It’s called Hologram Kebab, and despite being more finished than my Poetry collections False Vacuum and Branch Density, it doesn’t yet have a pre-order page set up on Amazon. That’s because I can feel another story waiting inside my brain to hatch, a story that desperately wants to be in HK, despite being unformed and nebulous right now.
So what is Hologram Kebab?
Basically, it’s a short story collection. Not unlike Who Built The Humans? but this time considerably smaller. There aren’t as many stories, and they don’t click together like Lego either, so it isn’t secretly a philosophically-driven Science Fiction novel.
No, it’s just a basic, simple short story collection.
About holographic kebabs, dead ex-girlfriends, and throbbing alien foreheads.
It’s very weird. Weirder in fact than some parts of WBTH, which is weird to think about because I wrote WBTH with the philosophy;
“be as weird and as funny and as clever as possible, at the same time”
So Hologram Kebab is a collection of only ten or so stories, much less than WBTH’s forty seven, and each of these stories exists entirely independent from the others. There’s no clicking into other stories in the book, but that doesn’t mean they are outside of my ever-expanding story universe
(and yes, I’ve heard you, I will be publishing a free map in 2022).
Rather, the stories in HK, if they do click with anything, click with stories I have published elsewhere or haven’t published yet at all.
There is a rewrite of THE INTER-TEMPORAL HOTEL, my first published short story (and my last if we discount one I published for a joke under a pen name before going self-pub just so I could be as weird as possible).
There’s a story about an alien that abducts humans from thrift stores in order to use their “crap attuned brains” for navigational computers in the interstellar trash tubes.
There’s one called KEBAB that is obviously the title story, and is about a really bad night out with a sci-fi twist.
And there is one about creatures made out of rain. I wrote this one at uni, but it didn’t fit into WBTH because it’s a different kind of weird.
And of course there are a few more, but those are the ones I am settled on. As you can see it’s still a sci-fi mix, but leaning closer to magic realism now, or just surrealism. I think I might also include one about a pigeon that gaslights someone. I find that story very amusing and I think you will too.
Anyway, thinking of getting an author website since now I have a growing body of work. What do you think?
Also might get into interior design. I always wanted to do it, and now WBTH is sort of moving by itself (moved 4 a day last week, new record) I think I can afford to look into it finally. I just fucking love lamps.
Maybe I’m a moth?