Afterword- Everyone Will Know The Color of Your Guts

*Finishes speaking, exhales*

*Inhales again*

Hi! Thank you for reading. Here’s my annual little behind-the-scenes afterword thingy.

I have had a shit year!! But that means LOTS of inspiration for horror and lots of reasons to try new things, which I’ve been doing, as well as experiencing new art, albeit maybe not as much as my media eater past self would. Still, this collection wouldn’t have been possible without Shintaro Kago rewiring my fucking brain after seeing his art and when I read Super Dimensional Love Gun in particular. Those stories still make me gag. Body horror can speak to a lot of experiences for a lot of different people, but his brand of it resonates with me the most, these eccentric people finding beauty in their own distortions, even if it ruins them. I would like to engrave his name here as the biggest inspiration behind this collection.

Returning to writing felt easy. It was really fun to create a collection based around a more rigid set of themes this time around. I think I couldn’t do that before, and used my first two anthologies to narrow down the subjects I was most interested in. The elements were always there, but now they’re no longer diluted. I know the things I want to say and I feel I’ve gained the life experience to say them with clarity. It’s a satisfying feeling, probably the only thing that could’ve gotten me to write again after how done I was after my last project left me burnt out.

I think I wrote more of these stories in advance than either of the last two? It was a blessing and a curse, because it made the work easier but made looking back on all the stories before posting a bit intimidating! When you put something this dense with hyperbolic and sensational content out it can kind of feel like you’re walking straight up to your audience and gutting yourself for them to see. Which in itself is a hyperbolic way of saying it feels exposing. I guess that’s fitting for this collection, but even after all I’ve posted it’s still an obstacle for me. That said, the sorts of things you’ve read here are all I’ve written lately, they’re the shape my style has taken. It’s just ironic that I get so shy about it. At the end of the day, horror is something I like writing. and if anyone else can get anything out of it, that makes stepping out of my comfort zone to share it worth something.

I will close this book with some trivia. As you might know, there’s been one short in all three of these collections so far telling a continuous story, the ones with Charlotte and Macy. These are all concepts for a full book I once wanted to write, only to come up with short stories. Maybe that book will exist one day, though I have found it easier to simply revisit the characters now and then, even if they’ve evolved a bit over time, like how all the supernatural stuff from the first short went away. Just wanna clarify that if anyone was confused as to why Macy stopped being a ghost lol. Always a treat for me to return to them.

As far as other ideas related to this collection go, its 10th story Continue is a cut-down, ending-removed adaptation of a real, live action short film I began to sporadically shoot and act in this year. You can see a screenshot in this novel’s gallery if you like. That said, everything in it has been done more or less solo so far, to the point where it feels less like a production and more like an excuse to cover myself in homemade blood every few months. This, in hand with the content therein, means it may remain something I only ever show friends, if I ever finish it. I’m not really sure. So I just leave this note here in the afterword as a fun fact to archive its existence. Somewhere out there, a video version of every scene in that story exists. Lmao.

So anyway, this was fun! No guarantee I’ll return next year as these books make for a pretty nice trilogy already, but I’ll probably never stop coming up with this trash, at least on my own time. I write less now that I’ve found a lot more enjoyment out of acting, but it’s still a part of me, and I’d like to think I’ve improved at it a good bit since the last collection.

So thank you so much for reading! Have a wonderful rest of your year, I’ll be cleaning up all the blood and other stuff on the ground. This might take awhile.