Earthmen and Other Aliens

Years ago, an editor suggested that I put together a collection of my short stories. I thought it would be a rather skimpy collection, so I put the idea on hold.

This weekend, I decided to take a break from putting off writing Chains and see what stories I have. There are a few that have been published and a few more that should have been published. So, given that I’ve already leaped into the brave, new, revolutionary, world-changing environment of self-published e-books, which means that there’s no agent or editor to dump me if my sales numbers are disappointing, I’ve started putting together a short-story collection.

The title is Earthmen and Other Aliens, which is (almost) a line in one of the stories. I had originally thought to title it The Eye at the Back of the Moon, the title of one of the stories. I decided against that, but it did give me a cover idea.

It’s taking time because some of the stories were written on a (gasp!) manual (gasp!) typewriter and now have to be scanned in, and then the scanner’s OCR output has to be corrected. In the case of my first published story, I don’t even have a clean typed copy, only photocopied pages from the magazine. The scanner has been having a fun time making up words to match the marks on those faded pages.

There’s also one story I’ve been wanting to write for a while. I was waiting for a suitable market to appear, so that I could write the story, submit it, be rejected, and feel sorry for myself. I can skip some of those steps and just write the story. Which of course is the way it should work, aahtistically speaking. But that will take some time.

I hope to have the book up on Smashwords and Amazon in a week or two Or three. At most. I hope. Other outlets (B&N, Apple, Sony, etc.) will then follow as Smashwords distributes to them.

And I have a cover for it already:

http://www.dvorkin.com/earthoal/EarthmenOtherAliensCover.jpg