Seven Stones

A while back (I'm never good at recalling timelines), I ran into a writer named C.E.L. Welsh - when I say ran into, i mean, on twitter. Another writer (whose name I forget) said something like - hey, you guys should get to know each other. And a twitter-matchmaking was made. Tangentially - do people ever meet in twitter and get married? They must.

Chris (C.E.L. on twitter) and I are both married to our lovelies, so it wasn't that sort of match. But we did swap stories and novels. We write in different genres - his more of the fantasy, dystopian-future, kicking ass and taking names style, and mine, well that cross-genre literary-slipstream crime fiction thing. Come to think of if it, my characters have been known to kick some ass and take a few names. So maybe we are not that dissimilar.

The first book of Chris's I read was actually a historical fiction on Harry Houdini. I've always loved magic, and had a fascination with Houdini growing up. Reading his book, i was impressed at Chris's storytelling, and I told him so. Skip ahead to him reading both Correction Line and Fall in One Day, and me reading Clutch - well, long story short, we liked each other's work. So when he asked me to be a part of project he was putting together, the only hesitation was would I have the time. I guess the other hesitation was could I write in this style, and in the dystopian "wrecked earth" world he'd created. I was willing to give it a shot, and if it didn't work, I hoped he would be straight with me - tell me to go back to my Carveresque short stories, and leave the fantasy worlds to him.

As it turns out, I had a helluva lot of fun writing it. I racked my brain for a premise and story title as the deadline approached. Finally, the night before, I was in bed with my laptop, and just wrote down the first thing that came to mind. "Teddy's Treasure." Well, that's kind of a dumb name (actual thought at the time) - but then I went into, what is the treasure? Who is this Teddy guy, and is that a name he liked being called (No). Moments later, Theodore Limpdo was born, and the story emerged.

Mr. Welsh (throwing him some respect) has put together a killer team, and has launched this as a Kickstarter project. If this sounds like something you'd like to see happen, throw a couple of bucks towards it. If you've never backed something on Kickstarter, hey, you could make this your first - and it doesn't take much.

You can read more about the project and sign up as a backer here:

Seven Stones Anthology, Graphic Novel, Omnibus