ToC

The editors at Shimmer have posted the table of contents for issue #15—available in the next month or so—and you'll find a blurb about my story at the very end:

Milo James Fowler brings us “Soulless in His Sight,” a story that evokes memories of The Road. We are exposed to a raw post-apocalyptic world where one truly needs a soul to survive.

It took me two years and eight submissions to break into Shimmer, and I am beyond stoked to have this story appear in their next issue. "Soulless" was my Week 9 Write1Sub1 last year, and if I had to point to one story from 2011 as my best work, this would be it.

My goal was to take the father/son relationship from Cormac McCarthy's The Road (the book is SO much better than the movie), add an unreliable narrator similar to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and include something of Diogenes the Cynic's search for an honest man. I had a general idea how the story would play out, but I was too nervous to start, afraid I wouldn't be able to do it justice. Sometimes we can really be our own worst enemy, you know?

But the cool thing about W1S1 is, ready or not, you've got this self-imposed deadline, and I had a story to finish that week. So I did, I forged through it, and when it came time to submit "Soulless," I knew I had something . . . different. The voice of the narrator is unlike anything I've written before, and the tension throughout grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go until the last line. That's what I was going for, anyway, and I'm pleased with the final draft.

You'll have to judge for yourself, of course. Coming soon . . .