Out of Their Minds (Post 78)
Out of Their Minds came out in 2016 in the epub ebook format. It is available from iTunes here. This is a collection of short stories for older children and teens. As the blurb puts it;
Seriously. These kids have rats in the attic. They’re nuts. They’re out of their minds. But wait: is it them or is it society? These are the voyages of – oops. Wrong genre. These stories were perpetrated in the early 2000s. Read them as period pieces, or just ignore the anachronisms.
As this implies, the protagonists all have some pretty persuasive (let alone pervasive) problems and they all need serious lifelines. In Pendulum Th*m, Maria and Dan struggle against an early 20th C society that states boys must enjoy boyish pursuits and girls must enjoy girlish pursuits. Or else. Over the next three generations, things don't get a lot better for their descendants.
In Sal(Vultur)age, two kids face a life-and-death situation. One of them won't survive. In (Emma in Parentheses) Sarah enlists her sister Emma to try to help the new boy at school while trying to fend off well-meaning adults who think she's mentally ill.
I rarely write dystopian or dark-themed stories because they're not the kind I generally enjoy reading. Now and then I get a bleaker idea and still manage to produce a story I feel pleased with. This trio or tales is the result of one of those bursts of bleak inspiration. The title leans both ways. Maybe the protagonists are out of their minds. Maybe society should get out of their minds. Maybe the problems all come out of their minds. Which is it? Pick one.
About the Blog
Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)
The goal for 2017 is to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist.
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