well, not exactly a book but a short story collection. Shortly after I returned from Melbourne, I was discussing a cat story that I’d sold to a regular anthology publisher, and I started wondering just how many cat stories I did have. I’ve always written one or two each year and after 20+ years that had to be mounting up. Of course, a number are in the detective collection due to appear around 2015 from Cyberwizard Publications in the USA and others are in a theme SF collection possibly appearing in 2013. But others are SF or fantasy stories too and some dated back to the mid-1990s when they appeared in print and in a single country only. Several had been award winners, and I was also holding a couple that had been written for specific markets, those had folded, and I’d never gotten around to resubmitting them.
I checked, wrote a couple more SF cat stories for which I’d been holding over plots, and found I now had 17 works that would be suitable for an SF/F cat-themed collection. So I gathered them together, added a page of notes on when and where those that had been published had appeared, listed the awards they’d won, and offered the collection to Sky Warrior Books – who had previously taken the Young Adult book I mentioned in this section as having been sold in October. I know the publisher likes cat tales, and I hoped… In which I was both right and fortunate. Contracts have now been signed, and the as-yet untitled collection should appear sometime in 2013. So, baring acts of Ghod, next year will see out, one SF/F cat stories collection, one YA book, Flying Free, (SF) the next in my Daze series, Rustic (And Rusted) Daze – and possibly also the SF theme collection – which has a cat or two drifting about in that as well. One of the advantages of writing about 6-12 short stories a year is that after 20+ years you can start doing theme collections. Which makes me wonder about all the ghost tales I must have by now…