The Best of the Planetary Anthology Series

 I've got a new anthology coming out. The Planetary Anthology Series of eleven books has gone out of print, so I contacted the publisher to get their blessing to put together a single book pulling two stories from each volume. This is the result.

The official release date if February 27, 2023. You might notice on the date of this post that this is still almost a week away, but here's a secret. I released it a few days early. :)

This book contains 22 stories, selected as the best available, to go into this remastered, re-edited volume. Here's the lineup:

Sol

• Sundown And Out (David Hallquist)
• Let The Dead Bury Their Dead (Caroline Furlong)

Mercury

• The Mirror of Circe (John C. Wright)
• The Element of Transformation (L. Jagi Lamplighter)

Venus

• The Fox’s Fire (Danielle Ackley-McPhail)
• The Rocket Raising (Frederik Gero Heimbach)

Earth

• We'll Always Have Earth (Bokerah Brumley)
• Extinction Point (Richard Paolinelli)

Luna

• Luna Sea (Jody Lynn Nye)
• Samaritan (Karl K. Gallagher)

Mars

• Human, Martian—One, Two, Three (Kevin J. Anderson)
• The Clockwork King of Mars (C.T. Phipps)

Jupiter

• Sunward (Jeb Kinnison)
• Freeze (Jane Lebak)

Saturn

• The Clockwork Copper and the Priestess of Mystery (J.M. Anjewierden)
• Doing My Job (Dana Bell)

Uranus

• Room to Breathe (Marina Fontaine)
• Muddification (Clint Hale)

Neptune

• The Dogfisherman (Edward Ahern)
• The Lost Wind (David Breitenbeck)

Pluto

• The Heart of Pluto (Christine Chase)
• A Brush (J.D. Arguelles)

MisCon is here!

This is my first time to MisCon in Missoula, MN, and it is shaping up to be a lot of fun. I'm about ready to head downstairs for breakfast on Day 1. I have a book signing today at the local Barnes & Noble from 10am to noon, then my con schedule starts. I will do a post-con report with pictures and stuff. Here are the events I'm helping with:

Sensing Violence (Writing)
Fri 5:00 - 5:50 PM, (Ballroom C)
Pros and Guests: Cheryl Glenn, Elliott Kay, Joseph Malik, John Olsen
Moderator: Joseph Malik
What does violence sound like? Smell like? How does it feel and taste? Are the details of violence like those we see in movies? If not, should you write them realistically or cinematically?

Pacing (Writing)
Sat 11:00 - 11:50 AM, (Ballroom B)
Pros and Guests: Tod McCoy, John Olsen, L.F. Patten (Laurey), Peter Wacks (pjwacks)
Moderator: Peter Wacks (pjwacks)
What are some effective ways to control the pacing of your scenes, chapters, and overall book? Is it structure? Paragraph-by-paragraph? Can you outline for pacing?

It Seemed Like She Was, She Thought (Writing, Makers)
Sat 4:00 - 4:50 PM, (Monster Tent)
Pros and Guests: LJ Bonham, Eric Scott Fischl, John Olsen, J.A. Pitts, Joyce Reynolds-Ward
Moderator: J.A. Pitts
In Ken Rand’s Ten Percent Solution, he advocates that you take your story and cut 10%. That includes writing tight, precise prose, among other things. What are some of the best ways to do this?

Spotlight: Olsen, Kolva, Fischl (Meet & Greet/Signing)
Sun 10:00 - 10:50 AM, (Spotlight)
Pros and Guests: Eric Scott Fischl, Sanan Kolva, John Olsen
Meet a few of our authors, get signatures, and see what they're up to these days.

Getting Armor Right (Writing, Writing)
Sun 1:00 - 1:50 PM, (Monster Tent)
Pros and Guests: LJ Bonham, John Olsen, D.L Solum
Moderator: LJ Bonham
Historical, fantastical or sport, no one wants to bleed. Let's talk about getting armor right for both visual media and writing. Practical examples provided. Come find out how it's made and how it works and why.

My short story and novel experience will play nicely into these topics. Plus, I've made two shirts of chain mail armor before. :) I will also attend several other panels for fun. It will be a great (and long) weekend.

What's In a Name?

I've been thinking about how important titles are for books. Sure, everyone judges books by their cover, but a close second to the artwork is the title. If you can't make it past the picture and the title, it doesn't much matter what's in side, right?

As is typical, I made a list of resources to monkey around with.

• Amazon best seller lists related to fantasy.
• An empty spreadsheet.
• Enough knowledge of spreadsheet formulas to be dangerous.

I typed in all the normal words from a couple hundred titles. No proper names, no connective words like "and, of, the." The first thing I noticed was that certain words were used quite a bit. Here's the top 13 words, those I had more than about three occurances of:

• blood
• dark
• dragon
• fate
• city
• fire
• king
• queen
• long
• mage
• secret
• shade

Then I sorted them and removed duplicates. You may want to save the original copy before you remove duplicates if you're following along with a spreadsheet of your own. I forgot to save a copy before removing my duplicates so I may need to go back and rebuild my word list at some point.

Now comes the fun part. Mix and match, and see how many titles you can make from just that super-common list and the connector words you skipped over when building the list.

