Curiosities Now Available!

Back in September of 2013, I asked whether folks would be more interested in seeing another of my out-of-print novels made available or a short story collection.  To my surprise, there turned out to be a lot of interest in a short story collection.

At Last!

Aside: The comments on the post were only part of the feedback I used to make my decision.  Additionally, many people asked me if I would consider putting together a book on writing.  I decided I’d really enjoy doing that, and so Wanderings on Writing became the project I tackled whenever I had free time.

Now, at last, Curiosities is (or should be in the very near future) available as an e-book for Kindle, Nook, i-Tunes, Google Play, and Kobo.

For those of you who, like me, prefer a “real” book, Curiosities is also available from Amazon Create Space.

Curiosities includes nineteen short stories, ranging from my first published piece “Cheesecake” (1990) to 2014’s “Born from Memory.”  Although all the stories included were published elsewhere, some have been nearly impossible to find for many years.  Each story is accompanied by a short afterpiece talking about some aspect of the story.  I might tell what inspired the story or talk about influences or just offer some odd bit of trivia.  There’s also an original introduction discussing how I came to select these particular stories out of the sixty-some I’d had published to that point.

The cover art by Rowan Derrick is a photo montage meant to represent the cluttered interior of my brain.  Many of the pieces included were taken from my office.  Others were Rowan’s.  You can have fun trying to guess which are which.

Why did it take nearly two years for Curiosities to be completed?  Well, mostly because I wrote a lot of other things as well.  Artemis Awakening and Artemis Invaded came out.  In fact, a good deal of Artemis Invaded was written at this time.  Fire Season (written with David Weber) was released.  The previously mentioned Wanderings on Writing also took a good deal of time and effort.

I also wrote a variety of shorter projects, some of which – like “The Hermit and the Jackalopes” in S.M. Stirling’s anthology The Change: Stories of Downfall and Rebirth, and “The Button Witch” on Urban Fantasy.com – are now available.  Others, like “The Headless Fluteplayer” (a prequel to my and Roger Zelazny’s Lord Demon) and “Deception on Gryphon” (featuring Stephanie Harrington and associates) are yet to be released.

We did hope to have Curiosities completed for release at Bubonicon in August of 2015, but various small glitches kept cropping up.  The latest was just this week…  Emily Mah Tippets, who did the book conversion and design, called me on Monday to let me know that…  Oh!  Never mind.  Suffice to say that long before the end, we both decided the project had gremlins.

But it’s out!  I hope you enjoy it.  It was a good trip down memory lane for me.  Now it’s time to look to the future.

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