About Me

     Hello, friends and future friends! My name is Madeleine Milligan and I’ve been writing for almost as long as I can remember. Despite that, I didn’t start seriously considering myself as a writer until around 2019, and from then on, I’ve been pursuing all kinds of projects.

     My writing life took a sharp turn after a company I worked at failed and I found myself facing an uncertain future in the winter of 2023. At that point, I thought about the stories I wanted to tell and realized that, more than anything, that’s what I want to be known for. I wanted to stop wishing for a writer’s life – I wanted to live it. So I did. For almost a whole year, I got up at 6AM every morning and wrote for as long as I could at my local coffee shop almost every day. By the end of 2024, I’d written 3 first drafts of novels, dozens of flash fiction stories, and a handful of short stories. And while my life (at the time of writing this) isn’t conducive to that routine anymore, I’m not going to stop writing anytime soon!

     While I haven’t published any books (and I’m far from getting any of them published soon), I had a piece of flash fiction published for F(r)iction’s online series Dually Noted in March 2024. The story is “Swallow” – told from the point of view of a sword swallower – and it's about a circus that performs for the end of the world in every collapsing dimension of reality. While I may not discuss my novels here that much, I do have 2 novel-length projects that I’ve been working on since last year.

     So – what can you expect to see here at Two-tone Tales? Genre-wise, expect the strange, the fantastical, and anything in between! I’m a big fan of fantasy, horror, surreal/magical realism, speculative fiction in general, and genre-bending, so that’s what I typically like to write. As far as the form, I’ll be sharing flash fiction (1,000 words or less), short stories, and serialized novellas. Some of my story ideas are too big to be short stories but not big enough to be proper novels, so I figure splitting them in episodic parts would be the best way to share them with you.

     Which brings me to the most important reason behind the creation of this blog. Some of you have been following me on Instagram for years and have seen my writer’s journey. You’ve read all the word-count updates, seen the little victories and the slumps, and believed in me as I learned to believe in myself. Some of you are coming across this for the first time and are curious about what will show up here. And some of you might only visit this blog once or twice.

     Regardless of which group you fall under, the fact that you’re looking at this means everything.

     I’ve written for so many years, but never shared almost any of my stories before. Not because I’m afraid to – I’m not so precious about them that I want to hide them. And I’m not nearly the perfectionist I once was, so it’s not I’m keeping them hidden until they’re “perfect”. But I always felt I had to reach “a certain level” before my stories were worth sharing with anyone. That I had to be “good enough” to be noticed and then published. The longer I lived with that belief, however, the more isolated I felt in the creative process. It made the prospects of reaching any audience feel more like a dream than a reality. And it was the cause of more than one cycle of burnout and self-doubt.

     This year, that has changed. I don’t want to be isolated anymore and I don’t want to keep anyone waiting for my stories (especially those who have been wanting to read them for a long time). I’ll always be growing as a writer, and there will never be a stage where I reach the right kind of “enough” I need to be.

     And with the state of the world now, I feel that, as a creative, I should be sharing. Stories might not always change the world, but they can be a source of comfort, consolation, catharsis, and courage. Stories are sometimes the one thing we recognize when we no longer recognize anything else. You can escape your pain for a while through them, you can see yourself reflected in them, you can understand others because of them, and you can face the world for what it is while knowing what more it could be…and strive to make it better in whatever way you can.

     Stories have always been there for me. And I imagine for a lot of you visiting this blog, the same is true for you, too. But none of us would’ve had those stories to turn to if they hadn’t been shared first.

     So here I am. Whether you read just one story or you read them all, I hope my work does you some good. I hope I can give you something that brings you happiness, wonder, solace – whatever it is you need in the moment. My imagination might be a different and kinda weird place, but if there’s the chance it could feel like home to someone else, I’m willing to open the doors.

     I’m so glad you’re here and I hope you enjoy your time at Two-tone Tales!

 

     ~ Madeleine