You're all pretty cool

A thank you post

It’s my 34th birthday today. I am headed to an awards ceremony for a festival I did take part in, but I don’t think I’ll win anything for. I don’t mind, I am enjoying the journey.

Enjoying the journey is how I manage to finish books.

It’s also how I manage to do crowd work. It’s just nice to be out and about, telling stories. I don’t much care if those stories become poems, or jokes, or drawings, or Minecraft Monorails, or novels about time travelling interdimensional crabs who start cults and romance shapeshifting reptilians from the distant future whilst simultaneously planting the seeds for the destruction of an alien reincarnation machine. What matters is the stories are fun.

And that one, EARTHLOOP, is pretty fun.

Recently I put out a google forms link (it’s not a perfect form) asking you all about being ARC readers for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? my upcoming short story Sci-Fi Comedy collection.

And I really loved the responses. One of the questions was about if any of you know any marketing people. Someone said:

I wish I did! The best I can do is share with friends how awesome your book is, and that when they can they should run to get your book and read it!

Which was very nice to read this morning.

This is an optional question in the form, just in case anyone here -can- help with marketing, but the response is so much better than any billboard or shiny TV interview (more news on that later in the year). Because it shows me that there are people out there in the world, staring at their own migraine rectangles, looking forward to reading my human-written book.

There are humans here, who want to explore weird new worlds.

And I know that, statistically, some of you will love it.

And if you love the book, and you tell your friends, they get to love it too.

They don’t even need to buy it. If you get a paperback you can lend it to them and draw all over it. In fact, I might work in some additional white-space in my books so people can annotate better. I already have signing pages.

The universes of the WBTH series are weird and winding and peculiar, and from the very beginning you, dear reader, have been an integral part of the universe. You’re briefly a character in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?, being addressed directly in second-person point of view as YOU are haunted by crab cakes in my darkest comedy poem. Or you are the narrator in a way, given the choice as to which universe to hop into next with the dimensional gateways in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?

Throughout all my books, fun comes first.

Here’s the WKTH signup form. You’ll get a copy early, read it, then tell the world how you feel about it.

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I leave you with a stanza from a poem from an upcoming book. It is filth.

So don’t scroll if you don’t want NSFW stuff.

NOT SAFE FOR WORK BELOW!!!

I am working on five poetry books simultaneously, because I am normal and can be trusted with Word Documents (all my poems from 2013 until today are in the same document).

The next Somethingorother

He thinks he’s the next John Cooper Clarke
But I caught him wanking in the local park
And he thinks he’s the first man to develop emotion
And he’s singlehandedly responsible for the decline in hand lotion

warned you