Hi everyone! I’ve been waiting to make this announcement for a while and now I finally can: next month I’ll finally get to put something I’ve written up for free on this website!
Specifically, I’ll be posting my science fiction novella Three Keys in the Desert starting June 1st!
What is the story about?
There will be a lot more details forthcoming in the next three weeks (including a cover!) but the short summary is: it’s a story about a bunch of girls (and a few boys) living in a military boarding school in space, trying to navigate bureaucracy, romance and adventure. The action takes place over the course of a week, when the school experiences some dramatic upheaval.
Why are you posting it on this website?
I originally wrote Three Keys in the Desert in 2007 and put it aside for a few months, intending to finish working on it later. A few months turned into a few years, and before long I fell into a ritual of pulling it out every few years and telling myself that I couldn’t Really Be A Writer until I finished it and managed to get it traditionally published.
But then about 18 months ago I decided to take a deep breath and instead focus on creating new material. Which was a good move! I now have two short stories and a poem published in various venues, which would never have happened if I hadn’t let the novella go for a while.
All of which is to say, I still adore this story and its characters and what it has to say about the world, but I’ve been carrying it around on my hard drive for so long that at this point I just want to have it out in the world, for people to enjoy. There’s a bigger market for novellas now than there was in 2007, but I decided not to try and pitch it to publishers, even now that it’s as close to perfect as I know how to make it.
The main reason for this is that I’m a pretty slow writer (for example: a decade spent on this one novella) and none of the stories I’ve managed to sell so far are available online for free, and I really wanted there to be something of mine people could just read in their spare time, without necessarily spending money.
So how is this gonna work?
Well, Three Keys in the Desert is about 39,000 words long (that’s about 130 pages in a printed book) and I’ll be posting it in parts over the course of June. Because of the structure of the story, the parts will actually be fairly self-contained and no chapters will cut off in the middle of a conversation or anything like that.
The whole story will also be available as an ebook, if you wanted to get the whole thing on June 1st, or if you’d rather have it in that format.
Cool. So what now?
Now I’m probably going to go crawl under a table and breathe into a paper bag (it’s been a DECADE with this story, okay, I don’t even know who’ll I’ll be once it’s out in the world!) while you can do a bunch of things to make sure you don’t miss any Three Keys in the Desert-related updates.
You can sign up for my New Release Mailing List (I’ll send an email when the first part of the novella goes live) and follow me on twitter or facebook to get updates about the cover reveal and other cool things I might post in the run up to June.
Sounds good! Are you okay?
Yes! Mostly. I’ll just go eat an entire cake and have a glass of something alcoholic. I’ll be right back.