I finished my c. 65,000 word novel The Wayward Monster Girl on April 2, 2025. I started reading it on April 4th and finished it on April 6th. It proved better than I thought it was while writing it.
The story is a surreal adventure about a little girl who becomes a monster… yet remains a little girl. She kills people. Most of her victims are other children, little girls conscripted by the villains. She drinks blood… and likes it.
I wrote what was supposed to be a short story for the collection Stories of a Weird World. The setting is the Weird World universe, a dreamlike version of our world. The story became its own book. It was written for no other reason than to give an illustration context.
Since childhood, my favorite thing to imagine is the easy killing of clueless guards. These victims are usually armed and uniformed foot soldiers of villainy. Though the Imperial Stormtroopers of Star Wars are my very favorite in the mainstream, I generally prefer women in alluring costumes.
The Wayward Sentry Girl is the foot soldier of villainy of Weird World. She is not a woman, however. In her universe, most people are either children or elderly. She is a child. She is barefoot. Her uniform is a sleeveless white shirt and skimpy red bottoms. A blue “W” is on the breast of the shirt.
I wondered what the type would look like if I reversed the color scheme. I turned the white black, the red green and the blue orange. I liked what I saw… though not better than the original scheme. I made it the uniform of “elite” troops to explain why it is in use but by fewer girls.