UPDATED: The Legacy of the Phoenix anthology release date has apparently been pushed back to October 2016. Stay tuned.
Greetings, Loyal Reader!
Today I’m recovering from Dragon Con, still in a groggy haze as the accumulated sleep deficit of five straight days of late nights catches up with me. As usual, I spent most of my time in sessions of the Writers’ Track, organized by the indefatigable Nancy Knight, taking notes and jotting down ideas, with some side trips to the Paranormal track to glean ghost story ideas and some pure fan activity to see actors from some of my favorite shows.
As you may recall my short story “The Red Hook Incident” was expected to be released in August, as part of the Strange Arcana anthology. That project has been delayed – for what are actually quite good reasons and great news for the organizers – and will most likely be out in 2017, but with no firm date yet.
What that means for those keeping score is that while “The Red Hook Incident” was my first professional short story sale, a different story will see publication first: “Glass Darkly and the Skull in the Box”. This is a story I wrote over the 2015 Christmas holidays and submitted in January for a forthcoming anthology from Gilded Dragonfly Books.
Gilded Dragonfly (GDB to friends) is a small press based in Georgia, co-founded by Nancy Knight (there she is again!) and several other writers/editors . Last year GDB released Legends of the Dragon Vol 1, featuring fantasy and horror short stories set at Dragon Con (and with a great cover by Georges Jeanty for any Jeanty compleatists). I thought it would be fun — and a challenge, given my aversion to writing short stories — to submit a story for the planned Volume 2. Which I did.
For good and sundry reasons, Volume 2 morphed into The Legacy of the Phoenix, an anthology of stories set at the fictional MagnaCon held (fictionally) in Atlanta every Memorial Day weekend. MagnaCon is similar to Dragon Con, but far stranger…
Anyway, my story was accepted and I made the needed minor revisions to fit the new MagnaCon frame. The anthology should be out in paperback and ebook in about two weeks (Sept 24). I’ll share more details about “Glass Darkly and the Skull in the Box” soon.
Best regards,
Dan McGirt
