Who Killed The Pre-order?

Some bad news, plus a mini quiz (woo!)

Mar 04, 2025

I Spy

A message to my 19 WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? pre-order humans.

You will have gotten an email a few days ago from Amazon, apologising for your pre-order being cancelled. I got the email too, and it was a surprise. I had submitted the document on time, and was excited for it to launch.

But apparently I missed one tiny detail.

And that derailed the whole thing.

I missed the detail because I was, and am, exhausted.

This is not conducive to producing weird, twisty literature.

Even this post sits somewhere outside the limits of my comprehension, so I apologise if I repeat myself.

Long story short, I’m too tired to do things properly any more.

Short story long: I got a message the morning after the deadline that I had not submitted the manuscript in time. I had, but I’d fallen asleep from exhaustion at my desk at 11:26pm, just over half an hour before the deadline. I had thought this would be okay. Sure, it’s last-minute, but the manuscript was there. It was uploaded. I could see it.

For context, I got a pretty hectic day job as an alternative to borrowing money from business loans companies, so I could grow Halfplanet Press, but this combined with a few personal chaoses (good word) has meant I now have a new system for working on what I love. I log off from work in the late afternoon, go immediately to bed with a headache, wake up somewhere around 10pm, and write until 2am. Rinse and repeat.

This works okay, but I vastly underestimated just how tired it would make me.

I had the chance to delay the pre-order by another month, but Amazon would have revoked my pre-order launching ability for a whole year, and with another THE STEPHANIE GLITCH novella on the way, this seemed dangerous to my future projects.

My file was complete, so I put it on the system.

But this was not enough. Apparently, I needed to click “Okay” somewhere at the bottom to confirm the upload, and I forgot to do that when I was snoozing on my space bar.

That small mistake has led to the obliteration of 19 pre-orders, leading to my cancelling of several adverts I was to run, and a demotion from my lofty place in the top 1000 science fiction books on Amazon. I had earned that title for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? long before it was due to come out, thanks to you pre-ordering it.

The person I was six months ago would have had failsafes in place. He would have the pre-order file uploaded months before the deadline. But he wasn’t tired all the time. I’m pissed off, to be honest. And I will understand if you are, too.

There is some good news. The book is finished, and I am going to use this as an opportunity for rebirth. Mainly, I want to sneak in one final story that I had to cut due to my new time constraints.

I have spoken to Amazon about it and explained in some detail my circumstances (I am not the type to send books in so close to deadlines. Maybe essays, but never books) and they agreed to give me some much-needed slack. I can relaunch the pre-orders at any time, when I feel ready.

Further complications

Amazon’s first agent left the chatroom prematurely, so I had to grab another who told me I could not reuse my ISBN. This seemed unfair, and I am glad I still remember how to stand up for myself and ask questions, because he turned around and told me I was right: I can keep the same ISBN when I relaunch.

The old page for Who Killed The Humans? will dissolve in a few days, and a new page will take its place.

Do you remember the first time?

In April 2024 I went to Utah to tell jokes to Mormons about polygamy. I also wrote quite a bit of Who Killed The Humans? onto a document on my phone, using a bluetooth keyboard I took with me on the plane. My goal was to have a road trip to Roswell and write some of WKTH and the Earthloop trilogy there, but that didn’t happen in the end. I stayed in Utah for the duration.

I was offered a job with the UK government whilst I was out in the desert, and had to do the needlessly time-limited security and health checks whilst in the shower at my friend’s garage, because nowhere else had wifi. Turns out nobody else had to do these, so I am wondering if it was a humilation ritual reserved for the self-employed.

I was in the middle of showering when I found out I was locked in. I was offered a position in an office in another city, which I thought was odd because I’d applied for a work from home job (very good if you have migraines, you get to sit with cats on your break (cats not included)).

Born to cry

A melodramatic title for this chapter, but it’s part of the later quiz.

So I got the job. I returned to the UK via Utah, Chicago, and Ireland. I abandoned my cool new beard gel in Chicago because I’d joined the queue for people without liquids. I retained my cat-shaped cooling pad however, and did the usual dance of explaining to security I was about to put a giant lithium battery through the X-Ray machine. They are fine with portable chargers provided you disclose them.

I went to my last live music gig (Gary Numan) in July, and started my fancy new job in August 2024. I had applied for a work from home, part time thing, on account of having some caring responsibilities, and not wanting to bring back those migraines I used to get all the time as a kid and teenager.

Breakthrough Study Reveals Hidden Mechanism Behind Migraines — How it feels to pour fizzy orange into your brain tubes

But, like a shit 2000s boy band, the migraines returned conjoined at the skinny jeans and malformed testicles, determined to ruin my blood flow, my flow state, and my will to carry on. They also cost me about as money as a shit 2000s boy band reunion, because I am burning through earplugs like your washing machine.

