Blog No. 141
Hello fine folks. I’ve been talking about this darn collection with Christian for over a year now and all I’ve had for you were promises and Gorilla Dust. It’s been a long, bumpy, lazy road, with big changes and lots of letdowns, but we are finally in sight of the finish line. I decided to use this week’s post to write a short update.
When we started the collection (back in February of 2014) we had wondrous visions of a collection of short stories to go along with the quickly growing blog. We were racking up stories faster than we could post them and decided to collect the best of them and put out a book. Christian had his own collection coming out (which has done marvellously well: http://christianlaforet.com/the-space-between-houses/) but we had lots of stories in the bag and wanted to do something more with them. As it turned out, the dynamics of Adventure Worlds changed and the number of stories we each needed grew, and so did the amount of time spent working on it.
Fast forward to sometime early this year (say a couple months ago). The collection was in its 14th or 15th month of production and we both had a couple of stories to finish editing. We were (and are) both working hard on our novels, and things had crawled to a near stop. Christian came to me with a proposal. Drop the collection to focus on the novels. I shot back to him the idea of shrinking the collection and pushing it out as quickly a possible. He agreed and we chose our stories and completed final edits (with the help of an outside source. Currently we have chosen the order of the collection and sent it out to a local publisher. When we hear back from them we will make some final decisions and proceed with releasing the book. Expected time will be September at the latest.
We hope that the publisher will be interested and with a last clean up based on their suggestions, the book will be laid-out and printed. If they decide to not publish the book, we will do the layout and find a printer and do it ourselves. Either way, it will be done and released soon. We hope to work with the publisher to both lighten the load on us (as we continue to work on the novels) and to make sure the book is completed professionally with that final input, but either way, we are putting out that dang collection one way or another. It’s been too long coming to not. With that cleared up, the title is No Light Tomorrow. We did a cover contest and have the cover ready to go. It’s a collection of six short sci-fi stories with dark tones and the overall theme of challenged expectation. Expect an announcement when it is ready to print.
Ben Van Dongen 