“Not Quite so Stories” Forthcoming!

I signed a contract with Literary Wanderlust for my short story collection Not Quite so Stories! I already posted about this on Facebook and though I wanted to update everyone here, I didn’t want to overload this on Facebook (my blog autoposts to Facebook, most of the time) so I decided to wait a couple days before posting. The book is now forthcoming!

I’ll be sure to let you all know details as soon as I’ve got them nailed down.

This one was a long time coming. I’ve been working on these stories for a few years now. It all goes back to the day when I was walking around a bookstore and noticed a cover turned outward that depicted a melancholy guy in a bunny suit with a shotgun surrounded by deceased birds (The Nimrod Flipout). That got me curious, and introduced me to Etgar Keret. Followed shortly by encountering Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray, my course was set. I got really into these sort of highly realistic stories that take a sudden left turn into absurdity.

I wanted to write stories like that.

And, I started doing that. I envisoned a whole collection of those, going against the idea of myth explaining the world and instead going with the idea that the world is by nature absurd and inexplicable and all we can do is figure out how to go on in the face of that. I even had a tentative title, Not Quite so Stories, playing on the Kipling book Just so Stories and forming a kind of answer to it.

Anyway, after all these years, it’s finally complete and going to be published. I can’t wait for you all to be able to read it.