The wait is over and as promised, the time has come for me to give a little bit of insight into my new short story Encroachment.
This story is unlike anything I have ever written before in
my life. It came together fairly quickly because I got the idea for this story
about 3 weeks after I published Ubiquitous Aspirations. In that post, I
mentioned having already completed a couple of other short stories and not
being sure what to do with them. Encroachment is the result of me coming to the
decision to put the other stories on hold.
I came around to writing Encroachment because I wanted to
elaborate on The Elders from Living Through the Glass.
Ubiquitous Aspirations was about Oscar and this story is about Manuel. In Living Through the Glass, I don’t delve
too much into the personalities of The Elders outside of Oscar and Sunjata to
an extent, (As I mentioned before, book 3 of The Lost Stories series will be
about Sunjata) so Manuel isn’t much of a focal character and his fate is
decided towards the end of Living Through the Glass.
I wanted to go into a couple of radically different
directions with Encroachment. At first I kicked around ideas of going into an
adult direction with this story but as I was writing I found it very difficult
and eventually decided against it, so the book at worst is PG-13. There’s
nothing overtly racy about this story. I wanted to pivot away from romance in
this book. As a female author, there are some challenges to writing a story from
a male perspective and it’s a challenge I’m willing to undertake because all of
the stories I am working to release in the near future are all centered around
men being the primary characters. With that being said, I am not going to shy
away from touching on misogynistic topics and having some of my characters embody
being downright sexist. While not sexist, Manuel does have less than honorable mannerisms when dealing with women. I am absolutely not saying that to mean that all of my
male characters are going to be disgusting pigs but on that same note, I am not
going for the prince charming look for all of my male characters either. As
I’ve stated before, I want my characters to be the type of people who know
right from wrong and still remain accountable for their decisions.
It is a part of the human element that I wish to highlight in my stories.
Encroachment is a far different story from Ubiquitous
Aspirations. There is no redemption for Manuel in this story. I
chose to intentionally leave an open-ended route when it comes to defining his
legacy. The major reason for this is because there is a point in the story that
parallels a major event in Living Through the Glass and it leaves an opening
for me to elaborate on why this event occurs in the next book in
this series. This story has some hidden gems in them. On the surface, the story
can be read and digested as a standalone story without having to read
Ubiquitous Aspirations or Living Through the Glass but if one reads Living
Through the Glass and this story, then some of those underlying elements will
become obvious.
If you are interested in purchasing a copy of Encroachment,
it is on sale for $0.99 USD or free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription at Amazon.
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