I’m pleased to announce that very late at night on April 18th, my new book came out. Its title is Wild State and it is a collection of ten short stories. As usual with me, the genres are eclectic; I can’t write about the same person more than twice in a row and I certainly can’t write in the same genre ten times in a row. So there is some fantasy, some set nowadays, some set fifteen or twenty or twenty-five years ago… and we’ll all just have to deal with it. Mayhem unites them all.
Ben Gemmell and Gabe Gomez, two characters of mine who each have a different way of constantly getting into trouble, show up prominently here, and Radenna of Armattia, the gladiator who debuted in two stories in Serene Grace but did not appear in Lower Power, is back, too. The other stories, whether fantastical or realistic, continue to expand the, uh, Atkinson-verse, or as I think of it, “Matkipedia.”
The title Wild State comes from a dream I had as a kid about a very YA-dystopia experiment where kids were divided up into factions and forced to manage resources and build settlements in a wide stretch of lush land like it was Age of Empires. While that would itself be a cool story, that one’s not in here.
I published the collection to Amazon, Google Books, and Draft2Digital and friends. I hope you enjoy.