short stories – Polenth's Blog

Book Launch: Everyday Aliens (Flash Fiction Collection)

19th January 202519th January 2025 by Polenth

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.

Story at Clarkesworld

2nd July 2024 by Polenth

I have a new story at Clarkesworld. “Born Outside” mixes pandemic, alien invasion and ecology themes. There is child illness and death.

Story Link: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/blake_07_24/

I often include a few story notes when I have a new story out. In this case, the story notes are life notes. I caught COVID-19 in February, 2020. That was the end of writing for a bit. I had a couple of stories published after that, but they were both written and sold before.

It’s interesting that discussion keeps coming up about a lack of pandemic stories, whether directly about the one we’re in, or just in a general way. But people are vastly underestimating how many writers were hit by it. Including such themes isn’t going to happen when nothing is being written. In the case of older contemporary series, many will be set before that time, and continue on from their chosen time period. Assuming the author can still write.

Anyway, I’ve never really been a denial sort of person. So this is a little bit pandemic (in a general way), but nothing is ever only one thing. Ecosystems adapt, including the people within them. Things about the housing, woods and school are based on things from my past and present. I still live in the area with the broken roads covered in weeds.

The first draft of this story was written at the end of 2023. It sold a little over four years since I first got sick. It’s been a long journey to get here. But for now, I’m still alive, and here’s a picture of some tulips.

A field of colourful tulips. Full description below.

Image Caption: A field of tulips at Keukenhof Gardens in The Netherlands. They are planted in clusters. Plain pink at the front, white and red stripes in the middle, yellow a bit behind, and then red at the back. A small variety marker sign is visible near the back, but the writing is too small to read.

Story in Rosalind’s Siblings

4th December 202320th September 2023 by Polenth

My story “Rewilding Nova” is in Rosalind’s Siblings. This anthology is about people with marginalised genders and sexes in science. My story is about a non-binary Romani ecologist with joint damage doing science in their back garden. It’s a cozy slice-of-life story about science and rewilding an alien planet.

Book Link: https://www.atthisarts.com/product/rosalinds-siblings/

Rosalind's Siblings Cover

Image Caption: A book cover with a maroon monochrome illustration of a person looking into a microscope. They’re wearing a short-sleeved buttonup shirt and have short hair with a floppy fringe. The title reads “Rosalind’s Siblings” with the subtitle “Fiction and Poetry Celebrating Scientists of Marginalized Genders”. The book is edited by Bogi Takács. The cover artist is Mia Carnevale.

There’s a mention in the introduction about groups the authors come from. I’m one of those who wanted to be a scientist (I went to university) and couldn’t (no jobs). It was nice to have space to explore things like different approaches to science and barriers to getting research accepted by other scientists.

My main inspiration was the way rewilding has happened in the UK, where the reintroduction of locally extinct native animals has frequently been delayed and blocked, but they just appeared anyway. Your pet beavers going missing and not reporting it could happen to anybody. Who among us hasn’t lost a few wild boar here and there.

Some aspects of the main character are based on me, though I wrote this before long covid and joint damage. I’ve always had stiff joints, so there’s always been a risk that illness and injury could cause something more serious. It’d been something I’d thought about and knew could potentially happen. I just wasn’t really imagining it’d happen in the time between submitting the story and it being published.

It’s taken a bit for this anthology to get out there, so I’m pleased it happened and I hope people enjoy the story!

Story in Common Bonds

4th December 20231st March 2021 by Polenth

I have a new story out in the Common Bonds anthology called “Busy Little Bees”. This anthology has speculative stories about aromantic characters. Mine is near future science fiction about an aroace woman looking for her clone siblings. Themes include issues surrounding cloning and surrogacy. If that’s all you want to know before reading it, click the link below for sales links. If you’d like some of my thoughts on writing it, continue on below the cover.

Book Link: Common Bonds

The cover of Common Bonds

The cover of Common Bonds. Two red people sit back to back. They’re smiling and one holds a book and one holds a mug. They’re surrounded by green vines and white flowers. It is edited by Claudie Arseneault, C.T. Callahan, B.R. Sanders and RoAnna Sylver. The cover is by Laya Rose.

Backstory

This was an anthology funded by Kickstarter. I was contacted before that, asking if I’d write a story for consideration for the Kickstarter launch. If accepted, it would have been one of the ones mentioned as “contains stories by!!” and all that. It didn’t happen. I didn’t have a great year in general. I also had two very close story deadlines. So I had to say I couldn’t get it done in time, but I’d submit to the general slush when the public call went out.

Writing to themes can be a challenge, but I had some clues this time. I know what stories the editors had read before asking me to send something. A lot of my short fiction has characters who just happen not to get involved in romances (it often doesn’t occur to me unless it’s relevant to the plot), but the first who states not being into that is Tyler, the unlikely vampire in “Midnight Ice Cream”.

I later went on to write “Werecockroach”, where Rin is asexual and aromantic and uses the words.

Both of those are relatively clear and simple in terms of narrative structure and tone. I do also write things that get rejected for not being stories, but that didn’t seem like the sort of thing the call was after.

For my story idea, I wanted to focus on an aroace character, as that’s what I am. I also wanted to focus on sibling relationships, as I like writing those.

Inspirations

The good inspiration was CC (CopyCat), the world’s first cat clone. She ended up with a different colour coat to her mother. They had identical genes, but that isn’t everything.

This didn’t surprise me a whole lot as I knew some identical twins who didn’t end up looking alike, but it doesn’t appear much in science fiction where clones are often assumed to be literally identical. Even more so than identical twins. I wanted to explore the ways people could end up looking and being different from the same starting genes.

The bad happened when YouTube was changing how adverts worked. I ended up with an eight minute unskippable advert selling surrogate services. It was very glossy and tried to make it sound like they’d picked that location as the mothers there were just so great… not because the people were poor and there were few regulations. That shiny corporate branding was chilling and stayed with me.

Other Representation

This was an interesting story for me to write, as I really was “writing the other” in some ways. The lead comes from a relatively privileged background, whereas I’ve always been working class. That meant unpacking some of the assumptions she’d make. Not in the sense of a total bigot finding out she’s wrong, but in the sense of someone who generally isn’t a bigot finding she still had some things to work on. I might not have lived that, but I’ve had to field some of those things from the other side.

The trans side also took some thought. I’m non-binary, so including a non-binary and a trans man as characters wasn’t really something I thought about. It just sort of happened. What did take some thinking was the idea of the trans man dressing up as another of the clones, because most of them were women. It made a lot of sense for the plot, but there are potential pitfalls.

The basic issue is this sort of scene is often used as a way to invalidate trans characters. A trans man made to dress up that way will usually be mocked. The outfit will be a pink frilly dress covered in bows that few women would ever consider wearing. There will be comments about how pretty and feminine he looks.

After thinking about it, and considering if there was a way to do it that didn’t disrespect the character, the solution was to be sure the other characters wouldn’t be disrespectful. In a near future where I’d hope people had improved somewhat on those issues, there’d be a conscious effort to not be jerks about it.

This also meant thinking about how other aspects of marginalisation would be treated in the near future world. Class is still present as an issue and I avoided making it seem like there was an easy solution that’d solve everything. It’s about small gains and keeping at it.

The other mentioned is disability. There have clearly been some improvements, but there’s also a family who abandon an adopted child for selective mutism. This sort of near future won’t have solved every problem with every family.

I do have direct experience of selective mutism. There were times as a child when I simply couldn’t speak, though it wasn’t often enough to get much notice, outside of the teacher who tried to ask my parents about it. He did not actually ask the question he meant to ask, which meant this happened…

Teacher: “Why does Polenth sometimes just stare at me?”

Parents: “Polenth’s reading your mind.”

Teacher: “…”

Anyway, that’s just a few of the representation things I thought about as I wrote the story. I don’t tend to think about them in an essay or blog format, but those thoughts are always there somewhere as I write.

Bees, Wasps and Swarms

I get on really well with bees and wasps, in the sort of way where I wander about near their hives/nests and they leave me alone or crawl on me. I share sugar with them if I have it. We’re fine. The only time I’ve been stung, I actually stung myself. A dying wasp fell in my hair, I thought the wasp was a leaf, so I stung myself trying to brush the leaf out. The wasp really wasn’t to blame.

I have a video of a wild bee swarm that I took some years ago. It looks very dated compared to video now, but it’s still nice to have the reminder. I’d note that honeybees are native in the UK, so this really is a wild swarm. They were in a nature reserve and were left to do their swarm thing.

So, on that note, I’ll leave you with some real bees.

Tales from Perach – Shira Glassman

10th January 20174th October 2016 by Polenth

Tales from Perach Cover Series: Mangoverse, #5
First Published: 19th July, 2016
Genre: Fantasy / Short Story Collection
Available: Amazon.com | Amazon UK

This is a collection of short stories linked to the main novel series. The original edition contained five stories. I read the updated edition, which also contains two stories previously published as Tales from Outer Lands. I haven’t read the novels, though mostly the stories worked on their own and had self-contained plots. An exception was “Every Us”, which came across as more of an extra scene for people who know the characters.

“Rivka in Port Saltspray” is the strongest in terms of standing alone. Rivka needs money, so ends up taking on a job to rescue a woman. I liked that Rivka and the woman she rescues use their shared faith to communicate: they don’t speak the same daily language, but do know the same stories and prayers. This is also the odd one out in the collection, as it has a fair bit of violence.

The rest of the stories had a generally lighter tone, though I didn’t always react to them in that way. There are microaggressions and threats, which made the stories where they appeared rather more uncomfortable. The one that particularly didn’t work for me was “Aviva and the Aliens”. It’s otherwise a very silly story about hungry locust aliens. But the aliens have all the same attitudes as the men on the planet below, so there’s a forced marriage threat. It changed the tone of the story with a jolt.

I enjoyed the domestic focus of many of the stories, such as running a business and family celebrations. “Take Time to Stop and Eat the Roses” was a particularly fun story, about two children gathering flowers to surprise someone. There’s some interesting fairy lore in this one too.

Many of the characters are queer. This includes trans, bi, lesbian and gay characters. One story has an asexual aromantic supporting character. I appreciated seeing these characters getting to have happy endings. I also liked that their Jewish faith was shown in a positive light. Religion was part of their daily lives.

There’s a lot to like here, but I felt there was an overall mismatch between how I reacted to the stories and what was intended. These are billed as being fluffy, which I could see for some, but not for others. Situations where rape is threatened, leering and microaggressions are all things I find decidedly non-fluffy. It’s not graphic, but those themes are there in some stories.

[A copy of this book was received from the author for review purposes]