Fantastic Stories now has a small website that you can order the electronic and print editions of the book from. www.fantasticstoriesoftheimagination.com There are also two ways for you to get free copies of the e-book. One, if you were a subscriber to Realms of Fantasy or any of the DNA Publications magazine you may download the e-book for free. Two, if you will review or blog about Fantastic you can also download it for free.

The e-book is DRM free and we’ll let you decide what you think it’s worth. So take a look over the table of contents and then decide how much you want to pay us. If you like Fantastic more than you thought you would, you can always send more money after you’ve finished it. Please help us spread the word.

Here's yet another tweak. I'm still not sure if this is the final version, But I think I like this one better than the previous ones.

I got a lot of feedback from a number of different quarters. So I'm trying yet another iteration on this cover.

I had two people who I trust tell me I needed to put my name on the cover and add more design elements to the cover. I'm not sure if this is the direction I want to go in, but this is how the cover would look if I put my name on it and made the design a bit more complicated. I'd love some feedback.

The Anthology is essentially finished. I have page proofs out to the authors. If you're interested in reviewing this in print or on a blog and would like an electronic copy please e-mail me at warrenlapine@yahoo.com and let me know if you'd like a PDF or an Epub version and I'll send it along to you.

I spent the day roughing out the layout for Fantastic Stories. Here’s the table of contents as it currently stands. I’ll spend most of tomorrow working on layout aesthetics so I suspect the book will probably end up with five to ten additional pages.

Introduction (page 5 Warren Lapine)
Interface Pattern (page 9 Kelly McCullough)
How Interesting: a Tiny Man (page 29 Harlan Ellison)
A Cry For Hire (page 37 Carole McDonnell)
The Digital Eidolon That Fits in Your Pocket (page 87 Trent Zelazny)
Riding the Bus (page 97 Tom Picirilli)
Sluggo (page 107 Mike Resnick)
The Swap (page 125 Barry B. Longyear)
Starwisps (page 162 Edward J. McFadden)
Custody (page 190 Jay O’Connell)
Haircut (page 202 Shariann Lewitt)
Steaming into Wonderland (page 212 Douglas Cohen)
And What Were Roses? (page 238 Mary A. Turzillo)
The Box in My Pocket (page 250 Amy Sundberg)
Skyblaze (page 262 Sharon Lee and Steve Miller)

Oh and the antho currently comes in at 314 pages, and with this line up I've decided instead of publishing this in just trade paper that I'm going to also come out with a simultaneous hard cover.

It’s been five years since the last project I was the fiction editor of, Absolute Magnitude, saw print. A lot has changed since then. E-books have risen in prominence, e-mail submissions have become the norm rather than the exception, and genre magazines have experienced staggering losses in circulation. Back in 2009, after a four-year hiatus from genre publishing, I decided to return to magazine publishing. I contacted Harlan Ellison to see if he’d write a story for me so that when I made my announcement I could include the info that I had a new story from him in the announcement. He readily agreed and sent me “How Interesting: a Tiny Man,” which I accepted immediately.

Then the universe threw me a curve ball. The top magazine in the science fiction/fantasy field, Realms of Fantasy, announced it would be closing. I know a thing or two about buying magazines on their last leg and turning them around, so I called the publisher, Sovereign Media, to see if they’s be interested in selling the magazine to me. I didn’t hold out much hope as I’d actually tried to buy Science Fiction Age from them back in 2000. At the time, they told me it wasn’t worth the effort to sell a defunct magazine. But they surprised me by being quite anxious to sell Realms. I looked over the financials and decided I could make a go of it.

So now I owned the top fantasy magazine in the field and had a paid-for Harlan Ellison story. The problem was I had decided to keep the editorial staff, which included long time editor Shawna McCarthy. If there’s one thing I believe as a publisher, it’s that you never force an editor to run anything they’re not comfortable with. So I called Harlan, told him that I had purchased Realms of Fantasy, and that I would not be going forward with Fantastic Stories. We discussed what to do with the now-orphaned story. I suggested we could send it to Shawna and see if she thought it would fit in Realms, and if not then Harlan could keep the payment as a kill fee. Shawna did indeed accept the story for Realms of Fantasy; it appeared in the February 2010 issue, and went on to win a Nebula.

