Hello all! Sorry to everyone who was waiting around for more posts from me. Good news. I’ve been published! The story, The Cleaner’s Clean Slate, is being published in New Contexts: 9 by Coverstory Books. Preamble out of the way, I’ll tell you more about the story.
I’ve been busy with writing. Both my feudal Japan historical novel (A Collection of Wanderers)—which has finally got to novel-status, and a new fantasy project. Both of those can be explored in later posts. Special thanks to Nick Stead for helping me draft the story, along with Alison Hramiak. Both their contributions cannot be understated. Alison really helped me streamline the overall plot while Nick gave me very in-depth advice on writing, say, the fight scenes. Something I’ll be putting more of into my next project. I love fighting and action stuff, to put it plainly. I’m one of the people reading berserk partly because I like seeing evil get cut in half with a giant sword. Another thing I’m putting in my next project. Still, this is a story for another time. I’m doing this post here to discuss my being published.
To give some detail on the story, but not too much, it’s about a man having a meltdown at work. More broadly, it’s about me being stressed and how that felt in the moment. Having autism isn’t fun, and frankly I’ve found myself annoyed by other people with autism. Or people in general. The point of it is for me to vent and show the reader, who for all I know might be thinking the same things, that they aren’t the only one. I mention the purpose of the story here, because having a point tends to mean you’re work will last and be remembered.
I’d like to note that I paused here and wondered how pretentious that made me sound. A little, but not much. Me lampshading it here hardly helps matters. Am I overthinking things or just trying to fill the word count. You decide!
I got published (I have to keep saying that for keywords to work)! Ian Gouge, editor for Coverstory Books, has been of great help over the years. I’m glad my work’s been consistently up to his standards enough that I’ve been put in quite a few of his anthologies. Also, my mum’s in there too, but that’s just us both being good writers. I won’t even make a nepotism joke here. You know I could have.
If you want to read the story, and all the other work by equally talented authors, click the link here. I’m happy to be doing blog posts again. Look forward to another one next week.
- Thanks for reading! If you like this, please check out my published work:
- The Spider and the Moths, on Impspired.
- A Model Dwarf, Wolf in Sheep’s Therapy, on Impspired.
- Cramped Quarters, on New Contexts 4.
- Endure, Reclaim, in New Contexts 5.
- Lost and Found, in New Contexts 7.
- The Cleaner’s Burden, in Apocalypse Now?.
- The Last Man Standing on the Ash Heap, on Impspired.
- Fragile, in New Contexts 8.
- Or, you could have a look at my last blog post, which you can find here.
- Also, I have a Fiverr page, check it out if you need proofreading or copywriting work done. Link here.