Coming Soon: Take Out & Other Stories: The Audiobook

In 2013, I released my first ever collection of short stories. Take Out & Other Stories: A Collection of Weird Fiction is a capsule collection of five stories with an odd shared history. These are stories that could have been published in print journals and anthologies if I agreed to make “minor” alterations.

I had a streak of stories that would come back with insightful commentary like “can you make it about werewolves?” when presented with a haunted house story or “what about vampires instead?” in a flash fiction spin on Faust. I’ll get right on turning that horror short story about a family visiting a farm into a dystopian novella about pestilence. Ok, that wasn’t too far off, but I like “Black Dirt Country” as a shorter story.

That was a wild two year game of shifting goal posts and meaningful compliments from some wonderful editors. Other stories had no trouble finding markets as written, but these five were always turned into an editorial exercise in “what if?” So I gave them one more pass and organized them to represent the phases of a panic attack. I’m still proud of this collection and think it really holds up.

I do have a regret that has nagged me for over seven years now: I never did the audiobook version. I always planned on it. Believe me, I did. But for someone who was still auditioning and recording demos and trying to make a performance career happen, I had major hang-ups and insecurities about my speaking voice. I’d record and delete, record and delete, record and delete until I just gave up on it.

It really has bothered me for three reasons. One, it is one of the things I promised would happen with the collection upon release. It became such a source of anxiety for me that I dropped promoting the book altogether and let it be a pure surprise when someone would buy a copy out of the blue. I couldn’t face the guilt of not fulfilling that promise, so I abandoned a project that I had been proud of.

Two, I’ve become more and more aware of the inequities in accessibility in media and am, frankly, embarrassed to contribute a small part in that. I am constantly making tweaks in the work I do online and in the classroom to improve accessibility for everyone who encounters my work, and part of that is going back and correcting big things like this.

Three, I’ve only recently realized that my writing, especially in horror, is the kind of mental wellness representation I want to see in fiction. How I learned to write horror is through my own struggles with OCD, Clinical Depression, PTSD, and anxiety. I would get a vision of a terrible idea I couldn’t shake, then let my writing explore the idea until I could put it aside and not obsess over it any longer. A few edits later and it would be a horror story representing some aspect of my mental wellness through a fantastical lens. Knowing this truth has only made my newer writing clearer in its intentions, but it’s important to me that I get to use my own voice to reclaim these incredibly dark times in my life. There’s a time and a place to just speak for yourself and this collection is it.

Next Monday, 15 February 2021, the first ever audiobook edition of Take Out & Other Stories is making its way to audiobook servers. Pre-order/pre-release sites are up at Google Play, Apple, and BingeBooks. More are coming as soon as they finish processing. The audiobook and a new exclusive 2021 edition of Take Out will be available on my Ko-fi, as well.

You can currently get Take Out & Other Stories on Smashwords, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd, and Amazon. The book is also available in paperback on Amazon.