A year ago, readers on my Patreon got the story of a man exploring an alternate Earth where the touch of man was unknown, because animals never evolved. He mainly goes there to let his dog do its business beyond the reach of pooper-scooper laws, because the gate into that uninhabited world is huge and being used as a Hail Mary attempt at climate disaster mitigation.
You can read Curselands here. I hope you like it.
Curselands, like everything in my fiction library, is free and under a Creative Commons license, and I’d like to take a moment to remind you how that’s possible when I have internet hosting and upkeep fees to pay, along with the sordid necessities of feeding and housing my aging flesh. I sell stuff through DriveThru and, by necessity, Amazon. But the bulk of my income was Kickstarters, and my last one failed.
This isn’t great news. What is good news is, Patreon has been pretty steady and reliable. So, like a sunflower pursuing bright Phoebus, or like Dillanger robbing banks because that’s where the money is, I’m pushing that venue.
https://www.patreon.com/GregStolze
There it is. For five bucks, you not only get a fresh new story every month–you support the system whereby stories flow downstream here and end up free for the world to read. I love doing that, and I don’t want to threaten to stop doing it, but I just read a story about how, when everyone takes advantage of a resource and nobody pays for it, it goes away. It was called Curselands.
The real coolness at the Patreon, of course, is the exclusive, high-end ten dollar a month tier. There you not only get access to the last year’s archive of stories, you get on a private Discord. It’s pretty fun and chill. So far, it’s the only place I’ve put up my mashups of Chick tract art with Chuck Tingle quotes. So if you want to see Chick Tingle art, so far that’s the only option unless you make your own, which I heartily encourage because it’s fun.
(The story I just posted there is Penitentiary Pool Boy, a soft sequel to After the Cops, only instead of a grizzled cop, it’s a freshly-hired corrections officer in a brave new world of carceral reform. It’s also a murder mystery!)
-G.
