My new flash fiction collection is out! This is my first book in some years, for reasons I’ll discuss below. Briefly, it’s about aliens and it’s flash fiction. Visit the official book page for all the buying links. There are promotional posts on Bluesky and Tumblr if you’d like to signal boost them.
Book Description
The everyday lives of aliens are explored in this collection of flash fiction and poetry. An amoeboid shares recipe tips. Cartwheeling worms carry messages across the desert. A living planet has suspicions about a new moon. Humanoid aliens fade into the background as the truly alien aliens take the stage to tell their own stories.
This is a novella-length collection and includes some non-fiction notes and citations at the end. There are various speculative genres included, not just science fiction. Most of the stories were first published in this book. Two were published in 2024 in Second Life (“Almost Eggs” and “The Sincerity Of Kindness”). And one was very old (“Radial Loop Fire”).
Questions
How long are the stories? Between one word and one thousand words (including subtitles in the count, but excluding the main title and scene break markers).
Are there humans? All the stories are from the perspective of aliens. Three stories feature Earth life as well. One of these has humans. So, yes, humans exist in the collection’s multiverse. It’s just not about them.
Are the characters QUILTBAG? The main characters aren’t human, so don’t have experiences that exactly match what we’d call queer. In their own contexts, some are going against assigned social roles and assumptions about relationships. One is clearly intersex based on the usual lifecycle of that species. In the end, this was written by an aroace non-binary person, and it shows.
What’s with the square brackets? That’s intentional. [a mystery]
Themes
Some years back, I wrote a story called “Radial Loop Fire” for Patreon. It was in response to people saying they wanted aliens who were very alien. So they got a story about the lifecycle of a crawling alien who communicated in songs of three words. It was designed to be printed on a cylinder with no true beginning or end.
Coming up with a collection gave more space to try other ideas. I looked up various planets, such as hot Jupiters and carbon planets. I considered what aliens would be like in universes with magic and things like that. I made aliens inspired by various known life and some that people might not think about as living.
It was also a place to experiment with story structures. There are 6-words, 50-words, 100-words (drabble), and 369 (3×69-words) stories. I wrote a story in fourth person (in the indefinite sense, though there are some “we” stories as well). One is formed from pieces of code.
There wasn’t a lot of point in trying to be marketable with the concept, so I didn’t. If I wanted to write it, I gave it a go.
Process
I published Werecockroach in 2018. The next couple of years were heat waves and family deaths, but I’d hoped to get some writing done in 2020 as things settled. Instead, I ended up catching COVID-19 in February and was left with long covid. I wrote very little.
It took a lot of healing before I could really write again. Even then, long projects were just too daunting. But as I healed, I started thinking about aliens. The next thing I knew, I had a basic outline for a collection and was writing stories.
I’m not new to flash fiction. My first pro sales were flash fiction and people used to call me a flash fiction writer. Until I sold a few longer short stories and wrote a novel. It turned out to be a length that worked very well for a recovering brain. It meant I could split a larger project into very manageable lumps.
This isn’t a project I’d have done for the goal of selling things. Flash isn’t the most popular format. Nor is weird stuff from alien perspectives. But my priority wasn’t sales. It was simply finding something I could finish writing. That was freeing in a way, because it meant my main worry was getting it done to my satisfaction. Not whether someone else would like it.
The good news is this worked. Five years after getting sick, I’m here with a finished book.
First Published: 6th July, 2016