Good Timin’

In the immortal words of Jimmy Jones, you need good timin’.

When I sent my entry in for the Scott Prize to Salt Publishing at the beginning of last October, I had no idea whatsoever that Salt were about to launch Proxima Books and even less idea that barely a month later I would be signing a contract for Proxima to publish Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens. By the time the Scott Prize announcement came around, the release date for Mrs Darcy was already set for September 1st which made things look a bit complicated, given that all three Scott Prize winners were due to be launched during National Short Story Week – November 7th to 13th.

Something had to give. So yesterday the decision was taken for publication of Dot Dash (my short story collection) to be put back to 2012. I’m obviously slightly disappointed about this, because my first love is short stories and I’m desperate to find out what the world thinks about this collection. But I can also see that from a marketing point of view, bringing two very different books from the same author out at almost the same time would be insane.

So 2011 is now going to be solely the year of Mrs Darcy, whilst 2012 is going to be the year of Dot Dash. Unless of course everyone suddenly starts clamouring for that sequel to Mrs Darcy, in which case life gets very complicated indeed. But in a good way.

Meanwhile, Scott Pack is reviewing stories from the 2010 Bristol Short Story Prize anthology, and today he’s given a four-star review to one of mine, “rZr and Napoleon”. Like the other story of mine that bagged a four-star review from him (he has such good taste), it will of course appear in Dot Dash in 2012. But if you want to read it in the meantime, I strongly recommend getting hold of a copy of that anthology – it really is very good indeed.

2 thoughts on “Good Timin’

  1. I can see why this would be disappointing, Jon, but I imagine trying to promote two such dissimilar books at the same time would bring on a personality severance/meltdown of the type described in A Scanner Darkly.

    I enjoyed rZr & Napoleon, too. It’s a really well-constructed tale. Good stuff!

  2. Yep. Philip K. Dick’s is a less than ideal career path to emulate, however good his output was. Glad you enjoyed that one – it went through a lot of revisions before I actually got the structure working.

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