You know how there’s this legend that the world was built in seven days? How about a story of creation that took nearly four years? Or the one about how something was built out of nothing in under a month?

In November 2008, Aaron Rosenberg and Paul Kupperberg had been kicking around some ideas for creating a shared universe. They came up with one so momentous that they needed a third hand to help bring this to life. They asked me to come play.  The ideas flew back and forth with intensity—and then, it seems, life got in the way.

At one point, Paul said he was too busy so bowed out, wishing us luck with the gestating universe. We still needed a third (sort of like a minion but without the membership requirements) so we talked to Steven Savile, who was busily hatching other ideas with Aaron, one of which became For This is Hell.

Some more work was done, including a three-month effort to raise some funding via Kickstarter. We were among the unlucky ones not to get the monies we needed, but that’s another tale. In any case, we turned to other projects for a while, conceiving, among other things, Latchkeys. But ReDeus continued to gnaw at us, an idea too cool to let go.

Finally, this spring, Aaron and I wrote our stories to get things rolling and Steve was excited. But he was also busy, so he bowed out. And lo, there came the resurrection of Paul to the mix. There began a new round of excited ideas, one of which was to take our three stories and combine them into a printed book to sell at Shore Leave, which represents Crazy 8 Press’ first anniversary.

It soon became obvious, however, that the economics were against a book with roughly 30,000 words. At which point, one of us said we should invite the pals attending the con to come play in this brave new universe. So in late June we put out a call and invited a host of demigods to join us. The catch was, in order to have hard copies ready for sale they would have to meet a rigorous early July deadline.

Rising to the challenge were Allyn Gibson, Dave Galanter, Phil Giunta, William Leisner, Scott Pearson, Lawrence R. Schoen, and Steven H. Wilson. Dayton Ward knew he couldn’t make the con, but thought the idea too cool to pass up so joined in the fun.

While they wrote with the red-hot fire of new life, we sought out others to craft the cover and even some interior illustrations which got everyone excited, making them write faster.

ReDeus: Divine Tales will be available at Shore Leave, August 3-5, then made available for POD sale via this website. Ebook editions for Kindle and Nook will follow in mid-month.

And exactly what is this new universe that has everyone so excited?  We’ll tell you that next time.

Fans don’t always realize how much of what they get to read on the marketplace gets out there despite publisher preconceptions.  History is filled with any number of books, ranging from A Wrinkle in Time to Confederacy of Dunces to Harry Potter, that hit the market and left in their wake a host of rejections from various editors because the stories didn’t fit in with what they were looking for.

Pulling up Stakes first made its presence known at various conventions when I first started working on it.  I’d read sample chapters and enthused audiences begged to know when it was going to be done so that they could find out what happened next.

Yet when the book was circulated to editors, the reason for their passing on it were impressive, to say the least.

Stakes tells the skewed tale of Vincent Hammond, a twenty-something vampire stalker, who lives with his domineering mother in a small community of hunters tracing their lineage back to the French Revolution.  Vince, however, has a rather singular problem:  he’s a vampire.  And if his mother finds out, she’ll kill him.  Literally.  So he doesn’t dare come out of the coffin, so to speak and keeping his secret becomes further complicated when…

Well, we’ll get to that at a future date.

Little did I, or the fans who have loved the readings up to that point, know that that Pulling Up Stakes violated too many rules of the genre.  Editors who rejected it, however, didn’t hesitate to explain the problems.

First, if you have a vampire story, you have to have a female protagonist.

Second, men can’t write vampire stories.  That’s solely the arena of women writers.  Bram Stoker, Joss Whedon…you can suck it.

Third, humor doesn’t sell.  So apparently you’ve doomed yourself when your vampiric narrator says things like, “Sparklepires?  Come on.   Real vampires considered the Twilight books to be such a loose flow of unmitigated crap that they were typically referred to as ‘Vampirrhea.’”

So apparently by writing a humorous vampire story with a male protagonist, I managed to hit the trifecta of hopelessness.  No publisher would touch it.

And as you, dear reader, work on prying your slack jaw off the floor, consider how nice it would be to send a message to the publishers that maybe, just maybe, thinking outside the box now and then might be a nice idea, by letting everyone know that Pulling Up Stakes is going to be making its debut here at Crazy 8 Press in just a few weeks.  Because you can’t keep a good undead man down.