It’s so exciting to see The Art of Broken Things out in the big wide world.
Thank you to Elizabeth from ‘Nerds of a Feather’ for this lovely, thoughtful review
In particular, this quote:
“One of the delightful things about collections is that they make the preoccupations of the author wonderfully clear. This is most certainly true of The Art of Broken Things. Many of the characters in these stories are outsiders, some literally living on the outskirts of town, others simply strangers in a foreign culture. They are people facing grief or toxic relationships, people who are desperate and despairing.”
Sometimes, as a writer, you don’t realise you’re doing this very thing – exploring stuff that’s going down in your real life through fiction. This might be doubly true when you’re a speculative fiction writer like me. Sometimes a story about a spacewalk is a story about a spacewalk. Sometimes, it’s me, dealing with the way my marriage and very long term relationship ended. A lot of the time we do this subconsciously, and it’s only when putting a collection together – even seeing a review of said collection – that we realise.
