The story vault is open.
All my old posts are now free.
I’ve been here three years.
It’s been good. I’ve found an audience. Hi.
That’s huge.
Time.
Some of you haven’t been here from the beginning, and you’ve missed out on some decent posts. My serialised novel, THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, is so old now that its earlier passages slipped into my archives.
The archives, on Substack, are a paid section for older posts. I had mine set at a year because I post quite often, but it meant when I wanted to show someone a longer story, they had to become a paid subscriber to see it.
That didn’t work for me. The paid tier is a good idea for some posts, and I will keep using it for bonus material (more on that below), but paywalling older stuff doesn’t really work if you’re writing long stories, and you want the first chapters of those to be easily accessible.
With that in mind, I have decided for this Christmas to crack open the archive vault and let you all rummage around in all of my older posts for free.
I’ve selected my favourites below.
So, if you are new, here’s some cool things on this website that you might have missed.
The Stephanie Glitch - Serialised novel
Two time travellers arguing - an excerpt from Earthloop
How I would write The X Files - my plan for a reboot
And if you’ve not already pre-ordered Who Killed The Humans?, my upcoming Science Fiction collection, I’d recommend doing it now. The price is reduced until release, so pre-orders are cheaper.
It’s the second book in the Who Built The Humans? series, but you don’t really need one to understand the other. On the surface they are short story collections, but they go deeper than that. The universes within are interlinked in strange ways.
I’m very proud of the WBTH series. Everyone who has picked the first book up has loved it, but it’s hard to advertise something this strange. That’s why I’m taking it to comic conventions as well as book fairs. I need as many amazon pre-orders as I can get, because a book’s success in week one determines its fate for a while… algorithms are annoying.
Leaning into the multifaceted.
I’m weird. It’s why I chose to represent myself as a writer, rather than endlessly chase someone else’s approval. It’s why I write poetry into my science fiction stories, and it’s why I stayed up all last night building a replica of an old Legoland statue from memory, so I could one day buy the bricks and rebuild it myself.
I’m just as happy telling stories with Minecraft blocks on my Youtube channel as I am writing novels, or talking people through my design choices on a Lego livestream.
To me it’s all connected.
I am relaunching my Patreon soon. I now feel ready to take that leap into becoming a fully independent author, and I have a lot planned for this new venture.
The Patreon is going to contain:
Exclusive stories, poetry, and serialised books
Access to the paid tier here on Substack
Minecraft world perks
Access to exclusive writing workshops (hosted on discord)
More *to be announced soon*
The Patreon is a new, more affordable way to get extra material from me. It’s an efficient, neat way for me to serve all my audiences at the same time. It will fund new equipment for my podcast, audiobook recording slots, etc. It will become my alternative to one-time crowdfunding projects, which always felt too limited in scope. It will contain exclusive standup sets, including live shows you can rock up to inside my discord chatroom.
With Patreon, I can give you evolving, intelligent perks which integrate into what I’ve already built here and on my discord chatroom. For a writer like myself, it’s the perfect place. It’s also orange, which is nice.
I’d get an OnlyFans, but my internet service provider is very nervous.
Anyway. You’re the person who will be exploring this new thing I am building, so what else would you like to see on my Patreon?