Starting 2024 with two free stories
Starting 2024 with two free stories
From my past, and from my future.
So it’s now 2024 according to human calendars. Cool.
We’ve also just reached 1000 subscribers here, which is huge. That’s about two new subscribers per day I’ve been on Substack.
This little corner of the internet has evolved a lot since the beginning, and your support pushed me to get back into querying my stories with publishers who aren’t just me in disguise.
Which has resulted in the following piece of news.
I got published.
My short story, MYCELIAL (originally fated for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?) got picked up by Cinnabar Moth Press in late 2023. It’s theirs now, for a few months, and it will be in their February edition of their magazine!
I’m also now looking for an agent for some other books. I’ve had some interesting conversations so far, but I am aware I’ll have to look hard to find someone who wants my specific brand of weirdness.
If you’re an agent and you’re reading this, please reach out!
Beyond that, I’ve done a few other weird things in 2023, including bumping into and making friends with writers and comedians I wouldn’t previously think I’d ever meet. I’ve done stand-up comedy about time travel, got my first paid comedy gig at the Manchester Fringe, started writing a stage play set inside the universe of my upcoming (looking for an agent) Earthloop Trilogy, and published the first chapter of my upcoming (don’t need an agent for this one) novel THE STEPHANIE GLITCH. I also went viral on tiktok and instagram at the same time for a post about autism, which was nice.
Then I decided to republish a story from WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? on its own, so it could reach a new audience. After that, I wanted to put out an entirely new story, in preparation for the sequel.
And I decided to make both of these free.
They’re available on Amazon and a handful of other websites, the links below take you to all of them at once. I’m getting smart at the book thing now.
I published both these about a month ago, but, not wanting to overwhelm you with emails, I kept putting this announcement off.
So here it is.
If you do get these and enjoy them, please do leave ratings and reviews wherever you can, as it helps me find new readers.
EDIT:
In its infinite wisdom, Amazon’s algorithm has within the last few hours bumped the price for TCU up from $0 to $0.99 without telling me, but only for North America...
But fear not, you can still get both stories for free, from any other retailer.
Author friends inform me this annoying price shifting sometimes happens if an eBook is popular, as Amazon wants to capitalise on its popularity, or something. Not sure how true that is, but I am sure of how annoying it is (very).
Thanks to Eleanor for letting me know.
Writer Corner, Fun fact:
To make a book free on Amazon you have to manually request a price match with a competing retailer, and Amazon then decides whether to go along with it or not. If they do, it should apply to all territories, but they retain the ability to meander your books’ prices around if you upload them directly to Amazon (the only way to make an eBook free).
PAST
The Certain Universe
The first story is THE CERTAIN UNIVERSE, one of few standalone stories from my debut short story collection / fragmented novel WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?
In that beast of a book, TCU was an important part of a larger metanarrative about time travel, determinism, and robot crabs. That metanarrative was tucked away above the plots of several stories in WBTH, the yellow-eyed crab echoing back and forward if you read the book front-to-back.
Many of you will know WBTH contained 11 universes for its 47 component chapters to slot into, with no two chapters from the same cosmos touching across the pages. That way the universes were interlocked, playing against each other if you read the book front-to-back, or crossing over if you read the book universe-by-universe, which many people do if they get sucked into one particular story.
The metanarrative present in TCU snaked its way through other stories too, so it revealed itself only under certain circumstances. Sounds complex, but it’s like a sportscar, the clever bits are beneath the surface.
If you just read this story on its own, it is a neat little story about time.
In it, a bottleneck in time and space enables an alien race to predict absolutely everything with certainty, apart from the end of their own lives. They know when they will die, but not how. All that lies ahead is a darkness.
And beyond that darkness?
FUTURE
Hologram Kebab
HOLOGRAM KEBAB was for a while the working title for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? (formerly known as WHO BUILT THE HUMANS TWO).
It’s a great title, too. HK is a short story about a breakup, in which a hologram of a kebab becomes a central part of the story. Not my usual sort of story, but there’s a heavy Sci-Fi twist to this which will probably hit you quite hard at the end.
Read the viral lamp story on reddit? This is basically that, but better.
And I wrote it about a year before.
It starts out with Anya complaining about her ex-boyfriend, usually by swearing, and it ends with a sort of serious note on free will, the nature of the soul, and if death can be undone.
So, a dark and crass relationship comedy that turns into Sci-Fi existentialism.
A real audience-splitter. Kind of like my stand-up.