2021 is the year I’ve started to suspect that any money I’ve made from fiction has been despite my level of skill at business, and not because of it. But with the help of my fans, I’ve maintained and grown the fiction library on this very website. Now, I’d like to do it again.
I am crowdsourcing funds to release three new stories based on the game UNKNOWN ARMIES. If I get a thousand bucks, the first one comes out. There’s another at $1,500 and the last one at $2,000. But don’t worry, you don’t have to pay it all yourself! Click the link, see how much you think new cool fiction is worth, and make a pledge. (There’s also cool stuff you can get — patches, linocuts, access to novels, something for everyone!) If they get funded and posted, they’ll be under a Creative Commons license, as has been my tradition.
What are these stories? They focus on an affable layabout who stumbled into a successful music career at a young age, got kicked out of the band, and is now living on residuals. Oh, and he’s unreliably psychic. His name’s Mick Peltier.
Mick and Amanda and Reesa and Craig has him as a minor character, alternately irritating and intriguing the narrator, a grouchy retired man with a surprisingly awful history. Together, they’re trying to save a girl from what can only be called an evil spirit. That’s the story you get at $1000.
Mick and the Spoon Bender was the first one I wrote, and focuses on him much more closely as he tries to start a podcast about the paranormal. He’s on the trail of a man who claims to be the UNKNOWN ARMIES version of the narrator from I Am A Psychic Assassin… Fortunately, this alleged psi-spy asset is a real big fan of Mick’s old band.
Mick and the Fit only brings him in at the end. Mostly it’s the mixed-up story of a fitness instructor. The story starts before a particular event, then skips to after it, and flips back and forth until we zero in on the exact moment her life got ruined, even as we see the way she’s able to transform her trauma into occult power.
I’ve got those stories all written, edited, and ready to go. If those clear, you can bet there’s more where that came from. I have a story about a pleasant old man’s terrifying anatomy, a short and extremely nasty piece of crime fiction along with a longer and more ambiguous one, a story about zombies and a bit of SF set on Mars that goes from funny to wince inducing. So check out the link and let’s see how much of this we can get out to everyone!
