Twenty Epics: Online Launch Party!
Welcome to the Twenty Epics online launch party! Once upon a time, we'd hoped to have an real live launch party for the book at WisCon, but publication delays and other small problems made that impossible. Thanks to the initiative and energy of some of our fabulous and talented authors, though, we're doing it online! My heroic co-editor David is collecting launch party links at the official party headquarters, and everyone is encouraged to participate. Some of the authors are posting about the writing process for their stories; Mary Robinette Kowal even included some pictures of the Icelandic landscape that inspired her piece in the collection.
I think of myself as a fairly articulate person, but I actually cannot adequately convey to y'all how excited I am that this book is finally available. (Lulu | Amazon | B&N) At nearly every stage in the editorial process, I have been nearly overcome with glee over these stories. (I've qualified that "every" because, well, there was a moment of doubt. At some point after the guidelines were released but before we started reading the submissions, I started to think things like "what have we done, committing to having twenty stories in the book before we've even seen the submissions? What if we can't find twenty good stories?" This was, of course, a completely groundless fear.)
The book concept was fun to work with from the beginning. Mini-epics! Bite-sized epics! It's not just gimmicky, though--we both felt there was more to it than a novelty idea. Why can't you convey something enormous in a few short brushstrokes? Why do you need padding and meticulous detail to convey a story with a sweeping scale? It's not that I have principled objections to the brick-thick fantasy novel, it's that I wanted to see what else you could do.
David and I spent a couple of days reading through all of the submissions, camped out in my living room surrounded by stacks of manuscripts. I knew very early on the first day that we were going to have a good book. What I didn't realize until a few weeks later, when we'd finished haggling over the exact table of contents and I read through the set we'd settled one, was that we had a really brilliant book. In the guidelines, we asked the authors to redefine "epic" for us. What we have in the book is not so much a redefinition as a range of interpretations. Some of the stories are light and fun (with a few that are outright goofy), some of them are emotional and serious, some of them deal directly with events on an epic scale and some of them just move the epic adventure into the background of a very personal story.
And they're all fabulous. Not only are the stories themselves fabulous, they come in a lovely package complete with a beautiful cover painting. So go buy the book (Lulu | Amazon | B&N), then come talk to me about the stories, because I've been waiting for months to be able to hear what people liked and didn't like in our beautiful little book.
(UPDATED to add: Rumor has it that they'll have a few copies in stock at the Barnes and Noble in downtown Berkeley in the next week or so. So if you're local to Berkeley, you may want to think about buying the book in the store rather than online. That helps boost our odds of getting more books in actual stores. Thanks!)
Powells.com shows copies in one of their warehouses:
http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-1847280668-1
Posted by: heather w | 14 July 2006 at 12:19 PM