New short story collection coming...

It's been a while since I published a collection of short stories: the last major ones being the Spell Circles/Eccentric Orbits/Life Cycles set covering the period 1999-2011. I was dimly aware that I'd had a fair few fantasy and science fiction short stories published since then, and the other day it occurred to me it was about time to produce a new volume.

It turns out I have fifty-two stories that have seen the light of day in various magazines or anthologies and which I'd like to see reproduced. That's about 90,000 words of speculative fiction goodness. Blimey.

This time I want to combine the SF and fantasy (and slipstream and dieselpunk and steampunk) stories into a single volume - because, actually, I'm not always sure what sort of story I'm writing as I'm writing it. Some are clearly high fantasy, some are clearly space opera. For others, it's far less obvious. And that's fine: in these gender-fluid days I can be genre-fluid, too.

I did think about pitching the collection to a publisher, but eventually decided against it. Not too many agents or publishers seem that interested in short story collections, and my experiences of trying haven't been great. I pitched a shorter collection to an interested and well-known genre publisher a few years back only to wait a year for an "actually, we're not doing any more short story collections just now."

So, it'll be another Stormcrow book. That's cool. I have a table of contents but no running-order yet. Don't have a cover or a blurb either. But I think I do have a title.

It will be:

Otherworldly

52 short stories

Stay tuned for updates...