Last month, I released the second edition of my first and only fiction title Unlikely Stories. I added five new stories and made it into a 61,000-word 122-page book. The new stories are:
- Shadows in the night: A young woman is troubled by a ghostly intruder at night.
- Zuma vs. Cutie: Zuma finds competition from an unlikely friend.
- The evil twin: A rich heiress is driven to desperation by a deceased twin who wants her to die as well.
- Alien chicks are nothing but trouble: A meteorite crashes down in the Atlantic. The site becomes an alien platform for launching attacks on English-speaking countries. No other countries are attacked. The world's sole superpower collapses after a few days. That is not strangest thing about the invasion. The invaders' primary objective is not humans but cows. This is no run-of-the-mill alien-invasion story. Uniquely, it provides a fascinating economic model for a successful alien invasion.
- Please do not smile at our alpaca: Zuma and her husband restart a farm devastated by the aliens. Things go well until her husband picks a fight with a South American.
The second edition is available as a full-colour illustrated paperback. It is $9.99 for now.
The book is also available as a grayscale paperback for $9.90. This version has an alpaca on the cover.
Unlike the colour paperback, the grayscale paperback is available in India but it is very expensive. It will be cheaper to buy the ebook for ₹200 or $3.
Here is the common link for all the stores where Unlikely Stories, 2nd edition is available in its various forms and formats.
Even though I increased the page size, I had to limit the page count to ensure the price of the colour paperback was around $10.
The new stories are mostly written from the perspective of Zuma. I was able to close several unexplained plot points of the first-edition stories in the second edition. I removed the deliberately placed woke-toxic content in the Alien Encounter story of the first edition to make space for the new stories. So, the new book is funny throughout. (The first book was also funny but it took a sombre dive in the afore-mentioned chapter.)
The new edition reaches its climax in the alien invasion story. It is the biggest story in the book. While it is funny in places, it focuses more on suspense. I have seen a lot of alien invasion movies and I have been a bit disappointed with all of them because the plot was not scientifically accurate. My readers will certainly leap with joy when they read who the aliens are and what made them invade. (I say I am the greatest writer ever with good reason. Nobody else can do so much in so few pages.) There is no scientific overload. Unwittingly, I have already provided a lot of the explanations in the Alien Encounter story of the first edition. In the invasion story, everything neatly falls into place and there was no need to provide any annoying explanations in the narrative. Another thing that alien invasion movies often miss is the economic impact on the world. With some inspiration from current events, I have provided a viable economic model for a successful alien invasion. I have not tried to delve too much into this aspect but the reader will effortlessly get the idea. One more thing that moviemakers miss or ignore is that Earth is different from other planets. Earth has an atmosphere. This means that fast-moving aircraft will burn up. So, how do alien craft move so fast in those alleged encounters that people have captured on video? I had already provided the explanation in the first edition of Unlikely Stories, which you can read for free. In my alien invasion story, I go further and demonstrate how the aliens do not have magical weapons yet achieve air superiority.
The other big story is that of the evil twin. It has the best mix of horror and comedy. In Zuma vs. Cutie, I have taken some liberties with science. Cutie can do everything I sought her to do but there is one minor detail about her that is not accurate. It has to do with her range. The rest of the stories are mostly fun.
In my backlist, I had promised that the stories will have not have stuff that can make the reader uncomfortable.
- Family planning: The first lead and Vampira plan their life together. In the first ending, they get married. In the second ending (written by the lead after their first night), Stone Age Man (SAM) and Stone Age Woman (SAW) discover the mystery of life. (This is an over-the-top parody of the controversy about MEN WRITING WOMEN.) Other than some intimate events implied in comic fashion in this story, there is no physical contact between the sexes in the entire book. Not even a kiss. The book is clean throughout. No swear words. No corny mushy dialogue. No degeneracy. No weirdness. Just no low-hanging fruit.
As a result, all the stories are light on horror and tilted towards comedy. They also fall into other genres such as paranormal, supernatural, sci-fi and contemporary. Like a good Indian masala movie, my book is all-round entertainer. The received wisdom is to write for one genre and build strategic depth in it by releasing multiple books. I cannot follow it. I wrote this book for my pleasure. It is most likely my last book, as I have decided to pause my book writing sojourn with this one.