Winter is coming

And so is the Christmas anthology. I am accepting stories as of now and writing a couple of my own too. Pay is as always, £10 or rounded up equivalent in your local currency, or the equivalent in copies of the book. That works best if you are in the UK because overseas postage is daylight robbery here. It’s better to send cash to overseas authors and get them to order copies locally.

Stories should be around the 2000 word mark. Longer is good, if you get into the hih tens of thousands we might be discussing novellete publication though. Under 1000 and if it’s good, okay, but we will have to negotiate a price.

Christmas themed, of course, and they don’t have to be scary. Mine probably will be but that’s just how I roll.

I’d also need an ‘about the author’ blurb which will not be edited unless it has typos. In that you can freely advertise any other work you have had published, or your blog, or website, or your Etsy shop selling Eritrean stones painted using your tongue. Anything at all as long as it’s legal.

Deadline for this one is midnight GMT (aka PBT, Proper British Time) on December 1st. I have to allow for the vagaries of loading up and I would like to get copies to authors (those who elect to be paid in books) in time for Christmas. It also has to be available for both regular readers to buy in time for Christmas and as we all know, Christmas is scarier than Halloween for the postal service. I really can’t take late entries on this anthology. I can’t publish until I have all the author contracts and editorial responses back and time will be very tight.

I have neither cover nor title prepared so far, but it’ll work out. Don’t worry about that – it’s entirely my responsibility and I’m not going to worry about it for weeks yet.

I am also asking for advice. I have had a story idea that is pretty damn brutal even by my standards, and I have written some truly horrible things. In summary it is this:

Modern youngsters Mary and Joe have been together for a few years. Mary goes out one night with her girl friends, gets a bit drunk and wakes up in a churchyard with her clothes in disarray. Later she finds she is pregnant, even though medical examination shows she is still a virgin.

Shadowy, powerful people find out. They check her and Joe’s ancestries and bloodlines. They install their own medical team to advise Mary to have an abortion. On some pretext about the baby having two heads or something like that.

Joe is fine with it, it’s not his child. Mary is scared and confused, she thinks she must have been raped while drunk. So she agrees. The baby is aborted.

The shadowy people meet below a statue of a goat-headed figure and say ‘That was close. He nearly got through that time’.

What do you think? Too dark even for me?

Should I write it?

Or is the outline all you need?

UPDATE: This is Anthology 7, but this title idea only works if there are 24 stories…