Whetting the Appetite

Not the actual cover

As you probably know, Elizabeth L. Brooks and I started a short story project last year. It was a double challenge; the first part of the challenge was "could we write a short story, consistently, every week?" The second part of the challenge was "could I get my words under control enough to write SHORT SHORT stories?"

We were... mostly successful. There were a few weeks that she skipped; a few weeks that I skipped. Life happens. And while I do have... three... stories in the collection that capped out over 2,000 words, most of them are in the under 2k limit. (We originally set a 1,500 word limit, but that I was almost completely incapable of...)

We ended with 46 usable stories. We each had one that got trashed immediately for being depressing as all shit. (Both Liz and I sometimes have some serious self-esteem issues, and independently of each other, we wrote some hideous "I hate myself" pieces...) Around June or so, we got stuck; it didn't seem how much we wrote, we weren't getting any closer to our goal... we wanted at least 40,000 words so the collection could go to print. And then we realized there were some errors in the spreadsheet. Once those were fixed, we had about 56,000 words. Yay us!

We let it sit for a while, then back in October, I started editing Liz's stories. I wanted them off my plate for NaNoWriMo, so they were all done by Nov 1. Liz took a little longer (this is not a complaint, since like I said, Liz works as a professional editor for not one, but two different publishing companies, and she ends up with a crapton of work.) Finally, around the end of December, we got everything edited, back to each other, and did our corrections. We let it sit for another week, then did final edits.

Oddly enough, a few weeks ago, we changed the title. If you might recall, I've been referring to the project as Promptly, or sometimes Promptly Hot, for quite a while... I was doing final read-throughs and while we do have a number of extremely hot sex scenes, we also have a number of stories that stop just outside the bedroom door, leaving you wondering just what's going to happen now. (Although, in the end, I did take my shapeshifters to bed. They were quite insistent... and now THAT story is a bit long for the collection. Oh well... ) So, now it's Whetting the Appetite.

And submitted.

I've only once had a story picked up faster; Pistols & Guns was only "out" for about four hours before I got my acceptance.

Whetting the Appetite was out for less than 24 hours before JMS Books, LLC picked it up.

And, just to make my life fun and interesting; it's going to be released.... in March.

Thanks to everyone who provided writing prompts; we've thanked you officially in the collection as well. (First name, last initial, but you know who you are... I hope. Because if you don't know who you are... well, the IRS is probably mad at you.)