Teleporting to Utah, and why my books click together like Lego.

Today’s soundtrack - Season of the Witch - Hausfrau

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Hello.

This time in two weeks I will be in America.

Feels weird. Never been abroad.

I am going to Utah so I can hang with friends and finish book one of THE EARTHLOOP TRILOGY, my time travel series that almost got funded on kickstarter that time.

The trilogy has four books. One of them is an introductory novella set before the other three. I am planning on sending that one to you for free.

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A research trip.

I’ve not had a holiday for a long time, and I’ve only afforded this one because I’ve had help. I’ll be being fed and watered by my pal Zaak, who runs a garage over there. We’re both pretty into UFOs, so we’re going to try to spot some.

I timed my trip so I could watch the eclipse as well.

It’s a big, possibly scary thing, but I must go because if I don’t I will always wonder what it was like out there, the land where Lax Morales became human.

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Chasing words across the desert

When I’m out there, I’ll be working on THE FURUKAWA PARADOX, the first book in the EARTHLOOP trilogy. If you’ve read WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? (that link leads you to all my books) you’ll be familiar with some of the Earthloop characters already. They appeared in the 45,000-word FURUKAWA UNIVERSE, one of eleven universes in the novelthology.

I’ve been thinking about reprinting that as EARTHLOOP ZERO, to get some more people into the story. We’ll see. (I’m already doing this with Lucy’s Universe, reprinted as BEYOND UNCERTAIN STARS)

What say you?

Anyway I’m almost done with THE FURUKAWA PARADOX, but as the trilogy is time travel I need to know how book 3 ends before I can polish the first scene of book 1. You’ve probably read it already, I posted it a few weeks back. A young Nori Furukawa scrambles around his university campus, meanwhile an older Lax Morales goes to dinner with his would-be assassin, who claims she’s already assassinated him and is looping back through time.

I feel that the last part of Lax Morales’ story is hidden out there in America, that I might find shards of it in a UFO-themed diner, or in a Walmart or something. I don’t know, but I know it’s not in the UK.

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Time falling apart.

Lax and his relationship with Fixer is a weird twist, one I originally wrote in 2009 for what would have been my second published novel, but I am a perfectionist so I shelved both stories. They were unrelated to the stuff you know me for now, but they did involve time travel, and they were where coldbeds and Intersect pathways originated from. Some of the plot twists coming up in Earthloop were first written all those years ago, when a teenaged me wrote poems in the cemetery across the road from college, the same cemetery Stephanie would one day write in in THE STEPHANIE GLITCH.

Some of the Atanattat (that’s the alien species Lax is a part of) myths in Earthloop are actually stories I wrote as a teenager, cemented now as part of the larger mythos around all my books.

I would much rather be writing these than spending my days sending emails to newspapers who never get back to me, so I need the marketing people. I am smart enough to know that there are things I don’t know. Marketing is unfortunately one of those things. As soon as I’m done writing a book my mind immediately starts the next one. Sometimes I forget to mention the first book. Did you know I have a poetry collection out? Exactly.

I’m reprinting those things too, now I know what ‘wide distribution’ is and I’m not just stuck on Amazon.

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Timelines intertwined.

I’ve been asked by some of my older fans if I would open up crowdfunding for THE STEPHANIE GLITCH and THE EARTHLOOP TRILOGY soon. I thought, since WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? was up for pre-order, that doing the same for those other books might intimidate people who had just found my work.

It would be reasonable to assume the average writer might need more separation between their projects, but like Bowie’s Major Tom, some of my characters and plots will reappear across albums books you might otherwise think are unconnected. Here’s some examples.

• Stephanie meets Lax Morales in a between-place between TSG and EL, a chapter which takes place in TSG and is referenced a few times in EL.

• This is the reason Lax is so into simulation theory and psychics.

• WKTH carries on from WBTH, and includes some stories that take place in the TSG-EL universe.

• Coldbed technology is invented in TSG, used in WBTH, referenced in WKTH, and reinvented in EL.

• The upcoming novella THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE slots in between WBTH and EL, after TSG, as the aliens in the second half of the novella exist throughout all those books.

I’m telling a really big story, that can (and should) be enjoyed as a collection of standalone trilogies, books, and novellas.

I am writing all of these worlds simultaneously, which is why I don’t pump out an 80k book every six months like clockwork. Whilst I do sometimes envy my agented friends, I do not envy being told what to write. I like being weird.

Since I use crowdfundr, I can link all my projects together for one main goal as well, which makes managing them easy. It means that the WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? page would link to the rest, and I could have a goal above them all such as “make audiobooks” which could be sorted out through a joint fund of everything. I think it would be more streamlined.

So maybe my older readers are right… Maybe I can, and should, accept that these things are better off self-published. They are weird and experimental, after all. And if I was self-pub again I would have full control over them, and would make more money per book sold because nobody else would need royalties. I could be weird.

There’s a reason the special edition cover of WHO BUILT THE HUMANS is designed to click together with the WHO KILLED THE HUMANS cover. It implies a continuing multiverse, one which stretches through EL and TSG too.

So what do you think?

Would you back this multiverse?

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I put out a poll on twitter as well. Most people voted in favour of me setting up crowdfunding for all my books, rather than spending months looking for representation. Ultimately, the main thing a publisher has that a writer doesn’t is money, but I’m working on that. It’s why I picked crowdfundr. If I get funds some other way (like another Manchester Fringe show) I can manually add those to the pot, bringing each project closer to its goal.

Publishers tend to ask if you’re popular on tiktok as well these days, which makes my brain itch in a bad way. I think I am popular on tiktok (800 people is a lot of people) but apparently I need a few more zeroes…

Not too long ago, the main draw of a publisher was that they’d do the social media stuff for you, so you had time to write. What happened?

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So, to conclude, my books click together like Lego and you can read them in whatever order you please. That’s why they are all building up together, there’s a story within the stories.

Please ‘like’ this post if you’ve read it, as it gives it a little boost which might help new people find it. Sharing the post gives it a huge boost.

Also, you can now message me directly here to ask me about books or suggest ideas for my pre-order campaigns. Feel free to ask me anything, about my Minecraft streams, comedy, poetry, whatever.