Happy birthday announcement

[lesser_celery]

Here is the happy-smiley news I’ve been keeping dark for the past five months, waiting to make sure it was really going to happen.

Coming soon, in honor of our magazine’s twentieth anniversary:

The Best of Not One of Us
Edited by John Benson, Published by Not One of Us
Distribution by Wildside Press, LLC

Another Coming, by Sonya Taaffe
The Elevator, by Patricia Russo
Matters of Family, by Gary A. Braunbeck
There the Great City Stands, by Ceri Jordan
Night Window, by Marc Lecard
Chad, by Kate Riedel
Take the “A” Train, by Wayne Allen Sallee
C2, by Anke Kriske
The Rosegarden, by Seth Matthew Lindberg
Fading, by Katherine Harbour
The Birthday Ritual, by Kurt Newton
The Last Poetry Night at the Saturnalia Coffee House, by Mark McLaughlin
Hooney Jew, Hooney Jew, by Steve Vernon
Pale Fruit, by Jeffrey Thomas
Soul's Night, by Jennifer Rachel Baumer

Special thanks to sovay, without whose help and encouragement this book would never have happened. Thanks, too, to oldcharliebrown.

I suspect that you’ll be hearing a lot more about BNOU in the coming days as I work off my excess excitement.

Oh, and here’s the promised link to the Washington Post article I mentioned in my last post.

Comments

[hans-the-bold.livejournal.com]

Excellent, and congratulations! I look forward to getting a copy!

[lesser-celery.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I just printed the pdf proofs here at work. It's pretty exciting.

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is good news. Congratulations to you, and Not One of Us, and its contributors. This will be a fine collection to own. Twenty years--that's a long time. I'm wondering about your process of selection--if you'd been keeping in mind all the stories you really loved, or if you had to go back and reread everything (and I immediately wanted to go read sovay's piece but it's not in her collection and I don't have my NOU issues in one place--guess I'd better start searching). (Glad to see scanner_darkly's in there too; I'd been wanting to read his work and suddenly he has stories appearing in two anthologies I want to get.)

Thanks for keeping the magazine going all these years; your readers appreciate it.

[lesser-celery.livejournal.com]

Last year sovay read all of the back issues of Not One of Us and emailed me a list of her favorite stories, about 65 of them. Once we got serious about doing the collection, I asked her if I could use one of her stories, and we agreed on a favorite that I had published just after her story collection was finished. After that, I went over her choices (which accorded with my own tastes to a frightening degree) and added some more of my own favorites to create a preliminary list of about 80 stories. Anke also weighed in, mainly on the stories we had listed, told me which ones she really liked and others she didn't like as much. I then sorted the stories into groups so that we didn't have too many of any particular kind (horror vs. fantasy, particular themes), or too many from one era vs. another, and I started trying to contact the authors of our favorites. There were a few people we couldn't find and a couple who politely turned us down. But generally we got the quality and mix we wanted.

[sovay]

(and I immediately wanted to go read sovay's piece but it's not in her collection and I don't have my NOU issues in one place--guess I'd better start searching)

It's currently on the website, although soon to be replaced: "Another Coming."

I'm really looking forward to this anthology.