As it turned out the magazine industry had changed so much that I simply was not able to turn Realms of Fantasy around. I poured close to $100,000 into it, yet the circulation just kept declining. So after nine issues I announced the closure of the magazine and then sold it. The magazine had brought me back into the genre community, but it had done nothing to scratch the editorial itch that had caused me to want to return to magazines. It did, however, convince me that I wanted no part of trying to publish a magazine under the current market conditions; but I still had the urge to edit short fiction. To that end I announced Fantastic Stories as an anthology. I contacted Harlan to see if he’d be interested in selling me reprint rights to “How interesting: a Tiny Man,” as I’d actually been the first editor to purchase the story. And as you can tell from the table of contents he said yes.

I’m extremely proud of the work I did with Absolute Magnitude and the award nominations were cool. That said, Absolute Magnitude had such a narrow focus that it could sometimes be very frustrating to edit. Right out of the gate I’d had to pass on stories by two of my favorite authors Roger Zelazny and Harlan Ellison. The Zelazny story, “Coming to a Cord” had been set in my favorite literary universe, Amber; and the Ellison story “Chatting with Anubis” went on to win a Stoker Award. They were both top notch stories that just didn’t fit with the hard science fiction theme of the magazine. There were scores of other stories that I passed on not because I didn’t think the stories were well worth publishing, but because they didn’t fit the magazine.

I remember telling many name writers that I loved their stuff, but that it just wasn’t right for Absmag. I don’t think most of them believed me, but two of those writers are in this anthology. When I opened for submissions I’d expected Fantastic to essentially be Absolute Magnitude with a slightly broader subject matter. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Ultimately Fantastic Stories doesn’t read anything like Absolute Magnitude. Really only three or four of the stories here could have been accepted for Absolute Magnitude. It was a hell of a lot of fun watching as the anthology dictated the unexpected editorial terms to me.

Steampunk was just starting to come into vogue when I closed Absolute Magnitude’s doors. I must confess that I never really got it and that I don’t particularly care for it as a sub-genre of fantasy. I know that some people consider it a sub-genre of science fiction, but I think of any story that requires science that isn’t real to work as a fantasy story. Of course, my classification of it as fantasy didn’t preclude my purchasing it for this anthology, and while I expected to see a lot of it I didn’t expect to buy any of it because it just doesn’t do anything for me.

I should also mention that I don’t like stories in the present tense or stories that deal with religion. But over the years I’ve discovered that a good writer can still get stories past my prejudices. Really it’s all about the story. If I care about the characters and I’m pleased by where the plot takes me, I’ll buy it, period. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I purchased not just one but three steampunk stores.

It should be interesting to see how submissions change once writers see what I purchased for this anthology. Over the years I’ve found that a number of writers do a very good job of targeting editors. I remember routinely thinking as I read the slush, oh this one was written for Stan, or this one was written for Gordon, etc. So hopefully I’ll be thinking this one was written for me next time out.

I’d be remiss not to mention that this anthology is in part a celebration of sorts. I plan to release it on what will be my twentieth anniversary in the publishing field. It’s been a wild ride with a lot of highs and lows. Some of the highs were amazing and some of the lows were lower than anything I could have expected. But through it all, publishing has given me an extraordinary life that a working-class kid from a small working-class town had no right to expect. So to all of you who have been part of my publishing life in one way or another for the last twenty years, thank you so much, and here’s to twenty more.

As people are mentioning here, manuscripts have been, and are continuing to be, returned by the post office. I have no idea what caused this to happen. I spoke with them, but did not come away with an understanding of why most of my mail was being returned and some of it wasn't. Very frustrating. The upshot of this is I'm not interested in dealing with this PO Office anymore. Angela and I are currently looking at houses in another town. So I'm going to close the the Anthology to submissions until we purchase a house and move to another town. When I open up again, I will probably take e-mail submissions for a few months to make up for the postal mix up.

The first Fantastic Stories anthology is now full; it has fourteen stories and about one hundred thousand words. When I started reading for it I expected it to be a lot like Absolute Magnitude with a sprinkling of fantasy thrown in. As it turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong. The first anthology has more fantasy than science fiction. I should qualify that by saying I think of steam punk as fantasy. I’m not a fan of steampunk and yet I have three stories here that I would call steampunk. I really like that this anthology didn’t turn out as I expected, that made the editorial process a lot more fun.

Below, in no particular order, is the full list of authors who will be in the first anthology.

Shariann Lewitt
Harlan Ellison
Mike Resnick
Douglas Cohen
Trent Zelazny
Edward J. McFadden
Jay O’Connell
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Tom Picirilli
Carole McDonnell
Mary A. Turzillo
Kelly McCullough
Amy Sundberg
Barry B. Longyear