In a little side foray that I think you’ll all appreciate, I’d like to announce the publication of our first speculative fiction anthology, “Thiside of Anywhere”!

That’s not to say that I haven’t been making all kinds of other weird things, but… oh, I guess it’s been a long enough minute that I should bring you up to speed.

In the last couple of years, remarkable things have happened. I got my undergrad degree in Psychology, and I’m blasting my way through grad school right now, too, also for Psych, as a path to support adult autistics.

While doing that, I’ve also been writing a lot of fiction: science fiction, speculative fiction, short fiction, dystopian fiction… all kinds of fun stories. And true to my academic passions, there are a lot of diverse types featured in my stories.

You can get the Kindle version of Thiside of Anywhere on May 1, 2024. The paperback and hardcover versions will come out the same day, but they’re not available for pre-order.

Here’s where this becomes a full-on Alchemias thing:

I listed Alchemias Art as the publisher, and I did that because I am totally open to helping other people self-publish as well. I am not a full-service publisher with marketing and people and things like that, but I am totally down with helping with the editing and formatting and so forth. I went all out with “Thiside” and created it in all three available formats, mainly so that I could get the experience.

Also, you’ll notice that the title of the article is Thiside: Volume 1, and that’s because since I finished this first volume, the characters have been up my ass to continue telling their stories, and to bring the rest of their friends into the fold.

How the story got here

I wrote Thiside of Anywhere during November as a Na– um, those guys and their annual challenge. (More on that in a later post.) My personal goal was to write an entire short story every day, but during the planning phase, the titles became ordinal and the structure became palindromic, so the first story is resolved in the last story, the second story is resolved in the second-to-last story, and so on.

Okay, but, like, what’s it all about…?

All thirty stories are about the daily mundane lives of cryptids.

A mothwoman and a chupacabra meet up for a first date.

A gremlin is the overnight manager in a grocery store.

A leprechaun and his dryad and selkie partners work at a seasonal carnival.

And then it gets interesting.

I’m sure you can see how these tales definitely can take on a soul of their own.

In the future, there will be more volumes of Thiside tales, and also an illustrated bestiary. There’s already an appendix added to the Kindle, paperback, and hardcover versions, which is a step beyond what you can read in the Vella version. (Oh, yeah, it’s on Vella, too.)

In other news…

There are some other stories brewing, and I’m getting the hang of this self-publishing thing now, so I’ll just keep cranking out the material until I get tired of it.

I’m working with Ashley at A Stitch and a Kiss to help her put some of her amazing bags up for sale at local markets, and I might have some items for sale there as well. We’ll see if I have time to make anything between writing the next book and finishing my homework…

And, speaking of, if you want to see what kind of academic trouble I’ve been getting into, you can look at my portfolio site at degeswain.com.

Sorry it took me so long, but it’s nice to be back.