Small Press Takes Time

I'm sure every author has encountered the problem of delayed publication schedules during their career, where a short story is accepted into an anthology, the project is then announced, and then everything grinds to a holt. Years can go by with nothing happening, and before the author knows it, they've forgotten they ever wrote their story in the first place. Well this seems to have happened to me a lot.

Small press publishers, because they have day jobs and normal life to contend with like the rest of us, often run into stumbling blocks, as we all do. So this is not an exercise in blame, rather an observation, because I know my input as a writer has dropped significantly in the last two years for various personal reasons, many of them being financial which are now on the mend. I think it is just the nature of small press publishing, it's a hobby that needs some sense of control, but is hard to apply that control in practice.

However, the horizon is looking food with some of those delayed stories about to resurface, as several anthologies that I've been accepted into many years ago are now back on track. Morrigan Books recently announced Scenes from the Second Storey which features my tale "Dream Machine". I wrote that story about two years ago, but looking back the turn around is pretty good when I look at some of the other tales I have out there, and some that have been in anthologies that after years of waiting in the wings, have now been cancelled.

I heard today that "Sister of the Sands" from Cthulhu's Dark Cults has just been re-scheculed by Chaosium for a June 2010 release. "The Hag of Zais" appearing Ancient Shadows from Elder Signs Press also is expected to be out in June. Recently I was contacted by an editor who had vanished for close to two years to tell me that a science fiction tale I wrote for him a long time ago will be out soon in an e-anthology in the US. All good stuff.

A few stories still, unfortunately, still linger, but we won't go into them.

So maybe 2010 will result in me being more prolific than I originally thought possible, through no effort on my behalf, at least not recently. That's kind of a nice thought, I think.

Ancient Shadows: Dark Tales of Eldritch Fantasy

I recently discovered that a short story I wrote many years ago is finally seeing print, in William Jones' lastest anthology Ancient Shadows: Dark Tales of Eldritch Fantasy and published by his imprint Elder Signs Press. Originally slated as Eldritch Steel, it's now scheduled for release in late 2009 or early 2010 depending on what you read where on the World Wide Web.

My story, "The Hag of Zais" takes place in H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands setting and is about a man lost and dying in the Sahara who encounters a talking cat. The cat promises to save the man's is life if he in turn promises to undertake a quest banishing a sorceress haunting a once great city of cats. Anyone familiar with my Secrets of Kenya sourcebook for the Call of Cthulhu game will notice that I've adapted this story story from the scenario in that book, "The Cats of Lamu." This story is a little bit different for me, as it's more high fantasy than anything I've written before.

Ancient Shadows can be purchased from Amazon.com.