Sam Redlark

Towards the end of 2020, I wrote a novella by accident. Which is a cutesy way of saying that, either on a whim, or as a dedicated act of procrastination to avoid doing something else, I dragged the mothballed fragments of an unfinished piece of fiction out from the archives, and worked on it until it was well over 30,000 words and no longer viable as a short story. During the decade or so since its conception, the story had acquired a number of notations that had been tagged piecemeal onto the end. Among these was the outline for a new opening paragraph that went on to become chapter one. A sketch of a scene that was intended to amount to nothing more than a couple of paragraphs, swelled to immense proportions and became chapter three, which remains my favourite part of the book. There was a point where I had to make a decision: Do I cram the story back into the vaults, or do I continue adding to it, in the knowledge that it is too large for any literary journal to even consider, and w

Readers of my novella, The Missionary Dune ( which is available through Amazon as a paperback or eBook ) may have noted, in the 'other books by the same author section, a sprawling, 7000-page, WWII epic, titled The Buttoner , that I wrote under under the female pseudonym, Agnes Pimm. The book is a relic of a shameful era of our literary history, when it was unthinkable that a man might be permitted to toss his bowler hat into the female-dominated sub-genre of cross stitch fiction. Consequently, I was left with no option other than to don a sensible cotton blouse and a heavy tweed skirt, prior to making inroads into this forbidden territory. Sadly, my ruse was exposed by the treacherous Dorothy Welsby, who affected both friendship and support for my plight, prior to very publicly stabbing me in the back. An edict issued by the Global Council of Literary Standards resulted in the book being de-published a mere two weeks after it was released. An accompanying motion to have me de-aut