Category: Missives
Just the updates!
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It has been about four months since NeoTokyo Dead came out across a number of platforms. The novella, weighing in at a mere 35,000 words, is the first thing I have published independently. After a four-month period, I thought it was time for some reflection on it that may serve as a reality check for…
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It is sort of fashionable for many to be down on Valentine’s Day. Sometimes, it is the aged among us, worn down with the reality of false hopes and broken promises. For some, the idea of Valentine’s Day threatens the identity they think they have. One of the biggest excuses people find to be down…
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I have finally done it. The moment when you open your work bag, after not feeling anything different, and you reach in. You scrabble about in there, but with the dawning horror-coloured scarlet red of your own unique concoction of shock, embarrassment, and confusion, along with an unhealthy dash of rage, you realise your phone…
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The end of 2025 was frenetic and stressful, mostly because I have serious impulse control issues. Pumping out NeoTokyo Dead before the manuscript was really ready added to that, but it was a huge learning experience. So, what can be expected from Bryan Beal in 2026? I have two major projects in the writing at…
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The temptation to join the crowd and use AI (which are basically just Large Language Models with the intelligence of a hedgehog, if we’re being generous) can be fairly intense. A lot of “authors”, henceforth I will refer to them as “users”, are pumping out books, among other artforms, through varying use of LLM’s. The…
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In the on-going effort to turn a short story in a full novel, there have been a few forced realisations. Callous Sky would have been about 17,000 words a the end of the short story, but with enough floating about in my head for probably five or six times that. Making those changes to an…
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Writing a short story is something I have failed at repeatedly. Well, writing a good short story is what I have failed at. Novellas and novels? They do not seem a problem to me. NeoTokyo Dead is just the second I have written, the first having drawn some interest from a publisher. I started writing…
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I write cyberpunk a lot. My debut novella, NeoTokyo Dead, has only just come out. At the moment, I know exactly who has read it, besides myself. One person is in Canada, and another is someone I work with here in Aotearoa. There are a few more people from the USA who have read it…
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This is for the self-publishers among us. I wanted to think about the phenomena that is self-publishing and, in part, my own responses to being a self-published author. As I have talked to people, I have found myself saying NeoTokyo Dead is “only self-published.” Even as I have said this, I have caught myself up…
Bryan Beal 