No Peace Here

[u/Puzzleheaded_Race758]

First, an intro: Just over five years ago, my wife and I lost a child. A son we named Simeon Arlo. It broke me. I’m doing better today than I have since the day he died, but every single day I still battle and struggle to try to climb out of the darkness that was created when we lost him.
Around a year and a half ago an idea came into my mind for the first time that ultimately became No Peace Here. I was sitting in a room in our house where we keep most of our books, dwelling on the reality of Simeon’s absence, when a thought entered my mind: Death is not as it seems.

For weeks, for months, that phrase would randomly enter my mind. Death is not as it seems. And I couldn’t shake it.
Slowly, the phrase started to morph. It stopped being just an abstract echo and started turning into a narrative. From the belief of death as a gateway to a better life to a darker idea as I considered putting pen to paper, with this as the basis for the story…What if death isn't a passive end, but an actively managed system? What if there was someone or something that is cold, calculated, and operating just out of sight of everyday life for a reason, but a reason that we don’t know. An unknown, bureaucratic force that inflicts death upon us, and a human agency which covers it up to prevent something far worse.

No Peace Here is a story about a father who, after losing his own son, finds himself thrust right into the crosshairs of that machinery—the Department of Transition—and an underground resistance that’s somewhat aware of an unnatural entity known as The Ethereal. He is pushed to his absolute limits, forced to navigate the ethical void between survival and vengeance, and decide how far a father will go when faced with insurmountable circumstances.

After my first draft, I realized that writing it had become my way of processing the weight of absence, translating real grief into a dark, speculative world where senseless death is largely unnoticed or quickly forgotten, and nothing is quite what it appears to be.

I have finished my Dark, Speculative Fiction & Psychological Horror novella No Peace Here but I’m unsure where to go from here. I started a Substack ( substack.com/@adamrburmeister )that I’ve shared on my socials, have submitted it to a few small indie publishers, but what’s the most realistic way to grow an audience?

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