A whirlwind end of winter. March coming in like a lion with blustery winds, and not one, but two anthologies featuring my stories coming out. Unbreakable Ink Volume 2 was supposed to be released in January, but ran into some snags. Such are the joys of genre fiction, where you generally end up working with small publishers who don't have the staff to spend 24/7 attempting to unravel the intricacies of Amazon and PayPal when something doesn't go the way one assumes it should.
Nevertheless, Unbreakable Ink Volume 2 is now scheduled to launch on Amazon on March 3, nor can I fault anyone at Indomitable Ink for the delays. What they may lack in experience dealing with multiple author projects, they more than make up for in enthusiasm, launching two volumes in six months, with a total of around sixty stories. Those are just the ones being published. I don't even want to think about the number of submissions Shebat Legion had to wade through, weed out, and ponder before reaching the final tables of contents.
Of course I got involved with Volume 2 because I had a story accepted for Volume 1. When I submitted "Babs In the Bonfire" for Vol. 1, it had been kicking around the hard drive for some time, had, in fact, become what's referred to as a "trunk story." Something written and shut away because it never found acceptance. Shebat made a few suggestions, and since I'm always willing to revise for an editor who knows what they want, I whipped Babs into shape, and now she's in print.
The call came for the second volume about the time I was writing through some of the frustrations of the pandemic. The results of that were "Waiting For Oblivion" a darkly comic take on dealing with so much death.
That's the quicker side of this crap shoot called publishing. Acceptance within a few days, or even a few weeks, of submitting a story is a gift from the higher powers. The other side of the game is the long path my second story coming out this spring has taken. At the beginning of 2021, a call went out for contributions to The Book of Carnacki, to be published by Belanger Books. Another small press, Belanger uses Kickstarter to fund projects that riff on Sherlock Holmes, a character who is now in the public domain. This has proven so popular that Belanger has now produced four volumes of "Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives," with Volumes 3 & 4 due out soon. This time, however, Belanger branched out with another occult detective in the public domain, William Hope Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki, The Ghost Finder.
Now I had no interest at all in writing a Carnacki story, even though I enjoy reading them. But this was a different sort of call – not for submissions, but for story pitches. I threw a wild one at editor John Linwood Grant, in late February of last year, for a story in which my own occult detective, conjure woman Miz Flora Haskill, takes on a Carnacki-style adventure, asking herself along the way, "What would Carnacki do?" It took a couple weeks for the pitch to be acknowledged, then it was crickets for a couple months. I didn't hold my breath over it, because I was going to write Miz Flora's adventures anyway, with or without the Carnacki spin, but early in the summer, I heard from John again.
He said he couldn't quite picture how this story might fit the anthology he was putting together, and asked if I could get him a rough draft by, say, the end of July. Since I'd gone ahead with it anyway, I was able to get the story to him toward the end of June.
The September 30 deadline for completed stories came and went, and I moved on to other projects. I might have missed the boat completely if not for the fact that John promotes heavily on facebook, and he posted an update on both the Holmes and Carnacki books. Something clicked. I checked my spam folder, and there was John's request for a rewrite, sent just a couple days before, on December 7.
I submitted the revised story on New Year's Eve. John posted a list of authors on facebook on February 6, and I found myself included. Having just dealt with the delays of Unbreakable Ink, though, I wasn't jumping up and down too much. This, however, was the point at which publisher Derrick Belanger took over.
On February 22, almost a year to the day after submitting the story pitch, I signed the contract for the inclusion of "The Headless Ghost of Foxfire Creek" in The Book of Carnacki. There was one final worry – would the Kickstarter campaign be fully funded?
They were 800% funded by the end of the first week, with another four to go.
Now I'm jumping up and down. Not the least because I decided to use part of my tax refund to back the Kickstarter myself, and get five trade paperbacks for a hundred bucks, without having to go through the dot com bandit billionaire.
Nevertheless, Unbreakable Ink Volume 2 is now scheduled to launch on Amazon on March 3, nor can I fault anyone at Indomitable Ink for the delays. What they may lack in experience dealing with multiple author projects, they more than make up for in enthusiasm, launching two volumes in six months, with a total of around sixty stories. Those are just the ones being published. I don't even want to think about the number of submissions Shebat Legion had to wade through, weed out, and ponder before reaching the final tables of contents.
Of course I got involved with Volume 2 because I had a story accepted for Volume 1. When I submitted "Babs In the Bonfire" for Vol. 1, it had been kicking around the hard drive for some time, had, in fact, become what's referred to as a "trunk story." Something written and shut away because it never found acceptance. Shebat made a few suggestions, and since I'm always willing to revise for an editor who knows what they want, I whipped Babs into shape, and now she's in print.
The call came for the second volume about the time I was writing through some of the frustrations of the pandemic. The results of that were "Waiting For Oblivion" a darkly comic take on dealing with so much death.
That's the quicker side of this crap shoot called publishing. Acceptance within a few days, or even a few weeks, of submitting a story is a gift from the higher powers. The other side of the game is the long path my second story coming out this spring has taken. At the beginning of 2021, a call went out for contributions to The Book of Carnacki, to be published by Belanger Books. Another small press, Belanger uses Kickstarter to fund projects that riff on Sherlock Holmes, a character who is now in the public domain. This has proven so popular that Belanger has now produced four volumes of "Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives," with Volumes 3 & 4 due out soon. This time, however, Belanger branched out with another occult detective in the public domain, William Hope Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki, The Ghost Finder.
Now I had no interest at all in writing a Carnacki story, even though I enjoy reading them. But this was a different sort of call – not for submissions, but for story pitches. I threw a wild one at editor John Linwood Grant, in late February of last year, for a story in which my own occult detective, conjure woman Miz Flora Haskill, takes on a Carnacki-style adventure, asking herself along the way, "What would Carnacki do?" It took a couple weeks for the pitch to be acknowledged, then it was crickets for a couple months. I didn't hold my breath over it, because I was going to write Miz Flora's adventures anyway, with or without the Carnacki spin, but early in the summer, I heard from John again.
He said he couldn't quite picture how this story might fit the anthology he was putting together, and asked if I could get him a rough draft by, say, the end of July. Since I'd gone ahead with it anyway, I was able to get the story to him toward the end of June.
The September 30 deadline for completed stories came and went, and I moved on to other projects. I might have missed the boat completely if not for the fact that John promotes heavily on facebook, and he posted an update on both the Holmes and Carnacki books. Something clicked. I checked my spam folder, and there was John's request for a rewrite, sent just a couple days before, on December 7.
I submitted the revised story on New Year's Eve. John posted a list of authors on facebook on February 6, and I found myself included. Having just dealt with the delays of Unbreakable Ink, though, I wasn't jumping up and down too much. This, however, was the point at which publisher Derrick Belanger took over.
On February 22, almost a year to the day after submitting the story pitch, I signed the contract for the inclusion of "The Headless Ghost of Foxfire Creek" in The Book of Carnacki. There was one final worry – would the Kickstarter campaign be fully funded?
They were 800% funded by the end of the first week, with another four to go.
Now I'm jumping up and down. Not the least because I decided to use part of my tax refund to back the Kickstarter myself, and get five trade paperbacks for a hundred bucks, without having to go through the dot com bandit billionaire.