Polenth's Nothing

About Polenth...

I'm Polenth Blake and I write fantasy and science fiction stories/poems/shopping lists. Science and mythology are both interests of mine, so my stories range from hard science fiction to scientists-cry-when-they-read-this. I've had work published in places like Nature, ChiZine and Strange Horizons.

Biology themes are common in my work. I love plants, fungi and invertebrates especially. I don't discriminate again lifeforms made of metal - robots are also welcome.

I live in England with my pet cockroaches and family. My life is fueled by tea and large amounts of sugar.

(If you were looking for labels to put on boxes, rather than enthusing about invertebrates, I have a blog post all about my labels, which is also a good place to ask anything I've missed.)

On Writing

The first thing I did when I picked up a pencil was draw a picture. I loved drawing. I didn't love words so much. Though I enjoyed stories and reading, I was dyslexic and words didn't come easily.

Some years later, I was a critique partner for a writing friend, but he often put off getting his writing done. I came up with the cunning plan that we'd do NaNoWriMo together. The date arrived and we both started... and he dropped out due to having overtime at work. I didn't drop out and produced a finished manuscript. Though the novel needed a lot of work, I realised that my writing had improved immensely over the years. I wrote some short stories and researched places to send them. The first went out in January 2008.

I had a few small successes in the early years, but my first professional short story sale was in 2010.

My current goal is to put out a short story collection in early 2013, which will have my published stories and some new work.

This is me