Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

AFTERWORD for the digital edition

I hope you’ve enjoyed this electronic edition of Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness. My gratitude goes out to those who gave me the inspiration and tools to create it: Vera Nazarian, Charles M. Saplak, Rose Lemberg, Elizabeth Campbell, Michael DeLuca of Weightless Books and Erzebet YellowBoy Carr of Papaveria Press. And of course, my wife Anita, who guided the organization of these stories to emphasize their thematic links.

For the sake of expediency, and historical preservation, the biographies of the authors and your humble editor have been left as they were when this book was first published in trade paperback by Vera Nazarian’s Norilana Books in July 2008. However, much has happened in three years’ time. All of these writers have continued to blaze their own paths. Some have become editors of important publications. Some acquired major book deals, published new novels, were nominated for or even won major awards. I encourage you to click the links embedded in their bios to see what each one is up to now.

It occurred to me, too, that I should share a little about the bragging rights the Clockwork Phoenix crew of authors accumulated after this book came out. Vandana’s novelette was reprinted in David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s The Year’s Best SF 14, while Deborah’s “Tailor of Time” was a finalist for the 2008 Aurealis Award for Best Young Adult Short Story. Tanith’s and Laird’s short stories were included in the Locus Magazine 2008 Recommended Reading List, as was the anthology as a whole—and Laird later used “Occultation” as the title story of his 2010 collection which won the Shirley Jackson Award. Editor Ellen Datlow included David’s “Old Foss” in her massive anthology of feline-based speculative fiction, Tails of Wonder & Imagination. Tales by John Grant, Cat Rambo, Leah, Laird, Kathy Sedia, Cat Sparks, Tanith, Marie, Vandana, John Wright and C.S. MacCath received honorable mentions from various “best of the year” anthologies, and all of the stories received critical praise from some corner or other, though some reviewers mused as to whether my strange art-for-art’s-sake anthology construction actually worked.

Re-reading it now, I can’t imagine putting this book together any other way.

Future e-books in the works from Mythic Delirium Books include Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness and Clockwork Phoenix 3: New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, the middle and concluding volumes of this trilogy of offbeat anthologies, each of which fared at least as well as the first in garnering praise and awards notice.

To exchange my editor hat for my author hat for a moment, I’m also planning to release two books of my own fiction: The Button Bin and Other Horrors, a gathering of my own best horror stories, including the Nebula Award-nominated title tale; and Sleepless, Burning Life, a critically acclaimed and somewhat controversial novelette written in the same style I used for the Clockwork Phoenix introductions, that first appeared in Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft (Torquere Press, 2011.)

Watch for news of these and more at mythicdelirium.com.