of the first seventeen people who showed up in 2021, I want to thank you for being here and supporting me.
I will be making another story free soon, it’s a good one.
Who Built The Humans?
A massive part of my journey here, Who Built The Humans? had only been out a year when I started here on Substack. It’s a collection of eleven universes, each written specifically for the book so they could form an interconnected narrative. One universe makes jokes about the premise of the last, another shares a type of interdimensional travel, implying they might be linked. A third is about a rogue AI who remakes humans according to her memories, and a fourth is a parallel version of that reality, where the world ends long before she has a chance to rebuild us.
I wrote it mostly on the floor of a house my mum was temporarily renting.
[edit: I had a real-life story here but it was grim, so I cut it out. Maybe another time]
Anyway, I had a book in my head that needed writing, so I wrote it. I taught myself cover design and graphic design and formatting and editing and for some reason, launched the book on Etsy as a pre-order. I had a desk built out of those £5 Ikea tables. This was where I started building Halfplanet Press, where I set up my social media channels, and looked into blogging again.
Because I’ve been here before.
I wrote my first full-length (98,000 words) Science Fiction novel at 16.
I finished my first poetry collection at 17.
I wrote my first good poem at 5.
I wrote my first blog in 2007.
I made my first podcast (which I’ve since brought back to life) in 2012.
So, what am I doing at 32?
I’ve grappled with PTSD from 2021 up until about five minutes ago and met Richard Dawkins a few weeks back. It was brilliant. I finally got to thank him for inspiring my early writing as a Science Fiction author.
Richard even asked what my books were called, so there’s a non-zero chance he will own a copy of Who Built The Humans? someday.
I have so much more left to say, but right now I shall just say thank you.
To everyone who bought my books.
To everyone who didn’t, and read my posts.
To everyone who signed up and didn’t have time to read the posts.
To everyone who wrote encouraging words on the poems I wasn’t sure about.
To everyone who tried to buy me pints after gigs as a way to thank me for making you laugh.
To the bachelorettes who molested my inflatable alien (Bob) and took him home for a probing during my 2022 Manchester Fringe show.
To you.
And to everyone who is going to arrive once you share this with your friends.
(You don’t have to do that, we’re cool. See you in the next one)
Oh, I nearly forgot. Poll time.
Writing from yourself at different life stages is precious stuff, even if it isn't as objectively "good". You did things in your writing at 16 that you couldnt reproduce today if you tried. I wonder if there is a way to filter the manuscript that teenage you wrote and interleave it with your level of writing skill today to combine the best of both worlds?
Wonderful! So how do I read some of your stuff?