Also, turns out my new job was an office job.

I packaged up my hippy soul, my washed-up hair, and trimmed my beard only a tiny bit, so the moths would stop nesting in there. I wouldn’t want them getting lost in government buildings, people might suppose they were manifestations of the dismay of the British Working Class or something, and poets might turn up to take photos of them. I hate poets.

On day one, I wore a suit, and quickly realised I was overdressed.

The office had construction work in the room next to mine for the first three months. The longest migraine I had during that time lasted six days. It was punctuated only by a passive-aggressive email about the smell of marijuana in the office, which I proposed might not be due to the people inside the office, but someone outside. This theory became a hot topic until the builders left the space near the open window, and the smell mysteriously vanished.

I will say, as an aside, I would get back into watching the television if they had a show where you give builders drugs and have sports commentary over footage of them trying to make things with heavy machinery.

Meanwhile, in reality, the flourescent lights flickered in a way most people could not see, and some chose not to believe, as if I was disclosing my ability to communicate psychically with shellfish, rather than an established and researched neurological phenomenon.

Later, I would discover that an ability to see flickering lights is a common thing with autism and ADHD. Neat, but utterly useless to know because I am not about to blast £2000 on a diagnosis when there’s new Lego coming out.

The social schism between myself and the humans was such that I felt very isolated within the first week. I have never been lonelier than I am when I am trapped in a mass of people who I do not understand or relate to, but the pay was good, and I like buying adverts for my books.

(I have not had time to run adverts, hence Free Fiction Friday slowing down).

It got to the point I was so dizzy in the office that I wound up being assessed by their on-site disability people. Turns out migraines all the time is a disability, so I’ve had to grapple with the horrendous realisation that if I now do comedy in which I am a character (which I usually am), I might be punching down onto myself. Now, as a comedian, I have to apologise to myself in a tearful youtube video every time I make a joke about myself. It’s not too hard because I’m also a poet, so I use my faux-sensitive side for the apologies. Still, this is very quickly taking up all the storage space on my phone.

Something Changed

We were, at some point, talking about WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?

It was, and still will be, a collection of interconnected sci-fi and comedy stories.

I had a pretty good writing session in November 2024, when my doctor signed me off for four weeks due to stress. I still had to attend meetings at work to establish how sick I was and when I’d return (the clue was on the sick note - four weeks), but for the most part I was free to be myself again.

No more masking.

I spent the first week recovering, the two in the middle on writing, and the fourth was spent marinating in - and refining a type of dread previously only afforded to Neanderthals kicked forward through time and thrown into endless grey hallways. To them, the modern world must feel like an alien abduction.

I’m bordering on feral, I get it, it’s part of my charm when I do standup, and it helps at the poetry nights too, but it doesn’t translate everywhere. It’s like being really good at making balloon animals with condoms. Funny outside a pub at 2am, sure, but probably not the sort of skill to put on your job application.

Anyway, my time off sick was the most productive slab of time I have waded through all year. I set up an advert for my time travel novella THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE, had a radio interview, and briefly got back into standup comedy. I didn’t, as I would tell my coworkers upon my return, just sit back and chill out and drink tea. That’s what they wanted to hear, but the neurowyrd truth is that if I sit down not doing much then I get bored of my own company. I need to write.

I have been writing for as long as I remember.

I wrote my first sci-fi poem when I was five years old.

I will write my last in the moments before the asteroid strikes, and nobody will laugh as hard as I will.

Countdown

Unfortunately I got better, and it was back to nightly double naps and spending most of my energy adapting to the humans. My two-week writing stint got me another 20,000 or so words into the Who Killed The Humans? manuscript, and I managed to polish these on my breaks.

However, it would not be enough.

The other night, my head drifted inexorably forward, landing with my nose on the touchpad, as my book both was and was not submitted to Amazon.

I’d gotten the little textbox.

I’d read the message.

I thought it was done.

The project I had worked hard on for over a year was scuppered in one evening because of a lapse in my concentration brought on by the very same exhaustostress that had me plucking an antenna-like grey hair from the geometric centre of my scalp last night, wondering if my hair was falling out again.

I realised pretty quickly the other day that I had, in one moment, lost those nineteen pre-orders I worked for, and nineteen people out there in the world got emails telling them that the author they trusted had screwed up.

If you are one of those people, I am sorry.

I planned to release one of the WKTH stories on its own as a promo thing. I am still going to do that, but I think I will make this story free now, so you can all enjoy it while you wait for the final big book to be ready.

Does that sound good?

My legendary girlfriend

The titles of the chapters of this email were references to songs by which British band or musician?