New short story, BOOT
Audio and Text version available here
This is an old short story, originally penned in 2015, but rewritten this week. I added the surreal, postmodern ending in 2022 because back in 2015 I lacked the confidence to do so. I had intended for it to go in that direction, but shaved the story’s edges off and made it less interesting in hopes I’d get a better mark on my university short stories module. I think it worked. Not that this constitutes any commentary on my uni experience as a whole, but back in 2015 I was of the belief that to succeed in any numerical way with writing, I’d have to dress it up in a nice normal shell. I kept the weird just under the surface, perhaps appropriating a survival technique I had picked up in school.
“They realise on some level that they’re a fucking carboard cut out and they don’t have a soul, and it crushes them”
Anyway, on with the story.
Click here to listen to the Audio version
Click here to read the Text version
By the way, this story appears in Hologram Kebab, my upcoming short story collection. It’s sort of like Who Built The Humans? but a third of the size, with utterly disconnected stories making it more easily marketable and perhaps palatable to bookstores. This is a happy coincidence, turns out that I just fancied compiling a short story collection that was a bit more normal for once. But don’t let that discourage you, it is still written with my own brand of weird. It even has a rewrite of my first published short story, THE INTERTEMPORAL HOTEL, in which I think I might have invented a new type of time travel story, one which kept me up at night after I wrote it.
And Hologram Kebab also contains some spin-offs and sequels to some stories and running gags in WBTH, so it is in effect its hyperactive little brother. You will find one story that was in the beta version of WBTH but squeezed out of the final manuscript (due to Nori Furukawa occupying more space than expected) and a spin-off to Tin-Foil-Tim’s poetic universe in which an alien sources human minds from charity shops (thrift stores) to use as navigational computers in the trash dimension.
And of course, a kebab which is a hologram.
There are no pre-orders, because I want to just release this one without fanfare or announcement, surprising you all in the middle of an unspecified week. It just feels like the right thing to do.
The general podlink, for all my episodes, is below
