Stim
Stim is a collection of stories, essays and art created by autistic people. My contribution to it is Becoming Less, a semi-autobiographical story about how much I struggled as an autistic person starting university. It’s “semi” rather than “totally” because there is a selkie in it, a creature from Scottish folklore who is a seal that pretends to be a human.
I’d been thinking about selkies for a while before writing Becoming Less because I’d read Sofia Samatar’s award winning short story Selkie Stories are for Losers. I am indeed a loser, but that wasn’t the thing that made me want to write a selkie story myself. It was that Samatar’s story really highlights how miserable a selkie’s lot is in fiction, how she – it usually is a she – tends to sleep with a man, wake up pregnant to find that man has stolen away her skin, then spend the rest of her life stuck in a world that’s far from the one where she’s from.
But we don’t usually hear the selkie’s perspective in these stories. She’s the outsider from another world, who remains unknowable because no one thinks to ask her how she feels. She exists as a kind of symbolic representation of a world outside the human world, which must be frustrating for her when she’s also a person as well.
And being autistic can be like that as well, I think. People often say that we think a little differently, but of course if you are autistic that’s not really true. We just think like ourselves, in one of the millions of ways I imagine that it’s possible to think about the world. I wanted to write a story that said that, and that decentred the neurotypical narrative a bit— to say that all of us at the fringes of these stories deserve to have our voices heard as well.
Stranger Tales of the City
Stranger Tales of the City is a short story collection from the City of the Saved franchise, about the strange city at the end of time where every human who ever lived comes back again.
A lot of the stories in the City of the Saved books are about people from the exciting worlds of the past and the astonishing humans of the future. Mine is not. If everyone who ever lived got resurrected I thought there would be some people who just wanted to live in a boring suburb and try to process the fact that they were dead, and so my story is about this instead.
I think it would be a very traumatic thing to die suddenly— one minute you’re driving along in your car, and then the next there is overwhelming pain and you’re surrounded by Neanderthals and robot people who go “you are now dead; you live in heaven now.” I think there would have to be self-help books, and that these would sell an awful lot of copies. So my story is named after the most popular book like this in the City of the Saved: Mourning the Story, which talks about rebuilding a narrative for yourself when the story of your life is cut short.
Shorter work
I’ve put some of my shorter writing in my blog here on this website, like this award-winning complaint to the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival.
There are also flash pieces like this one about a teacher with a pupil who is alien in the wrong way, and this one about someone from the present day being stuck in a zoo built by the humans of the future.
Fanfiction
I’m not sure I should put this on a professional writer’s website, but I have written a lot of fanfiction. I became obsessed with Doctor Who back in 2005 because it was about normal people who still got to be weird and to live in a world which was very strange and beautiful, and for that reason it felt very affirming about being a human in general. And at some point I thought that had got a bit lost; that the world the Doctor now lived in didn’t really feel like the one I knew where everyone was struggling and exhausted and a weird old anxious mess. So I wrote my own series because I wanted to think about what it meant for the Doctor to exist in the present as I understood it, where the future and the past both seem darker than they might have been before.
Robert Shepherd: Writer 