About Illustrating Life and Other Stories:
Reality bends. People break. The truth bleeds through the margins.
What do a suicidal tech bro, a mute ballerina, a trauma-soaked illustrator, and an alien-infected Scoutmaster have in common?
They’re all just trying to survive stories that won’t behave.
In this genre-mashing collection of speculative tales, nothing is what it seems, and everything matters more than you think. One moment, you’re laughing. The next, you’re gutted. Then you’re questioning whether any of this is real. It probably isn’t.
A blind woman confronts the ghost of the man who ruined her life. A grieving father finds a memory in the woods that rewrites everything he thought he knew. A blogger’s angry parenting rant collapses reality around his son’s Pinewood Derby race. A washed-up writer discovers that the AI finishing his novel might be fixing his life. A group of burned-out creatives builds an art collective in a junkyard and finds redemption in the ruin.
Some stories flirt with apocalypse. Others hold your heart in their teeth and smile politely. All of them live in the uncanny space where memory, grief, technology, and identity collide.
Darkly comic. Occasionally romantic. Always uncomfortably human.
Illustrating Life and Other Stories is Love, Death & Robots by way of Black Mirror, with the character depth of Station Eleven and the lyrical weirdness of Cloud Atlas. These stories are emotional landmines with teeth, heart, and circuit boards.
If you’ve ever laughed at the wrong moment, cried at the right one, or wondered if you’re the only glitch in the system, this collection is for you.
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Author Bio:
Sean Platt has always been an entrepreneur, but stories were the business he was born to build.
When his wife bought him a laptop for his birthday in 2007, he dropped everything to write fiction.
After a short stint as creative director at a marketing agency — where he learned the kind of copywriting that could turn cliffhangers into an art — Sean wrote hundreds of novels (including international bestsellers), penned Hollywood scripts, and founded Sterling & Stone, an IP incubator where more than two dozen writers turn wild ideas into world-changing stories.
Originally from Long Beach, California, Sean now lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Cindy, and their dog, Fisher — both of whom remind him that real life makes the best stories.