Anarchy

Anarchy is a state of mind -- a feeling had when living in chaos. It is more than surviving the crazy world. It is more than punk rock. Anarchy is freedom to question everything, to be creative, to be alive. That is why I choose Anarchy as a title for my first self-published book. Last year I found myself at a crossroads. A publishing relationship was coming to an end because my writing style did not fit wth their romance output. My writing is dark and twisted and off the beaten path. I thought over my body of work including short stories, screenplays, novellas and novels. What was the common theme? It was not necessarily genre. Queer fiction and horror play a part as do dark fantasy, western, and true crime. There is even a story about furries. How did they all relate? Then it struck me that all my stories had a common character -- a queer punk outsider in a world of chaos. The journey would entail one of coming-of-age, desire, survival or revenge, but the characters were similar. A style emerged when I looked at it in that light. Every story crossed a taboo either subtly or blatantly in a punk rock sort of way. My influences of horror and exploitation movies were clear in the writing on the page. I decided in that moment to take my creative work into my own hands and build something new with my own imprint, DS. All my past works are out of print and this is a way to give them a new life in remastered and altered ways.

Anarchy -- Strange Tales of Outsiders collects my first novella, short stories and fragments in a punk compendium that ranges my first written material to the present. It is hard to revisit the past and revise, but letting go enough to let something live as it was created -- strange and raw -- was the way. I had to learn new things like Scrivener and Affinity Photo and Design to format the interior and create the cover of my first book in this venture. It took roughly five months to complete Anarchy concurrently with work and writing a different novel -- the first in my Rebel's Edge series. Time can be a battle and I found myself down to the wire with a self imposed release date of 01.13.17 and a last minute rights issue with a story resolved the day before. I am still learning and thrashing around in this new world. The first book was the hardest since it has not been done before. Thankfully, technology has changed -- better and faster --- and there are resources like Jason Gurley, Garret Robinson, and The Smarter Artist (Johnny B. Truant, Sean Platt, and David Wright) who share their knowledge online. The experiences of submitting to publishing houses, agents, anthologies, and magazines, cranking out query letters, the hard lesson of a vanity wasteland, being published (short stories, novellas, and novels), and having works go out of print has taught me how to cope. Moving forward, the first Friday the 13th of 2017 will be remembered by me as the day I stepped off into the abyss of Anarchy and I loved it. Writing Rebel's Edge has freed me creatively. There was a time that I had doubts and felt inadequate about things I have written -- not anymore. I see it all in a new light that shines into the chaos. My writing may not be perfect, but it is mine unique and strange, peculiar and queer -- my anarchy.

Some FB Excerpts:

Published by David Brady-Sharp · January 27 at 11:49am ·

New beginnings are rough and rocky things. I am proud of my cultish punk compendium. What is Anarchy? The strange tales within are diverse and span many years even decades in some instances. Inside you will find The Carny Cage a new prison story never published before. Followed by Where the Road Roams, my first novella (2009 - now out of print), about street life left mostly in its original raw and cut-up state which is part of its William S. Burroughs style of charm. The Deadfall is pure, taboo breaking, over the top horror that started life as a DIY screenplay in 1990; while Death Tarp is a supernatural tale of disease and revenge as a lost soul inhabits a panel of the AIDS quilt, influenced by the writings of Clive Barker. Those two and some other pieces, along with Dark, a pure, satanic-panic, horror involving goths and occult rites, are updated from my second out of print book, Dark Lands (2010). In the case of Dark, the Latin of the rituals has been translated for the first time. Rounding out the anthology is Under the Moonbow an asylum based tale of dark fantasy as a tattooed inmate tries to break a covenant and become his true otherworldly self; first published in 2015 in MSB Quarterly Vol. 3 on Halloween. Finally, Fragments are pieces from a journal of a dark time in 2005 with weird observations, memories, and dreams. Anarchy - Strange Tales of Outsiders has given me a rare opportunity as a writer to take control of the past, embrace its rawness, and to remind me that new beginnings are rough and rocky things.

Published by David Brady-Sharp · January 14 at 11:27am ·

...I knew I wanted to start with an anthology that spanned the years to show how the stories have changed over time. I chose my first novella, the shorts, and fragments then worked on the structure of the book. Editing was tricky as I wanted to fix and even add some things but not lose the rawness of the original pass. The entire process has been a learning experience from formatting the interior to designing the cover. Sure things are not exactly perfect, but that is what makes it punk....

Published by David Brady-Sharp · January 13 ·

Anarchy is coming, but for tonight there is the wolf moon.