Over the next posts I’ll discuss my recent novel—Death, Incorporated.! Writing is a lonely endeavor, so after 5 years of work, I’m very excited to finally share some details (and the book itself!) with the outside world.

Here’s the logline:

21-year-old Yorde needs to survive in the afterlife plagued by Kafkaesque bureaucracy and predatory capitalism and race the clock to find out the truth about his alleged suicide.

And in a longer form:

When Yorde, a recent film school dropout, wakes up dead in a shopping mall, he’s both terrified and pissed. Men in black inform him that he’s committed suicide, which he has no memory of.  He is escorted to Necropolis, the city of the dead, where his case is dismissed, his queries are unanswered, and he is left to fend for himself, with only 24 hours to spare. If he doesn’t sign up to an afterlife provider before his time runs out, he will cease to exist. But Yorde is done running. He decides to stay behind, challenge the system that wronged him, and live the life that was stolen from him.

However, surviving in Necropolis isn’t easy. The currency of the dead is time—you earn time by working, you rent with time, you loan time, and if you’re late with payments, poof. Yorde needs to stay afloat, make friends and enemies, unravel the conspiracy of the high floors and answer the question: is the afterlife of constant struggle the one he’d wanted to live?

Exciting, huh? Still, the pitch only scratches the surface of what I want to share with you guys. Next post—worldbuilding!

Wohoo, another short story published!

https://www.samjokomagazine.com/floating

I was inspired by Murakami when writing it, which is funny since it got acquired by a Korean lit mag. Murakami is a Japanese author, yet I wonder if it wasn’t thanks to some of the tendencies in his writing that got the story sold to an Asian market, where weird, open-ended stories are more commonplace. Perhaps the geography of literature is better defined than I thought.

In other news, I’m on a trip to India with W! It’s a wonderful country, the people are so friendly. I get many new writing ideas, though I can’t utilize them since I’m suffering from mild sleeplessness. Dogs are barking, we once woke up to a scream in the dead of the night, and people are honking constantly. If something stands in their way, be it a person, a tuk-tuk, or a possibility of a person or tuk-tuk, it takes them less than a second to slam their klaxon and BEEP-BEEP-BEEEEEEEEP the fucker out.

There was also this one situation I turned it into a horror flash-story. It was out first contact with India when we got off at the Delhi airport:

I sit down in a cab and try to pull the seatbelt free out of its socket. The driver turns to me and smiles, white teeth shining.
‘No seatbelt,’ is all he says.
I carefully put the seatbelt away. The man, still smiling, starts up the engine.

In the next post I’ll start sprinkling some info about my newest novel. Until then, safe travels!

I’m Peter Wynd, a writer of 26. My writing focuses on imaginative worldbuilding, entertainment, and, hopefully, delight.

(If you want to read something, it’s the best time ever, since my short story got published just 2 weeks ago! It’s about a milk-seller terrorizing a village with his price-changes. You can read it here:https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-36/summer-in-duncanny.html)

So, what will you find on this blog? Some slices of life, perhaps. Mostly tidbits of info about the stuff I currently write. Various things, but brief. Brief is important. I wouldn’t want to bore you or myself. I’ll aim to post at the beginning of each month, sometimes more often. Let’s start with that.

Another question: why make a blog? For the sake of continuity, I guess. It’s nice to romanticize my lonely process of writing a novel and turn it into some epic quest with beginning and end. You know, to give it some narrative… writers are crazy about those.

Managing social media as a fledgling writer is difficult, though: for the last four years I’ve been sitting at my desk and writing a book. What do you want me to say about it? How many pages I’ve cut? How the keys on my keyboard make different sounds depending on wear, or how my kkk kkkkkkkey is broken? I bet you’d rather read the damn thing when it finally comes out.

All in all, I’m not best at social media presence. For you, dear reader, it means this: that following this blog is like betting on a horse in a race, and knowing that the horse is kind of lame, weird, and with some of its teeth missing.

Bet on this horse, if you wish. In fairy tales, sometimes even a lame horse can win.

Peter