Le Beran Quotidien

I just sold a science fiction short story, Drowned by Molly Ann Friday, to the Machine of Death anthology series. There is an interesting caveat however: I am not quite exactly sure when or where the story will appear!

The first Machine of Death book was wildly successful. And the second volume (to which I submitted) received almost 2000 submissions out of which only 30(ish?) were accepted. Editorial triumvirate  North, Bennardo, and Malki ! said they didn’t know if my story would fit into Machine of Death Vol. 2. But if it didn’t, they wanted to publish it by some means which they would figure out soon. The length is a problem. If I recall, the editors requested stories roughly between 200-7,500 words. So knowing that it’s always charming (not exasperating) to people when I break the rules but only slightly, I sent them one which was about 8,060 words (to give non-writers some idea, my entire novel– albeit a short novel– is 51,000 words– so this story is roughly 1/6th the size.)

I’m very pleased with the story and I’m excited to share it with you in whatever form it eventually takes.  Naturally, I feel tremendously lucky to be chosen out of such a prodigious number of writers. I have suggested to the editors that the story take the shape of a mighty eagle, descending a mountaintop, clutching an irrefutable golden scroll– as it originally appeared to me in my vision– but have yet to hear back.

Here’s a word “death cloud” of all the submissions for Vol. 2. As you can see– if winds are right– we could take out the entire eastern seaboard:

In recent days, I’ve been enjoying reading those stories that didn’t make the cut. A lot of folks have been posting them on their blogs and linking them via twitter.

You can also read the first volume of stories as a free ebook.

I must thank my Dates Worse Than Facebook Group for urging me to send in a submission. They already know they’re awesome but I’ll just remind them here again.