Category Archives: Updates

Two of Solarwyrm’s Books in Oakland Public Library

My apologies for the lack of updates over the last several months. I didn’t even announce when Marked by Scorn was officially released and available to buy online. It was officially released on July 31st, and you can buy both the ebook and paperback from Amazon. If you buy the paperback on Amazon, you can download the ebook for free through their matchbook program.

Dominica Malcolm with two of her books at Oakland Public Library, Cesar Chavez BranchI’ve been pretty busy primarily with improv over the past few months, with little time to dedicate to promoting Solarwyrm’s books. However, after spending a lot of time over the summer borrowing graphic novels from my local library, I was invited to suggest others for them to add to their collection. I ended up asking if they’d be interested in having my books in their collection, and since my local branch has an excellent focus on diversity, they were delighted to hear about my books.

As of yesterday, two of my books, Adrift and Marked by Scorn: An Anthology Featuring Non-Traditional Relationships are now featured new books at Oakland Public Library, in the Cesar Chavez Branch. The Branch Manager took a photograph of me with the books to share on Facebook. If you’re in Oakland, you can check them out in their catalogue system (Adrift and Marked by Scorn), or if you’re elsewhere in California near a library that uses the Link+ interlibrary borrowing system, you should also be able to look for them there.

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Bowing out

Roughly four years ago I wrote a story called “Isabel and the Elf Knight” for an anthology based on Child ballads that never happened. I liked the story and wanted to do something with it. At the time I’d never been published, and had absolutely no idea how to go about doing that, but I had been playing this game on Livejournal called LJ Idol so I knew a fairly large number of amateur writers of very good quality. My story was a bit noir, so I put out a call to my writer friends for other fantasy noir stories. Then I thought, hey, I guess I need a Press name if we’re going to do this. Got together with one of those writers (Dominica Malcolm), and Solarwyrm Press was born. We published Fae Fatales, made a buttload of mistakes, hopefully learned from them, and went on to put out several other anthologies and a two-monthly journal of fiction and poetry.

Solarwyrm has been in existence now for about four years, give or take, and it has been quite a ride. In about mid 2014, I began to become very conscious that I really had just been making it up as I went along, and that there were a bunch of things I knew I’d done wrong with my first couple of books. I began to wonder what else I was doing wrong. So I decided to do a diploma in publishing to find out. My goal was to identify the gaps in my knowledge and fill them.

I spent last year doing that, only to find by the end of the year that what I now wanted to be doing was well out of the scope of what we’d set up to do with Solarwyrm. Dominica and I had a number of conversations about maybe taking it in new directions, but eventually came to the conclusion that actually we wanted very different things now. I wanted to do something quite new. That new and different thing is currently very much in the works, and I hope to be telling you about it soon.

In the meantime though, I have to announce that I am leaving Solarwyrm. I’ll be taking my own books (including Latchkey Tales) out of print, and redesigning and rereleasing them over the next few months. They will be available for purchase until the end of next week – so if you still want them in their current Solarwyrm format, now is the time to buy them! Dominica will continue to fly the Solarwyrm flag and keep the Press alive. I will be lending all my weight to support her in everything she does with it. I also encourage you to continue to support Dominica with whatever happens next for her and Solarwyrm.

I am a great believer in Indie publishing and in the crowd we create when we work together instead of being competitive. If you’re reading this, you’re part of that. Solarwyrm wouldn’t exist without you, and I thank you so much for your support over the years and really hope you will continue to support Solarwyrm.

But for me, the Solarwyrm journey is over, except as a patron and reader, and I’m in the process of setting up the Next Big Thing for Jax. It’s going to be amazing. If you want to keep up with my new projects – and I really hope you will – keep an eye on my blog, follow me on Twitter or Facebook, and stay in touch. Exciting times!

PROMOS, Latchkey Tales and other updates

I’ve just finished putting together the third edition of Latchkey Tales – Songs of the Earth, and it’s another awesome edition. It includes stories by Zoe McAuley, Hall Jameson, Jax Goss, Tanya Bryan and Carol Holland March, and poems by Shauna Aura Knight, Roscoe Matthews and Deborah Guzzi. The table of contents is below, but before we get to that, I’d like to draw your attention to our Patreon page, where there is an awesome promotion going on, which will be the last of its kind before the 2014 omnibus comes out in early 2015.

For September only, you can get all three of the existing Latchkey Tales (including “Songs of the Earth”, the new one coming out in October) for the price of ONE. If you subscribe to Latchkey Tales in September, when I send you “Songs of the Earth”, I’ll also send “Fire and Ice” and “Children of Water”.

So hit the link and subscribe now! While the two previous editions are available on Amazon, until the Omnibus comes out, this is by far the cheapest way to get all these amazing stories. And it’s only on offer during September, so time is running out. Do it, do it NOW!

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Table of Contents for “Songs of the Earth”.

Rock Formations by Zoe McAuley (“An unfortunate village discovers the sordid truth about geological processes.”)
Brooding Rooted by Deborah Guzzi
Memory Bites by Hall Jameson (“A woman discovers answers about her mother’s death and father’s illness when she encounters unexpected allies in a thriving underground community.”)
Sands by Roscoe Matthews
Crone by Jax Goss (“An old woman sings a song to the powers beneath the earth, calling down disaster on those who would hurt her daughters.”)
Garden of Roses by Shauna Aura Knight
Baked Baby by Tanya Bryan (“A mother uses magic to create a baby sibling for her son Jordy to play with, but Jordy always finds a way to mess things up.”)
La Loba by Carol Holland March (“Seeking her lost daughter, a woman follows a mysterious crone through the Nevada desert and learns an ancient secret.”)

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In other promo news, Allusions of Innocence will be available for download for THREE DAYS only for free starting the 23rd September. I’ll be posting about this again, once the promo is live, but thought I’d give people who have read all the way down to here a heads-up.

You can get it for free from the 23rd September HERE.  

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And on a final, more personal note, my Snow Queen retelling, “A Taste of Winter” is going to be included in “Twice Upon a Time”, edited by the ever awesome Joshua Allen Mercier as the firstborn child of his “The Bearded Scribe Press“. I love this story, and what I have seen of the other contributors makes me think this anthology is going to be amazing. Plus the cover was designed by Luke Spooner, who has worked on a number of our projects with us.

You can find out more and help with this awesome project here.