My pal Robin Laws is heading up a new fiction venture called Stone Skin Press, a division of the well-respected game publisher Pelgrane Press, run by another friend, Simon Rogers. Robin asked me to contribute to a couple of his upcoming anthologies, and I jumped at the chance to work with him again. The covers for the two books I’m involved with were just released today.
The first, The New Hero, Volume 2, features my name on the cover, along with Jesse Bullington and my friends Alex Bledsoe and Tobias Buckell. My story is called “Friend Like These,” and it’s the first Shotguns & Sorcery tale I wrote. You can see two of the main characters in the story – Max Gibson and Moira Erdini – slipping out of the building in the center of the cover.
Artist Gene Ha did a fantastic job with the whole piece, representing every major protagonist in the entire anthology and rendering it all in the style of a classic Japanese print. He even managed to slip the Pelgrane Press logo into the curtain that covers the door that Max and Moira step out through.
I’m told the book will arrive in February of 2013. By that time, I should have a full trilogy of Shotguns & Sorcery novels out as part of my 12 for ’12 plan.
The second book is called The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables. I pitched in a short but personal piece for this one that offers not so much a moral as some kind of hope.
The excellent Jim Zubkavich of Skullkickers fame provides the artwork for this cover, and I hear he chipped in a story of his own too. I can’t wait to read it along with the rest of the new fables for our post-modern age. This book, Robin says, should be available by Christmas this year.
