I got published!

(And you can read the story, for free, with this email)

I don’t usually have much interest in sending my stories to places. I find that I’m too weird for a lot of the places which are easy to find, and finding more specific ones with still-alive websites is not easy.

I also find it stressful. I don’t like the idea of competing with other artists for attention. I only want to compete with myself, or to wrestle with the idea I’ve had. I don’t even like making comparisons between my work and other books, even if they’re flattering (I’ve been compared to Douglas Adams and am still working up the courage to build that into an advert).

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Publishing, my journey.

When I was at university studying Creative Writing I sent a few things to a few places, but I never really felt like I fit in. Back then I was very pro-traditional publishing, but I felt deep within my chest that I was destined for another, rougher path.

One of my last projects was a presentation on self-publishing versus traditional publishing, and my conclusion in 2016 (that self-pub could soon be just as good as trad-pub) wasn’t as universally celebrated as I thought it might be. It seemed tradpub was seen as a marker of quality, THE marker of quality, and that anything printed through any other means was statistically inclined to be terrible.

But I was right in my predictions for self-pub’s increasing potency.

Six years later, in 2022, I would meet someone from one of the big five publishers who believed, at least for five minutes until I told him otherwise, that my debut book WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? was put out by a medium-sized publishing house based in Manchester that had a passionate and dedicated team of people who were bringing back that much-missed tradition of actually saying what’s in the book on the back of the book, rather than just a nondescript review from someone who doesn’t usually read that sort of thing.

I was being recognised for the quality of my work and I hadn’t even sent it to anything. All I did was stand behind a table.

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So I was quite content doing it alone.

But when I bumped into Cinnabar Moth on twitter, I knew right away I wanted to work with them sometime. They always put the quality and originality of their stories first, and that is exactly the philosophy I have for Halfplanet Press (which, coincidentally, did once have another, moth-themed name). It is clear in every single thing Cinnabar Moth posts that they care about good, strange, new stories.

So I knew I wanted to send something to them. The question was what?

Looking at their previous publications, I felt that MYCELIAL might have a chance. It’s a story about a mycelial network that is suddenly broken by large animals stumbling through it. One of these animals, known to the network as Uprights, is killed in the forest. Its blood drips onto a frond of the mycelial network, and this frond soon begins experiencing thoughts and emotions that are utterly alien.

It disconnects itself from the hive mind and evolves, picking up the industrious nature of the Uprights from its brief encounter with them.

From here, it plots to take over the world.

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It’s a good story. One of my best. I’m really happy that my return to traditional publishing should begin with Cinnabar Moth.

You can read the story by clicking the button below. It’s free.

https://cinnabarmothliterarycollections.com/flip_book/ezine-issue-4-volume-2/

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BONUS LORE

• MYCELIAL was originally intended for publication in WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?, which was talked about under the codename Hologram Kebab, in case I found out I couldn’t recapture the lightning of WBTH.

• You might remember MYCELIAL if you’ve been here a while. It was a subscriber-only story in mid-2023. It nearly won a contest, and rapidly became my most popular Substack post. To this day, it is one of only five posts that has brought me new subscribers!

• I’ve since swapped the story out on that post for a link to Cinnabar, because it’s in their hands for a while, so that link above is the only place you’ll be able to find it for a while.

• Whilst Mycelial happens in its own self-contained universe, I do have a nod toward it in the Earthloop trilogy.