Okay, okay–maybe I’m going a little overboard on the garfish. But today is (a.) the Ides of March, when a bunch of Julius Caesar’s close personal friends (some of them garfish or pipefish for all we know) stood around him and put holes in him until he stopped moving, and (b.) the official release date of The Return of the Sword (available directly from Flashing Swords Press or Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc).
The Return of the Sword started out, you may remember, as an attempt to recover from oblivion the stories in the briefly-available Flashing Swords E-Zine Annual, lost in the web-wrack and e-foam when Pitch-Black Publishing foundered with all hands. Some of the stories weren’t available, and some new ones were added. I was sorry, for instance, to see Steve Goble’s Spider John story didn’t make the crossing to the new anthology–but instead we have the first story in his series about the Faceless Sons, and it is, in a word, a riot. (How can you dislike a story with the line, “The man in the bloodstained white mask contemplated the impaled head”?) So the new anthology is undoubtedly bigger and better than the one it was designed to replace.
eeknight has a rundown of the contents and contributors here. The editor plans a sort of virtual book-tour in the blogosphere: it’ll be interesting to watch (and be a part of). So expect more noise and base self-promotion in this space.
