I'm putting together a collection of my non-Archonate (with one exception) science-fiction and fantasy stories. Most of them have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction or Asimov's Science Fiction over the past eleven or twelve years, but some have only been published in bespoke anthologies.

Two such are:

"Grolion of Almery," my shot at a Cugel the Clever tale that ran in the Jack Vance tribute antho, Songs of the Dying Earth; and

"The Ugly Duckling," an attempt to create a "lost chapter" of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, that was published in Old Mars, the retro anthology that, like Songs, was co-edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin.

There are 16 tales in all, adding up to some 94,000 words, including the only sf story I've ever written that I didn't sell. "Ant Lion" is a 500-word flash-fiction piece that I sent out a couple of times but got no sale. It would probably be easier to place if I expanded the concept into a full-length story, but I like it just the way it is.

The exception to the non-Archonate rule is the collected tales of Liw Osfeo, my faux-Sufi sage whose abstruse adventures were recorded in a book-within-a-book that was part of my first Archonate novel, Fools Errant.

I've asked the mucho-talented Bradley W. Schenck to do me a cover. Bradley, whose first sf novel (Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom) will be published by Tor, is like me a devotee of good old science fiction. He's also kind to the elderly, which is why he manages my web page and formats my books for me.

The collection will be titled Devil or Angel: Old Style Science Fiction and Fantasy. It should be available on Amazon and my webstore as an ebook and POD paperback at a friendly introductory price in the next few weeks.