The First Fiction Friday
A treasure trove of new stories
Today marks the beginning of a new subletter, Fiction Friday, in which I share new releases, sales, discounts, and free books in genres and styles I consider similar to mine. These are usually bookfunnel shelves, so you’ll be familiar with the format.
It won’t be every week either, as I want to pick the shelves I join carefully.
The first bookshelf is Not So Far Away. A modest collection (at the time of writing, there are just two of us) of sci-fi with a romantic edge. Whilst Aliens On Earth is definitely Sci-Fi romance, I believe that Mycelial also leans into romantic undertones. It might not be obvious on the first read, but I borrowed elements from horror and romance to write Mycelial, my weird love letter to the mushrooms.
This bookshelf includes the new deluxe eBook version of Mycelial, which contains an exclusive B-Side alternate version of the story and a 500 word explanation of how the story came to be, who Plennimb was before he was Plennimb, and how I refined the story’s tone. You can also get this exclusive version of Mycelial direct from my new store too, which is linked at the bottom of this post.
The second shelf today is Deliciously Funny Sci-Fi & Fantasy. This one, organised by my sci-fi comedy pal Kerrie Noor, is a collection of weird and wonderful sci-fi comedy.
Obviously, I’m in it. And Kerrie is in a comedy eBook I am organising at the moment. More news on that sometime soon!
Beyond that, I have also just opened my own Halfplanet Press store on Payhip. This is where I’ll be directly selling eBooks, merch, signed paperbacks, drawings of aliens, poems for weddings, etc, from now on. It’s the perfect platform for someone with a varied output like myself. But it’s mainly books.
At least 90% books.
With some alien drawings thrown in.
Anyone need a wedding speech?
Anyway. More MYCELIAL
Mycelial is a story you’ll all be familiar with. I have now released a deluxe edition, which contains a B-Side alternate version of the story, and a 500 word explanation of how I came up with the idea. It’s only £1, and any sales go directly to funding future books, such as Seven Stories about Time Travel, Earthloop, The Stephanie Glitch, or Who Built The Humans? Two (return of the humans)1. Just click on the book cover to check it out.
And this exclusive deluxe edition gets even cheaper on the new Halfplanet store, where you can get a 20% discount on that £1 price tag by emailing a friend about the book.
Remember THE CERTAIN UNIVERSE?
The Certain Universe was first published in WBTH1 in 2020. It was the shortest universe in the collection, but it had a big impact. Situated at the end of the third quarter of the book, it tied up some conceptual loose ends whilst opening up a new mystery that people are still asking me about three years later.
Why does that robot crab feel so familiar?
The story is totally free if you click on the image above.
It is also on the Halfplanet store, for £0.50, so readers who want to help me fund the next one can chip in and get something in return.
That’s it for Fiction Friday. I’ll see you next week, when I should be posting an early draft of Earthloop, Season One, Episode One (because I’m structuring it like a TV series).
Writing all those book titles down makes it look like I’m working on a lot. But in my mind many of them connect, whether in their lore or style. WBTH2, for example, is partially a short story collection, as is SSATT and its siblings Seven Stories about Astral Travel and Seven Stories about Space Travel. For that reason those four books are being built simultaneously, with a story being written in isolation before I decide which book it fits inside.
On top of that, The Stephanie Glitch has a side character who finds his way into Earthloop, and a spin-off from Stephanie’s cosmos appears in WBTH2.
As always, you don’t need one book to enjoy another, but some dedicated readers have gone through WBTH1 twice or thrice, and have discovered links that I am only now exploring explicitly in stories. There were ideas seeded into WBTH1 which hint at what comes next.
My goal is to write accessible, mind-bending fiction. The links between books are a buried treasure. If you want to enjoy them, you have to find them. If not, you can read them in absolutely any order.