Here’s a place for them:
With that out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks. overkill is done. I’m going to start releasing it on Royal Road soon. Here’s a blurb:
On NEWSTEAD-SIX, death isn’t the end. Annihilation is. On humanity’s frontier there is a prism which contains the greatest achievements humanity has ever known: a station where bodies get regrown, where humans can fly, and where death from age, violence, or sickness is a distant memory. It’s a station where grudges get older, where selfishness unfolds over decades, and where scientific curiosity turns to sin.
Arran, a former undercity lawman, has come out to live on an itinerant space station as their local peacekeeper. What he’s found is a nest of intrigue that’s led him to brutally avenge the murder of a small boy. A death he avenges with annihilation.
Now he’s suspended, a gun-hand short, and the Mayor wants him gone as soon as the district chief arrives. The town would help him pack his bags.
Arran’s deadly instincts are the least of their concerns. There’s a creature swimming in the void outside their small, protective prism. It’s hungry. It’s angry. It’s afraid. It’s big. Big enough to swallow them whole as it devours their sun.
overkill is a posthuman frontier western about the law at the edge of forever, and the man stubborn enough to keep it.
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I’m not good at blurbs, but that is fine.
One thing that might surprise you, from an author of westerns, is how little I enjoy my life resembling one. I don’t even think about books when I’m not writing them, much less do I think about dancing around like a spur-booted cowboy. I enjoy getting things done. Writing is often an extension of that. My life exists to support my stories, but if I tried to think about playing at stories in my daily life I’d just find myself buried under the weight of all the reality that contradicts them all the time. Real life’s like that, messy and uncertain, and if anyone ever comes at you with a good story then they are trying to fool you. It’s somewhat ironic I’ve chosen to spend my life writing stories, having such little faith in them, but perhaps that is what happens when you’ve been working with them for so long. It’s like knowing how the sausage is made. You don’t want to know. There’s a man on YouTube who does makes sausage and it is violent.
Which brings me back to overkill. The delicious pork sausage I’ve served up for you. I’d love to know how it goes. I see it as a counterpoint to Well’s Rest. It’s more of a straight western, for one. If there is any challenge I take with my work, it is to make each new project a counterpoint to the one before. Every new work needs to be a reversal of whatever efforts came before it, whether in setting, structure, themes, any aspect. It keeps every new project fresh and exciting for you, the reader, but more than that it keeps me interested. I’m not interested in replaying the hits. With my work you’ll see variety, imagination, and fine attention to things like tone, texture, and timing. Those are the features I try to keep. Most else is changeable.
For now I will only publish this new story serialised on Royal Road for the value of a closer editing pass than I am willing to do as a separate task, and then I will publish it in paperback and eBook format. I have a cover for it, but the cover is AI-generated and deliberately shit. When I can afford to pay an artist to design a better one, I will.
Without further ado: https://www.royalroad.com/profile/786561/fictions
This time I got names from Bing Maps.
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