Fallen Antho Canned as Northern Frights Goes On Hiatus

I suppose it was inevitable that with some of the good news I've been posting lately on the writing front - and the even better news I hope to be letting out of the bag very soon - there was bound to be something really rubbish lurking round the corner.

And lo, it arrived on Friday night, in the form of an e-mail from Northern Frights Publishing editor JW Schnarr telling me that, for undisclosed personal reasons, NFP it going on hiatus, the forthcoming Fallen anthology won't see the light of day, and my story Fall From Grace is back out in the cold.

I'd try to be all philosophical about it but frankly, given my desperate lack of short fiction sales over the last few months and the tenuous states of the tiny handful of publications I've still got on the way, this was a blow - all the more so because I was hugely looking forward to this one.  The three books NFP put out in its brief life were all beautifully designed and well received, and I've not doubt that both of those things would have been equally true of Fallen. 

I wrote to Mr Schnarr asking if he could see any way around this, since he suggested he plans to consolidate NFP at some point in the future.  Personally, give how astonishingly hard it can be to find a really good home for a story, I'd rather give an editor a few months leeway than try to resell it elsewhere.  But I haven't received a reply, and perhaps, in the face of whatever crisis was significant enough for him to put to bed such an obvious labour of love, it was naive to expect one.  However it works out, I hope this isn't the end of Northern Frights.  There aren't enough, and will never be enough, great small press publishers out there.


On a more positive and completely unrelated note ... I only had to mention that I'd written a wombot into the new Endangered Weapon script and Bob Molesworth sent me a sketch of one.  How neat is that?