My first significant work of fiction, The Mary Stories, is now available via Theo Reads! It’s a “rural fantasy” story that blends Eastern and Western elements. I’ve grown a lot as a writer since I finished this work, but I still enjoy re-reading it. It has a lot of charming moments and the wry humor that a number of people have told me they like about my writing. I think that people who like my writing will also enjoy it. Here’s the description:
“An older man moves back to his childhood home in the country and rediscovers the imaginary friend he had as a child, who is not so imaginary. Reconnecting after a lifetime apart, they begin to trust one another again. And, together, they confront a mystery that spans the past and the present, and that threatens them both.”
When I first started trying to actually write something for publication in English, this was the first piece of greater than short-story length I ever completed. It was a serial of ten episodes that each had a minor story and, together, covered a larger overall arc. It includes many of the elements that characterize my work: a blend of East and West, episodic story telling, interactions between human and non-human characters, ecological and environmental themes, and trans people finding acceptance and love.
It’s not my strongest work. I’ve grown a lot as a writer since I wrote this. The story structure and pacing is uneven. And there are some “darlings” and “mary-sue” parts that I like to think I have gotten somewhat better at killing. Or, at least, disguising. But I still like the stories and I think they’re fun romp.
After I finished writing the stories, I shopped them around a bit but found that few publishers were interested in serialized work from new authors. In spite of that, I kept pushing to write serialized work and found success at Water Dragon Publishing when Revin’s Heart was serialized. After submitting the Mary Stories a few times, I set them aside to work on other things. Then I heard of Kindle Vella.
Vella was an experiment that Amazon did in serialization. I published The Mary Stories at Vella as It’s Complicated. It didn’t attract much interest there. I read that people that were successful at Vella — and there weren’t many — had generally written more than a hundred chapters. And the more successful works tended toward erotica, which wasn’t really what I wanted to write. But Vella itself didn’t pan out either, and they shut it down in February 2025.
Theo Reads is an interesting project to commercialize serialized writing. It’s more of a platform than a publisher. They’re still developing the technology and the processes. But it’s fascinating to see a bit behind the scenes as they try things out and work through the various challenges. Among the authors are a number of familiar — and well known — faces in the SFF community. They’re currently particularly interested in erotica — or works adjacent to erotica. But they’re interested in broadening the types of stories they publish.
I have several other works that might fit that I could choose to publish via Theo Reads. I have one serial just sitting there that I had thought I had found a home for, but has been languishing for more than a year. So, for me, this is a useful opportunity to try out Theo Reads and see if my work might find an audience there.
