I Want To Share My Work

“I want to share my work!” Scandium shouted as he marched into the kitchen.

Nomlie, the magenta-colored fairy, fluttered across Scandium’s face and landed on the coffee machine. She perched there, all seven inches of her, an inquisitive look on her face.

“Then, why not share your work?” She asked.

Scandium, realizing he was inside his home now, pulled his oxygen mask off his face and set it on the counter next to his ray gun and his cell phone.

“But I need to go about it in the right way. Don’t I?” Scandium asked.

“What would that be?” Nomlie asked.

“Shouldn’t I shout it from the rooftops?!”

“I wouldn’t. The Krakney are still circling the city. The big ones. Twice your size… six-legged, sons-a-guns. Been here since Monday, won’t leave til they got enough food.”

“Alright, fine.” Scandium thought for a moment. “Then, I will drop my work in the information tube and have it shot out to every resident in the quadrant!”

“Nope, out of order.” Nomlie informed him as she licked her hand with her two-pronged, neon green tongue. “Every time someone has tried using it recently, the packages get jammed and the reactor sparks until it starts a fire.”

“Ugh! What am I to do?!” Scandium reached for the coffee machine and Nomlie hopped off before she was flung off.

Scandium popped a pod into the coffee machine, put his mug underneath, and began brewing his second cup of the day. Nomlie repositioned herself on top of the refrigerator, right next to the Kale-Generator. She opened her mouth to respond but Scandium cut her off.

“They deserve a big to-do!” He said. “My work. One of them, it’s Sci-Fi. And the other… well, I don’t know how to classify it. I could say fantasy, but I don’t know if that’s accurate. Maybe magic realism? But I’m not even certain.”

“You can just say it’s speculative fiction.” Nomlie suggested. “That covers a lot.”

“Yes! You are right! I love the term speculative fiction! Because I just write things and sometimes I don’t know how to classify them. I don’t know the genre. And anytime there is some ‘unreal’ element, I can just plop it under the ‘speculative’ genre and say ‘You figure it out.’”

“But what constitutes as ‘unreal’ nowadays?” Nomlie asked as she stroked one of her two wings. A bug jumped off her wing and she swiped at it with her four-fingered hand, but missed. Scandium nodded, placing his hand on his oxygen mask while he thought. An alert beeped from his suit, notifying him of his decreasing caffeine levels, so he promptly took two big gulps of his freshly brewed coffee.

“It’s a good point. But I still feel, given the nature of these stories, that they deserve…”

“They deserve an introduction as strange as they are?” Nomlie’s eyebrows bounced up and down.

Scandium smirked. He scanned his surroundings, both with his human eye and with the computer-generated eyeball that the lab printed out for him. Ever since he left Earth and came here… he’s absorbed every single weird thing and allowed it to become normal. But this was a strange place. Strange indeed.

“So, just start telling people.” Nomlie suggested. “You can start by telling me.”

“Okay!” Scandium was thrilled. He cleared his throat.

“I have two stories that got published today! I have a Sci-Fi story called 'Looting While Dead' which you can find on Sci-Fi Shorts. It’s about space exploration, people on a foreign planet, what they do to make ends meet. That’s my second story that I have published on that publication. It's in the Member's Area.”

Nomlie nodded.

“And I also have a… speculative fiction story… it’s called 'The Booth' and it’s on Clever Fox Literary Magazine. That’s my first time being published there. I don’t know quite how to describe this one without giving too much away. The main character struggles with his desires in life. He struggles with the feeling of being deprived.”

Nomlie gave a quiet golf-clap. “You did well. That’s all that’s needed. There’s no need for big fanfare. You don’t have to shout it from the rooftops or create AN ENTIRE, DETAILED STORY JUST TO PROMOTE YOUR STORIES.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

**************

So, if you're interested, you can go give my stories a read. Also, I put a direct link to "Looting While Dead" in the comments. I had trouble pasting the link into the body of the story, so down in the comments it resides...

Additionally, a link to Clever Fox below that.