Very excited today to announce the release of my short story collection, aptly-named Beyond Ourselves.
The collection features seven stories exploring transformation, gender, sex, love, loss, the mind and body, and more. It’s about as long as one of my novellas and is available on Amazon and Smashwords.
A few more details on the individual stories are available here
This has been in the works for about a year as I started getting ideas for stories I liked enough to want to group them. I mentioned last year that I wanted to have it done for the summer but I wrote Both and released the Author’s Edition of Kristi’s Mom instead. I pursued a few different ideas throughout the rest of the year but kept rolling these ideas around in my brain. I started to really buckle down in the last few months of 2023.
In putting together this collection, I made a list of story ideas that I had and selected ones I thought would go well together but also stand out from one another, allowing each one to shine and providing a hopefully consistently-enjoyable reading experience. I have a lot of oddball ideas that I didn’t go for because of that, leaving them aside for a future collection (if this one does well.) Some of the stories I picked because they said something and some simply because I thought they would be interesting ideas to pursue as a writer. Some of the ideas were fresh, created specifically in the last year, and a couple are old favourites that I never got around to trying or left half-finished because I didn’t think I could do it at the time.
Writing these stories is tricky. Some of them comment on society, or on gender and sexuality, and others are just kind of exercises. That doesn’t mean that any of them are less valid than others, of course: I like all of them and if I didn’t I wouldn’t have included them. And I hope the audience gets what they need out of them. But it’s also a little scary to work with these themes and balance crowd-pleasing and doing justice to the ideas. I think a lot of us are enamored of the idea of a person transforming from physiologically male to female and then engaging in heterosexual relationships as a female. There’s a lot to unpack with that but that doesn’t mean that I as a person think that females ought to be with males as a matter of normality or correctness. It’s a fun, weird, queer fantasy. My point — if I have one — is that thanks to my readership I’ve been given leeway to play with some very interesting tropes and I always want to do justice to them even as the meaning and understanding of them changes over the years.
This is all to say, I’ve thought very hard about these stories and what they say. When I’m old fashioned, it’s hopefully because I’m being old-fashioned on purpose, as commentary, or in a kidding way that doesn’t hurt anybody. There’s a lot of power in the ideas that I’m working with and my hope is not to betray that.
Enough babbling — the links are up there, go see for yourself!
Enjoy and be kind,
Liam
