It's always nice to report being published in something I didn't myself put together. 5 Totems is the second anthology edited by Scott Quine (after WriteClubCo, named for the writing group it sprang from) to feature my work. Here's the Amazon listing for the paperback.
Scott's one of the nicest people I've ever known, and the best boss I've ever had. The thing anyone knows about him is his abiding love for Chuck Palahniuk, and maybe most people he knows know he looks like Paul Rudd. His father, Dennis Quine, also appears in the anthology, and I can begin to understand Scott's obsession with UFO radio shows based on the little I've discovered about Dennis recently.
(I can't say I know Bruce Kooken or Robert Davis, but if Scott vouches for them, they've got to be okay, too.)
I've got six stories in the book, including a Space Corps story I've been itching to write for years. Actually, the version in the book is an abbreviated take on the one I originally wrote, but Dennis found it confusing, so I tried one that was a little more straightforward. Dennis read through all my stories, and I rewrote another one ("Nothere") based on his feedback. It was interesting, that process. Made the experience seem professional. The Space Corps story used to be incorporated into two separate books in the saga (outlines, as they have yet to be written), but it seemed prudent to extract the material, put it in its own context. In a lot of ways, that brought me back to how I used to write Star Trek stories, which was the first fiction of any kind I wrote outside of school projects. If for some reason you end up actually reading the anthology, the story I'm referring to is "Rue the Day."
A few of the stories have been reclaimed from projects fizzled out with other people over the years, so it was good becoming reacquainted with them and seeing them appear, finally, somewhere. One of those ("Ajax"), I honestly can't recall the original project, but it was fun to reread, and to remember I could write something like that. Apparently I have a label for one of them (The Tarnished Age); that story's called "Unsafe at Any Speed." All I had to do with that previously collaborative landscape was rename the city and a hero from the project's creator.
So, again, thanks to Scott for making this happen, and I hope you'll have a look.
