No Rest For the Death God's Chosen

No one warns you of this, but sometimes there's a staggering amount of patience involved in selling short fiction.  I say this from bitter experience - and also, I guess, lots of not-bitter experience, because that patience does tend to get rewarded if you're only patient enough.

But I'm talking patience epochs here.

Case in point: No Rest For the Wicked.  No Rest was the result of two decisions that subsequently turned out to be pretty lousy: writing a sequel to a story I hadn't yet sold and then, when I couldn't sell either separately, combining them into one really long story.  Don't get me wrong, I liked the results, but the results also happened to come to 9000+ words, and a rather crazy, episodic 9000+ words at that.

So I was immensely pleased when I finally managed to sell it way back in 2009, less so when the editor failed to publish it or pay me or answer my e-mails asking when he might do either of those things ... the moral apparently being to never trust anyone calling themselves Santa.

Then ... well, time passed.  Rejections piled up.  Years passed.  Four of them.  See what I mean about patience?

So with all that you can imagine how pleased I was when James Tallett's Deepwood Publishing put out a call for stories about necromancers - here I'm assuming you know that No Rest For the Wicked is a story about a necromancer, which you didn't because I forgot to mention it but you do now -  and how much more pleased I was when it got accepted.  And how much more pleased than that when it actually came out, and had that lovely cover up there.

I haven't have a chance to more than flick through Death God's Chosen yet, but it looks like plenty of fun, with a nice old-school Sword and Sorcery vibe to it.  No Rest For the Wicked definitely falls into that category, though it's particularly light-hearted, more Leiber than Howard.  It's perhaps a bit of a prototype for Giant Thief, in fact, and also the single longest thing I've had published outside of novels.  If any of that sounds up your alley then you can pick up an e-book copy from Barnes and Noble, Kobo or Amazon.