Launching Adrift by Dominica Malcolm

Now that we’ve finished with the release of Fae Fatales: A Fantasy Noir Anthology, we’re getting ready for the release of our next book.

Let me first introduce myself. Up until now, all the other Solarwyrm posts have been made by Jax Goss. I’m Dominica Malcolm, one of the writers from Fae Fatales. Like that book, I am running a crowdfunding campaign for my novel, Adrift.

Cover of Adrift by Dominica Malcolm

It’s the 21st century, and Jaclyn Rousseau is not where she should be. 1661 disappeared before her eyes, and there’s no way home. That matters not to Jaclyn—she lost her lover, and everything else that meant anything to her, in the West Indies.

In an adventure that crosses time and the Atlantic, a murderous pirate must find a place for herself in this new world.

Can she escape her past, or will it catch up with her?

Unlike Fae Fatales, money is not being raised to pay writers and artists, but instead to go toward marketing, promotion, and advertising costs. 20% of the net profits will also be donated to the World Literacy Foundation.

As a promotion for the launch of the campaign, we are running a giveaway. You can win copies of Adrift, Fae Fatales: A Fantasy Noir Anthology, or Jax Goss’s The Edge of the Map. Check it out!

There is also another way to earn a free ebook copy of Adrift. You will need to head over to the campaign on Indiegogo, and have a login. Once you do, share the campaign link with your unique Indiegogo ID at the end (if you’re logged in, you can just copy the URL from the share section of the page, or the URL bar in your browser, or even use the share buttons on the page). If you help raise $10 or more through the campaign, I will send you the ebook.

If you haven’t yet had the chance to pick up Fae Fatales, you can also get the ebook version for free or at a slight discount through Adrift‘s Indiegogo campaign, when buying the novel. Check out the campaign page for details.

Add Adrift to your shelves on Goodreads.

Connect with me on:
Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon

Things are happening!

Here’s a bit of a roundup of various things that are going on.

Fae Fatales

I am very nearly wrapped up with the Fae Fatales project. The special backers’ editions will be in the post next week, the book is available on Createspace, and will soon be available on Amazon, and as an eBook. It has been a very steep learning curve for Solarwyrm, and for me, but I have learnt a lot and I think our next project will be all the smoother for that.

I want to take a minute to talk about this book and what it means to me, personally. It’s obviously very special to me, as Solarwyrm’s inaugural anthology, but it’s also something I am very proud of in its own right. I love crowdfunding as a model, and am thrilled that we managed to do it successfully. But it’s more than that. The book itself is really a piece of art. Every single story in it is fantastic in its own right, and the artwork our artists did for it is all absolutely beautiful. As a whole, Fae Fatales is incredibly inclusive. I did not set out to make a diverse anthology, not specifically, and yet that’s what happened. The book includes LGBT characters (almost as many as the straight/cis ones, which is awesome). There are people of colour between its pages. And I love that that just happened. I love that I didn’t have to set out to do it. Clearly the writers from whom I drew these stories just see the world that way – diverse, colourful. That makes me incredibly proud.

In addition to that, the artists and writers themselves are drawn from multiple countries and backgrounds. The Travelling Book concept  only works precisely because we are scattered across the globe. And how awesome is that? I love living in the future.

The website

I’ve been doing a lot of work on the website. There is now a “People of Solarwyrm” section, with bios for all the people that have been involved with the Press thus far – writers, artists, designers. There is also the beginning of a “Books” section, which so far only has the one on it. But give me time. 🙂

Precocious Children

There is a call for submission for Solarwyrm’s next project. If you’re a writer, have a look.

 

 

 

Call for submissions: Precocious Children in Adult Stories

NOTE: Submissions for this anthology are now closed. If you submitted a story, you should hear back from me within the next month. If you haven’t heard anything by the beginning of 2014, please feel free to get in touch. 

Solarwyrm Press is calling for submissions for an anthology of stories involving precocious children. These are not supposed to be children’s stories. What we’re looking for here are child protagonists in adult stories. The more twisty and creepy and strange, the better.

There is a long history of precocious children in literature who don’t quite fit in. Mary from The Secret Garden is my personal favourite, but there are hundreds. Annie, Anne of Green Gables, Hermione. Zero in Holes. I could go on.

What we’d like to see here are smart child characters, but not in children’s stories. I like to keep these things open to let people play, but I always like to be surprised, so go for twisty. Humour is welcome, but black humour will probably be a better fit.

Sexual themes and violence are okay if they’re required by the story, but gratuity will disadvantage you.

This will be a crowd-funded paying gig. We will Indiegogo it, much like we did with the last one. Should this succeed, stories will be bought at a flat rate of $50 a story. The maximum number of stories that will be accepted will be 20. This is a totally crowdfunded and crowd-sourced project, so please spread the word as wide as you can!

Suggested word count is between 1000-7000 words, but that’s not a hard and fast rule, so much as a guideline. If you’re going to break it, make sure you do it exceptionally well.

Please submit stories as a .doc or .docx file to solarwyrm@gmail.com. Ideally 12 point with a clean font (Times, Calibri, Ariel, or something similar) and 1.5 spacing.

The author will retain copyright of the work. Solarwyrm Press requests first print and digital publication rights, exclusive for 3 months from publication. After that, the author is free to accept publication elsewhere, post the story to their blog, or anything else.

Stories may be edited for minor spelling, grammar, or formatting issues. Stories with major spelling and grammar issues will be rejected.

Submissions close 30 November 2013.