hey hi. is it cool to ask about how the publishing stuff is going? you're one of my fave writers and i'm curious but I don't wanna like, pry.
You have impeccable timing, anon! If you want more content from me, and an update on the publishing situation, I'm on the cusp of sending the draft of my latest project to my agent. But first...~*I need beta readers*~
The final voyage of the terraforming ship Persephone left Will Carrow with a hole in his head and no memory of his life before the mission’s bloody end. Now he works a dead end security job on the barren world where the friends and family he doesn’t remember tore each other apart, determined to find out why. His boyfriend, fellow Persephone survivor Jasper, says aliens made them do it, but obviously no one believes him. Carrow barely believes Jasper’s stories of the funny, precocious young man he used to be.
When two colonists are murdered in a grizzly echo of the Persephone deaths, Carrow is furious. And elated. It’s the justification he needs to search the Persephone’s rotting hulk for answers. He’s prepared for the corpses. He probably should have been prepared for the alien parasites that infest them. He’s not prepared for the truth; he can’t remember his life before the massacre because it was never his. He’s not Will Carrow, he’s the parasite that killed him.
While Carrow - or the thing still using his name - is horrified to realise he’s a monster wearing his victim’s corpse, guilt won’t bring back his host. All he can do now is keep his loved ones from suffering the same fate, and he’s going to destroy every last parasite to do it. Himself included.
But not everyone shares Carrow’s priorities. There’s money to be made from the alien technology he represents, and money to be lost if he derails the terraforming effort. And there’s Jasper, who refuses to believe that Carrow isn’t the man he loves. No matter what it costs, no matter what Carrow has become, Jasper is determined to save him from himself.
Out of the Dead Land is a 92,000-word dual-PoV Science Fiction novel that asks ‘What if The Thing was a love story?’ It combines the exploration of human identity in Ann Leckie’s Translation State with the romantic chemistry of Everina Maxwell’s Ocean’s Echo, set against the tense horror of Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead.
Content Warnings: Implied/referenced/attempted suicide, stigmatisation of mental illness, body horror and, while I'm a terrible judge, the consensus is there are graphic depictions of violence. If you've read my original work on AO3, you'll know what to expect on that front.
What are you expecting of a beta? You can give feedback however you want; via tracked changes in the manuscript, answering some book report questions, writing a small essay, or sending a single DM telling me the ending sucked and refusing to elaborate further. Only request is that you get through it quickly-ish (or if you're going to dnf then commit to dnfing and tell me where you gave up, that's still valuable info) because I promised to send this to my agent at the end of Feb and lol.
How do I sign up? DM me or, if you don't have an account, send me an anon with an alternative means of contact.
Didn't Stephenie Myer already do an alien parasite romance? Yeah. More tentacles in mine, though.
