We're having a release party today, for the brandy-new book Twenty Epics from All-Star Stories, edited by David Moles and Susan Groppi. It's chock full of maps, and epic tales of miracles and wonder, and moving, cake-like walls!

The book features such greats as Yoon Ha Lee, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Tim Pratt, and yours truly. Buy your copy from Amazon today, or direct from Lulu. And tell two friends about the terrif' new book, and they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on . . .

To follow the meme of the party, summed up by David Moles, one of the editors, a brief statement of how I came to write "The End of the Road for Hybeth and Grinar": it started as a speed writing exercise for a slow critique night at Wordos, where I just wrote, as quickly as I could, without editing or thinking much about the words. That's a different way than I usually write, which is very deliberate, and occasionally plodding. The key to the exercise (as introduced by our own Nina K. Hoffman) was not to think towards publication, or ending or anything that would impede the process. At the end of our time, when I had over 2000 words already, I read it out loud to the group, and it was good. I mean, it needed some work, and was only half done, but story existed in there, and with some help from the Wordos critiques, I sent it off to David and Susan's anthology.

The rest, as they say, is l'histoire. (Okay, maybe they only say that in France, but I can pretend.)

So check out the book, the stories from other contributors about their own process, and lemme know what you think.