Way back in 2007, I answered a call for anthology submissions for a little concept called Machine of Death. The premise was pretty simple: there's a machine that, with just a drop of your blood, can tell you how you're going to die. Not when, or where - just how. And the machine is never, ever wrong.
With the rules in mind, I set about writing a contribution titled "Friendly Fire". Submitted. And from a pool of 681 submissions, I was among the thirty three (or so) selected for the anthology. It was my second sale, the one that validated in my mind that "Mister Eddie" in Tales of the Unanticipated (TOTU) #27 (available here) wasn't a fluke.
And then the project went dormant while the editors sought a publisher. And it slept. And slept.
In the meantime, I placed "Tacklesmooches" in TOTU #30 (available here), and had a couple of short-shorts at the wonderful Pure Francis, and sold "Lorem Ipsum Donald" to TOTU for next year's issue #31, and hammered out a bunch of other bits that got rejected, and started on a novel, and pretty much figured that Machine of Death had died on the vine. And while I got paid, it's only a little about the money - this was about my sophomore sale being on pages, within covers, holdable and readable.
But you can't keep a good machine down - the editor's reported in August that after a long journey, the book is finally due next month from Bearstache Books.
You can check out the cover here (and also read in six minutes or less the posts that chronicle the mileposts marking the book's progress over three years.
Of course, it's not on the Bearstache website yet... Hmm...
