(NOTE: This is culled from a recently posted update on the Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter. If you’re a backer, and you haven’t read the full update yet, I recommend that you do. It’s chock full of things you need to know, much of it time sensitive.)

I’m thrilled to be able to share the official table of contents of Clockwork Phoenix 4.

• Yves Meynard, “Our Lady of the Thylacines”
• Ian McHugh, “The Canal Barge Magician’s Number Nine Daughter”
• Nicole Kornher-Stace, “On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse”
• Richard Parks, “Beach Bum and the Drowned Girl”
• Gemma Files, “Trap-Weed”
• Yukimi Ogawa, “Icicle”
• A.C. Wise, “Lesser Creek: A Love Story, A Ghost Story”
• Marie Brennan, “What Still Abides”
• Alisa Alering, “The Wanderer King”
• Tanith Lee, “A Little of the Night”
• Cat Rambo, “I Come from the Dark Universe”
• Shira Lipkin, “Happy Hour at the Tooth and Claw”
• Corinne Duyvis, “Lilo Is”
• Kenneth Schneyer, “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer”
• Camille Alexa, “Three Times”
• Benjanun Sriduangkaew, “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly”
• Patricia Russo, “The Old Woman with No Teeth”
• Barbara Krasnoff, “The History of Soul 2065″

This is a truly international anthology – with contributors hailing from seven countries – that encompasses off-beat takes on sf, fantasy, horror, or combinations of two or more, as well as interstitial works that just can’t be easily classified.

We received more than 1,400 story submissions during our reading window, and we whittled them down to sixteen short stories and two novelettes that all together total 87,000 words, making this the largest volume in the series by far. All of the writers have received their contracts and I’ve begun sending them their payments. This crucial stage is what the Kickstarter was all about; I wouldn’t be able to pay the writers at all, much less offer them a worthy pay rate per word for their work, without the generosity and support of all our backers, and of those who helped us out in other ways.

I’ll be publishing Clockwork Phoenix 4 simultaneously in trade paperback and e-book formats. I’m aiming for a June release, and then an official reading and launch party at ReaderCon in Boston in July, the same convention where I officially launched the Kickstarter last summer, and where I’ve launched all three of the previous volumes.

Posted in Clockwork Phoenix, Editing, Kickstarter, Short stories