“Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and sometimes they’re amiable and sometimes not.”
China Miéville, The City and the City
I shall keep this month’s blog short and sweet, dear reader. I’ve been working away on getting The Strange Tales of Gillion up to scratch – editing, editing, forever editing – and my brain simply cannot focus on writing a proper blog.
Instead, I’ve opted to share something very exciting with you! Here is the cover for the collection, provided by Castle and Classics.
The stories are set one hundred years before the modern Gillion era (and hundreds of years before the events of New Gillion Street), and I think the cover really shows the Victorian aesthetic… or, in this case, De Clarian aesthetic, named after Grand Duchess Genevieve of the House of De Clare, ruler of Gillion at the time… but I digress. I’ll explore the setting in the next blog.
It’s only a few months until I plan to publish this collection, and it’s largely finished. I just need to be completely sure it’s error-free, so that means the expert proofreader that I’ve roped into doing it – Naomi - will need to cast her eyes over the book and catch any mistakes I’ve missed… and there definitely will be some I’ve overlooked. No matter how often I go through the thing, there’s always an error somewhere—sometimes hidden, sometimes in plain sight!
I have decided on a release date, but I don’t want to officially announce it until I believe the book is ready. Once I know what’s left to do, I’ll make a decision. This is the beauty of self-publishing; there’s no pressure or rush! I’d forgotten how much fun it can be to have a project like this to work on.
In fairness, I won’t stop talking about it from now until then, so you can’t escape it anyway, with or without a release date. The ceremonial marking of the calendars - which should be digital anyway and will require no actual physical marking – will be moot, but you get the point!
Anyway, now that you’ve seen the cover you can see I’m working toward the business end of the release. I hope that you’re excited accordingly. I know I am!
Thanks for reading.
Elliot J Harper
Author of New Gillion Street, published by Fly on the Wall Press and the upcoming short story collection, The Strange Tales of Gillion.
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