The Malcontent of Mars — Afterword

Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to read my novel. I want to give a special thank you to my friend Salty, for being my beta reader and giving me help and advice during the editing process, and to my friend Noelia for helping me with a Latin translation which didn’t end up making the final edit, but she still made an effort, and that means the world to me. I would also like to thank Jo, for her advice – tacit or otherwise – to rein in some of the more contrived dialogue towards the end in the original draft.

I must also thank you, the reader, for taking time out of your busy life to read my work. THE MALCONTENT OF MARS was a passion project of mine since adolescence; I first began writing it in 2012, just before leaving secondary school.

Much like Christine at the story’s conclusion, and not coincidentally, I am now twenty-three years old, and my life has changed quite significantly since I began work on this novel. I still can’t believe that I’ve finally managed to purge this demon and put it out into the world. It’s been a long time coming.

Kurt Vonnegut once said that a story can break any of the established rules of writing so long as it uses the time of a total stranger in such a way that they do not feel that the time was wasted. This is a maxim I have always tried to keep to in my writing, and I hope that if you have been following along, you come away from here feeling that the past twelve weeks were time well spent.

Finally, I hope that in the near future I will be able to share with you more stories to enjoy and be inspired by. And I wish you all the best.

Goodnight. God bless. And may the road rise with you.

— C R E Mullins, May 2019