This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Darby Harn will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

I rarely think about a muse, but I’m always thinking about craft. How do I start a story? How do I finish? How do I sustain myself through periods lacking inspiration or motivation? My experience being autistic mirrors my writing process in many ways. I want to go out and be social; I also really don’t. I want to write the story in my head, and I don’t know how. My worst moments come in literally standing in the door, on the threshold of going out, but never leaving. Many of my stories exist in this space, unrealized.

This tension generates enormous anxiety and exhaustion from the same, eroding the energy I have to do anything, including write. Producing In Between: Stories of the Eververse represents a major accomplishment for me. When I settled on the idea of creating this series about Kit Baldwin, fighting to simply help people in a world where superheroes charge for their services, I had some strong ideas and goals. I knew I wanted to do nine books, and I knew I wanted to do a story collection that would land in the pause between books three and four. I knew this collection would serve both as a bridge and an entry point for readers, as much as it would serve to build out the world even more.

Despite the inspiration guiding me, getting the collection to print took years. The stories and novellas that make up the collection, loosely linked together in a kind of parenthetical novel, first emerged in 2018. I often think a long time on a story, write it fast, and then think on it more for ever longer. I’ve gotten better recently, as I’m more aware I’m threading into this loop, but I still do it. That requires me to apply enormous focus on my work. Inspiration always guides me, and my muse – such as it is – plays a role in seizing on an idea in the first place. But for myself and perhaps for other writers, hard work and dedication are what gets you through to the end.

The final novella in the collection, “The Other Kit,” lingered in my head for years as I teetered on the brink of what the story would be. I had an idea, and an ambition, but I also feared writing it. This novella acknowledges Kit’s autism in the text for the first time and I struggled with whether or not to do so. Many neurodivergent writers leave this aspect of their characters unacknowledged, but I felt for Kit and for myself, I needed to say. I didn’t know how for a long time.

Book five in the series, which I’m writing now, similarly gestated in my head for years. It will be years before it sees the light of day. Some stories come quick. I wrote a new short story recently in just a day, but it too will simmer for a long time before seeing print. I accept this. I understand now the inhibition in my writing, and I work toward taking those steps knowing inspiration will get me off the ground, but won’t keep me in the air.

Telepathic wolves. Zombie gangsters. Sentient houses. Just another day for Kit Baldwin.

Fifty years after an alien ship crashed in Break Pointe, the only protection in a strange new world is Great Power, a corporation of superhumans. If you can afford them. Most people can’t.

Enter Kit Baldwin, a young woman who helps people to help people. Except her power is the alien’s power, and she may be more of a danger to her city than she is a help.
This collection of stories and novellas follows Kit’s journey in a series that’s been called ‘the next logical step after Watchmen.’

Enjoy an Excerpt

Post Credits Scene:

“Bring my girlfriend back to life,” the old man says.

Since I got my powers, I get all kinds of strange requests. A fair number of them are curiously sexual, but mostly people ask me to do some good in the world. Catch asteroids. Cure cancer, end hunger, please and thank you. You know.

Little things.

This one might go up on the fridge. Bring his girlfriend back to life? He could do with some help himself. Seventy, maybe. Liver spots. A rattle in his chest like a bad engine. Still, he got up here on the roof. He knew it was me, warming my feet with the other birds.

Sometimes, I don’t know when I’m me.

About the Author: Darby Harn studied at Trinity College, in Dublin, Ireland, as part of the Irish Writing Program. He is the author of the sci-fi superhero novel EVER THE HERO. His short fiction appears in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Shimmer, The Coffin Bell and other venues.

Buy the book at Amazon.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Darby Harn will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

Doubt. There is no greater impediment to writing, or any creative endeavor, than self-doubt. That voice in your head that says You can’t do this, or I’m not good enough, or No one will care, is the only antagonist in the story of your being a writer. You’re going to face many challenges – the more you do, the more success you’re having – but the first, best, and last villain in your journey is your own doubt.

I wrote A Country of Eternal Light largely in 2015 and 2016. I sought agents and publishers, without success, through 2019. I also struggled with whether to even do so. This is a deeply personal book to me, a great creative risk in my telling this story from the perspective of an Irish woman, and I wasted a lot of time thinking it had no value at all. It took me years to find the courage to publish it now in 2021.

In some way I still doubt its value, and mine, but I also know its worth. This is a story that resonates with people when they read it. More than that, this is why I write. It’s to tell stories. It’s to share stories and connect with people, on some level. I have to fight that doubt, that indecision, that fear, every day. Some days it’s debilitating. What is the point? Does anyone care? Am I making a fool of myself?

But this isn’t the voice you need to listen to. As a writer, you are living in language. Your greatest asset is your pair of ears. Listen to the world. The way people talk. How they talk, what they say, what they don’t say. Listen to the rush of the river and the creak of the trees. Listen to the whine of the rocks as the waves crash into them. Focus on the world and all its music and you won’t hear that nagging doubt so much anymore. All those voices you collect in the world will keep in your writing, and keep you plenty distracted.

A rogue black hole tears apart the solar system. Mairead’s life is already in pieces.

The Earth has less than a year to survive.

Asteroids rain hell; earthquakes rattle cities; manic tides swamp coasts. Mairead intends to give herself to the erratic waves that erode her remote Irish island, the same that claimed her child. When Gavin, an American, arrives to scatter his father’s ashes, she becomes torn between wanting for life and death.

Despite the tides, fuel shortages, and closing borders that threaten to trap him on the island, Gavin can’t seem to scatter the ashes. He doesn’t know how to let go any more than Mairead does and they find a strange comfort in their confusion.

Their affair draws Mairead back to the world of the living, but the longer Gavin stays, the more it seems there might be a future for them. There is no future.

Life closes down around them. The world they know shreds. Life drains into an inescapable abyss. And yet Mairead fights, both the gravity of her grief and the restless, dissonant desire to find some kind of peace no matter how brief.

Enjoy an Excerpt

There is success in death.

Fish flop in confusion as the sea peels back to the mainland. Dinner tonight. Breakfast tomorrow, if I’m thinking of tomorrow. I leave them in the goopy, gasping muck. I keep walking. I am far now, farther than I can run when the tide returns. Bereft water jostles in pitted rock. Strands of seaweed coil around my feet. I feel your pull.

Here I am.

This buzz in the air. The tide coming back, surely. I look up, expectant. Meteors rip through the blue, faster than any wish can catch. Broken stalks of rainbows on the horizon. Comets like white lies. Three more today, competing with the big one they call Medusa, with all her snake tails.

I wait for my success.

The sea must have run off to the States with everyone else. That buzz again. Louder. Closer. The turboprop from the mainland comes out of nowhere. The plane hasn’t been over in weeks. Most days, high tide swamps the eastern horn of the island, the bit of Inishèan that can accommodate a runway. Right next to the cemetery.

Take offs and landings.

The sea is out. The plane is able to make a landing. He might have medicine, the pilot. Food. He’ll have room, for the trip back to Galway. Someone will get delivered today.

About the Author:Darby Harn studied at Trinity College, in Dublin, Ireland, as part of the Irish Writing Program. He is the author of the sci-fi superhero novel EVER THE HERO. His short fiction appears in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Shimmer, The Coffin Bell and other venues.

Buy the book at Amazon.

a Rafflecopter giveaway