A Non-Pony Short Story Collection · 11:41pm Dec 1st, 2021
So like it says up there:
By my reckoning, it's been thirty years since I first sold a short story for actual money and decided that I wanted to keep doing that.
Of course, growing up on a steady diet of Margery Sharp's Miss Bianca books and Larry Niven's Known Space series, I was sure that my future lay in novel writing. Grand visions of multi-volume talking animal science-fiction and fantasy adventures filled my noggin, books that spanned both star systems and alternate dimensions, but, well, it doesn't seem to have turned out that way.
Instead, it's been the shorter stuff that's really pulled at me, and to commemorate the aforementioned thirty years, I've put together a collection and titled it E is for Eggplant. The cover image up there will show you the titles of all the included stories and also shows you a picture of Orel the rachnoid with one of his beloved eggplants.
Orel plays a leading role in the story "The Language of Ghosts," and this picture was originally drawn by Marilyn Scott-Waters to illustrate the ebook edition of the story after its publication in the August 1997 edition of Asimov's SF magazine. What you see here, though, was redrawn by my brother Tom since the only version of the original image I still had on any of my various computational devices was about the size of a postage stamp...
The book also features "Why I'm Traveling With a Talking Cow," a story that Present Perfect Highly Recommended at the end of a review column a bunch of years ago, and two stories, "The Precession of the Equinoxes" and "To Drive the Cold Winter Away," that owe their existence to the Writeoff contests that I first heard about here on Fimfiction.
So, yes, there's no Ponies, but there's a lot of other talking animal folks, crows and mice and yurt turtles and spider robots and everything! The book's available both in a Kindle edition and printed on actual paper for your dining and dancing pleasure, and just in time for the various year-end gift-giving holidays!
Mike
Congrats on another book! And neat to hear you've worked with Marilyn Scott-Waters, I follow her on some socials and her work always makes me smile. :)
what a terrifying cover :)
I went straight off and bought it!
"B" is for "Buying Right Now"
Congratulations on the writing anniversary and new book, and good luck with sales!
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Thanks, folks!
I've known Marilyn since high school, actually. She's pretty much the best.
As for Orel the rachnoid, why, he's likely the nicest spider robot you'll ever meet!
Mike
Are you going to make this book available on the Australian kindle store? I'm not able to buy it on the american one.
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It looks like:
https://www.amazon.com.au/Eggplant-Science-fiction-Fantasy-Stories/dp/B09MG6TJSP is the address for it. I guess it took 'em a couple extra days to get it set up.
Mike
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Sold!
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It looks like something Kamen Rider could fight.
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yes
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Orel would be more inclined:
To share his recipe for eggplant parmesan or discussing comparative linguistics. The opening line to the story he's in, for instance, has him declaring, "Behold the mighty eggplant, noblest of all vegetables!"
Mike