My birthday is coming up– on June 1, I’ll be 32 (100,000 in binary)! Here’s what I’m doing to celebrate… a little early, but hey, it’s my birthday, I can do what I want.
My short story collection, If the World Ended, Would I Notice?, is published and available for purchase.
Ever since my story “Furnace” was accepted to the second Machine of Death collection, I’ve been thinking about publishing more short stories. They say the short story is dying out, but that doesn’t make sense, does it? Our attention spans are shortening with every generation. We have less and less time to work reading into our schedules. If anything, modern people should be gobbling up short stories like crazy, and the success of the first Machine of Death collection certainly suggests they are, or at least can be induced to.
If the World Ended, Would I Notice? is a collage of extremely varied short fiction, collected from various temporal and psychological parts of my life as an author. It’s a grab bag that should appeal to the same sort of audience that loves Machine of Death: some stories are fluffy and silly, some dark and violent, some sexy, some just plain over-the-top weird and creative.
There are 14 stories in total, including one novella of 94 pages. Some are fantasy, some are science fiction, some can’t figure out what they are. All have elements of otherworldliness, born of my alien mind.
The cover art is an adaptation of the phase-one painting of my “Earth to Erika” triptych: the painting in which I portray myself disconnected from Earth, having not yet begun to make contact with it. Several of these stories had their roots in my earlier, lonelier life, before John, before the whole author-artist-and-speaker gig. This doesn’t mean they’re all depressing, but it does mean their view of the world is perhaps more alien than anything else I’ve published.
If books had movie-style ratings, this one wouldn’t be G. There’s a fair quantity of swearing, violence and sexual themes, but I wouldn’t say they dominate the book. I’d say the overriding theme of the book is curiosity, and the exploration of the strange. It’s not for children, but it may be for adults who have retained some of the drives of childhood.
—–
BUY:
