An unexpected story

[tl;dr: you can go read my new story for free over here.]

I didn’t expect to write a novelette this year. I was over 50k words into my second book when Russia invaded.

I am a child of the 80s. I turned eight in 1980 and eighteen in 1990. I’m about as Gen X as they get. When the war in Ukraine broke out, I felt an anxiety I haven’t felt since I was a child. This was different from the growing anxiety we’ve all carried with us for the last several years. This was the long-buried anxiety of a ten-year-old child walking to school and looking up at the sky, wondering if the nukes would come today. This was the anxiety of a fourteen-year-old who had just watched The Morning After and couldn’t sleep at night. This was a Gen X, Cold War, anxiety.

So, I dealt with it the only way I could think of — I started to write. Ever since I published Super-Borg Dies in December 2020, I’ve been working on the second book (currently titled Angel Monster Hunter), but I was too distracted to keep working on it. I needed an outlet for this anxiety. I remembered my character from Super-Borg Dies, Sam, who was Kyle Lopez’s Russian roommate. My brain naturally drew a line from the events still happening today in Ukraine to the undetermined point of time in the future where my book takes place. And I kept writing. It was very cathartic.

This was meant to be a short story, but the words kept coming. At over thirteen-thousand words, this is technically in novelette territory — but I’m not sure that distinction means anything in the world of self-publishing. This story stands on its own from Super-Borg Dies (SBD), so you need not have read it to read this story. If you have read SBD, then this will hopefully add more to that world for you to enjoy.

I was nervous about publishing this because I didn’t want to seem like I was being exploitative or opportunistic at the expense of the people of Ukraine. I have a deep love and support for Ukrainians and their plight. That’s why I’ve both made this story free on my site, and published it so I can donate all proceeds to charity.

I hope you enjoy this, and it motivates you to do what you can to help the people in Ukraine.