By all appearances, I seem to be having a good year. After my new collection came out last month from Walrus Publishing, a second book has now been released by Yard Dog Press. The link to this “new” title is here.
Logic of Departure is a neat thing. Last year, the marvelous Selina Rosen, chief cook and bottle washer of Yard Dog, called me to ask permission to reissue the two chapbooks of mine they had published. Extensions and Diva are novellas which, being novellas (and notoriously difficult to place), made their debut as nifty chapbooks. Yard Dog has consistently sold them for years. The strangeness of publishing being what it is, it is now more economical for them to issue them together, in a perfect-bound edition, than to continue pushing the chapbooks—which are, of course, both still available singly as ebooks. Of course I said yes, and then suggested they hold off a bit, as I was then working on a new story that might fit in very well with those two.
Without intending it, Extensions and Diva both fit a loose background universe. So I wrote a third novella set in that milieu, called Raitch, Later. I was inspired to write it by a wonderful short story by Adam-Troy Castro called Arvies, which I urge you all to look up. It’s one of those logical projections of a current thing that blows the mind. A few days after reading it I had what I considered a suitably nasty idea and started work.
It took the better part of the last six months. This past year has not been the most conducive to writing I’ve ever had (though not by any means the worst), but the end result is something I’m good with. Lynn and Selena took the piece and now the completed book is available, with cover art by David Lee Anderson.
  I don’t write very many novellas. Mainly because they’re damnably difficult to sell, but also because most of them end up becoming novels. That happened with the last Secantis novel I wrote—in fact, the last two, because Peace & Memory began life as a novella as well—an unpublished novel called Ghost Transit which is lying fallow, awaiting the day when.
But these three I doubt could be expanded, at least not as conceived. So this is a neat thing, having them between covers, all together. I think they work well together.
So I can now officially claim 12 books to my credit. Published books, that is.
The link above is directly to Yard Dog. Please, if you intend to order it online, do so directly from them. They are a very small house and buying their product through Hamazon, ahem, while not profitless for them certainly takes a bigger bite out of their bottomline than is comfortable. And while you’re there, check out some of their other titles. A lot of fun work gets put out by these smaller publishers, work that one occasionally scratches one’s head and wonders, “how come Simon & Schuster didn’t take this…?”
I’m hoping this bodes well for the near future. Maybe the freeze is beginning to thaw and I can get some of my other books in the pipeline to print. I have learned in this business than 95% of it happens at a glacial pace, balanced in the end by 5% that requires time travel to complete.
(I just finished reading a time travel novel for my reading group. What if…?)
A word about the stories included here. This is a near future world, just on the brink of breaking out of the solar system. You could easily read them as (loosely, very loosely) part of the Secantis universe. They’re about class divisions, underdogs struggling to overcome, and the byzantine workings of social systems are laid bare for the reader’s scrupulous examination. They are all about knowing when it’s time to leave. Beyond that, I wish to leave everything else for you to discover. Enjoy.