Imaginary titles I'm making up on the spot:

• The Dragon Queen's Mage
• Secret of the Dark Dragon
• Fate and Fire
• Secret City of the Dragon King
• City of Fire and Blood
• Fire Shade of the Dark Mage's Secret Dragon-City of Blood

It's like buzzword bingo book titles! With some pretty art, would you crack the cover to see what these stories were about? Except that last one, I mean.

Now to expand things out a little. There are only so many titles if you can only use the hottest words on the list. I took my sorted list and build a little table to pick ten items at random from it. This lets you do the same exercise all over with a new set of buzzwords. I've just hit F9 on my spreadsheet to refresh it, and here's the random set it gave me. No pre-planning on this one.

• critical
• failure
• bone
• accord
• bed
• man
• moonlight
• hunt
• hundredth
• moon

Now to play mashup and make some titles. If you're a gamer, or have looked through the Amazon best seller lists, you might recognize some of these. Critical Failure is already a book title I saw, so I won't use that one in my mashup list. Romance writers have some good fodder here, but I'll bypass that as well and stick with fantasy.

• Bone Hunt by Moonlight
• Critical Accord
• The Hundredth Moon
• Moonlight's Failure
• Moonlight Accord
• Hunt Man by the Moon

And that was with a pretty bland word set. I've seen some that show a lot more promise. It's easy to combine the hot words list with the random list. Just don't remove the duplicates from the list, and those hot words will show up more often. If you copied my mistake and didn't save the original list with all the duplicate terms, you can just add in two or three copies of the hot words.

Spreadsheet geekery:

• Put your words in column A. Make note of how many there are. My list ended up 233 words long.
• Create a colum of random numbers. I did ten items in column F, and the equation is:
• =RANDBETWEEN(1,233)
• The 233 here is the length of the word list, so it picks a random word's row.
• Next to the equation in column G, I do a random lookup in the word list based on that index.
• =INDIRECT("A"&F2)
• This means fill this cell with whatever is in column A and row whatever's in cell F2.
• Copy those two cells (F2 and G2) and paste it to make ten or so lines with the magic equations.
• Hit F9 to refresh until you like the random set it gives you.

Here's a screen shot of my random lookup:

Let me know if you try this, and what cool book titles you come up with. I may run through some of the best seller science fiction lists and see what sort of words are most common over there, too.

Marketing and Publicity

As with many reclusive, shy authors, I'm not great at marketing and publicity. Putting myself into the public spotlight is awkward, and by nature, I'd rather sit at home and work on projects than go out among the teeming masses.

When you treat writing as a business, that doesn't work. Even though I still feel like I'm just getting started, I want to be seen as a reliable business partner and a successful author who makes things happen on schedule and to specification. That's the engineer in me leaking out into my writing.

I've had short fiction accepted and printed by several publishers, with more on the way. They've all been great to work with and helped me with my craft, and given me tidbits here and there on marketing and publicity. Here are the ones I'm closest to with either past or current work.

• Xchyler Publishing (my first short story since I started writing regularly)
• Griffin Publishers (my two published horror stories)
• Immortal Works (my upcoming novel Crystal King)

I've Also done several things to integrate myself into the amazing local writing community. These go beyond my writing.

• Attend conferences, conventions, and mass book signings. I've been to seven or so, some of them multiple times as they come around each year.
• Join the League of Utah Writers.
• Become a chapter president in the League of Utah Writers.
• Volunteer to help with some of those book signings and other events.
• Sell books at many of the conventions and conferences.
• Speak at conferences, whether as a solo class, team teaching, as a panelist, or moderating a panel discussion.

Still, those things only go so far in building an audience of people who like to read what I like to write. With that in mind, we had Ann Hunter come out to speak to our LUW chapter several weeks ago about mailing lists. She told us about how she's used InstaFreebie to build a list and a bit of what she does with that list.

Armed with enough information to be dangerous, I wrote a short story set about ten years before my novel Crystal King, and I set it up as a giveaway with InstaFreebie. You might still be able to see the link for it at the top of my blog. I'll eventually change out that link for something else.

Just signing up, adding that link, and making a couple of Facebook and Twitter posts gave me a trickle of up to five people per day interested in reading the free story and joining my email list. Then I saw some facebook groups on extending my reach. My blog isn't a high-traffic mecca, so I wanted to bump things up to the next level. I joined some promotional events to put my free story into lists of other free things.

Two promos kicked in this week. Wow. I don't know how the week will end, but it's started really well. Yesterday I added fifty people, and we haven't hit the big push days yet. It's really cool to see that people are interested enough in my story to sign up, and have stuck through my string of emails talking about writing. Here are the links to the promos, both very well run by their organizers.

My first promo email where I share these events went out yesterday and another goes out tomorrow. These won't bump up my list because those people are already signed up. This is co-marketing with other writers because maybe their readers will be interested in adding my story to their to-be-read list, and maybe my subscribers will be interested in those other writers and their stories.

I'll use my list of new fans to keep them up to date as my release date nears, as well as giving them reviews and recommendations for other authors. My challenge now is to give them content worth their time.

Maybe I'll do a second write-up on publicity after my novel comes out to see what sort of difference it has made. The challenge there is that it's a first novel (mostly), so there's nothing to compare against besides other authors' debut novels. Stay tuned, and if you like horse stories, you can join Ann's mailing list.