Announcing . . . Dragonstairs Press!

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Those who've been following this blog for a while know that upon retirement my wife Marianne Porter reinvented herself as a "nano-publisher."  So far, she's nano-published six works by me:  A Blurb Book photo tale for Halloween titled Autumn Leaves, a chapbook reprint of "A Midwinter's Tale," which we used as a Christmas card last year, and a set of four small Darger & Surplus chapbooks, most of which I gave away as promotional items over the last few months.

Now Marianne's imprint, Dragonstairs Press, takes another step toward commercial reality:  It has a website.  If you go there, you'll note that no prices are yet listed.  That's because she's not ready to start mercantile operations yet.  When she is, in the not-too-distant future, I'll let you know.

Meanwhile, Marianne is working on a big new project.  It's very cool and very strange and something that no major press would touch on a bet.  Keep watching the skies!

You can find the Dragonstairs Press website here.


And speaking of minor japes by major writers . . .

I received my contributor's copy of the new Gardner Dozois collection, When the Great Days Come the other day.  (I co-wrote "Ancestral Voices.")  In the introduction, Robert Silverberg writes:

Not that Dozois the writer has gone unrewarded.  His first published story, "The Empty Man," was a nominee in 1966 for the award that science-fiction writers annually give their peers: the Nebula.

And he goes on from there.  But here's the thing:  "The Empty Man," written when Gardner was either sixteen or seventeen, is a bit of a potboiler.  In Being Gardner Dozois, my book-length interview with Gardner about the art and craft of every work of short fiction he had written to date, he summed it up thusly:  "Sucks! is the way we describe it in technical language."

So I wrote Gardner, asking for an explanation.  Here's his response:

EVERYTHING got a Nebula nomination that year.  As a protest over the way the Nebulas were run, Frederic Pohl nominated every single story to appear in GALAXY and WORLDS OF IF that year.  So "The Empty Man," like many other stories that year, got exactly one (1) nomination.

It still sucked.

So now you're in on the joke.


Above:  The Dragonstairs Press logo.  Derived from a photo of the Dragonstairs themselves.

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