Revamp

I've finally acquired a copy of FrontPage, so I can finally edit the Pookatales website.  I have now gone through and made quite a few changes, including updates to item description pages and the news page.  I've made an announcement there that I might as well also make here.

Pookatales Press has been in business for ten years.  That seems amazing to me, as if the time flew by almost without notice.  But as it has in fact been a decade, I think Pookatales deserves the ten-year anniversary gift of a brand-new book release, our first in a very long time.

This August, my first traditionally published short story, "The Truth One Sees," will have been out in print for a year, at which point the rights to publish it elsewhere revert back to me.  So rather than search for a venue that may want it as a reprint, I've decided to claim it for Pookatales Press and release it as one of our miniature book titles.  I'm hoping to present it as a hardcover, but we'll see how it goes.  I'll have all summer to work on formatting it and getting it ready to be a mini book.  My intent is also to package it as an e-story that will be available for download from Pookatales Press for e-book readers like Kindle and Nook.

It's a great story, it's gotten some very nice reviews...this seems like the right thing to do with it.  And of course, it will continue to be available as part of the "Warrior Wisewoman 3" science fiction anthology--a collection of such thoughtful and well-written stories that it's easily worth buying a copy or three.

Superheroes

I recently found out that Samhain Publishing has put out a call for Superhero romance novellas for an upcoming anthology, and with superheroes on my mind lately--the new Thor movie comes out this week--I'm beginning to contemplate whether there's a way to present supers in a way that hasn't been done before.

Marvel, seemingly, has done it all.  We've had mutants, gods, aliens, ordinary people with unusual talents, people who have been bitten by spiders or exposed to strange substances or radiation...you name it and it's probably been done.

The trick here isn't so much finding something that hasn't been done, because it looks like that would be a near-impossible task.  The trick would be in finding something that's been done but doing it in a different and fresh way.

I know people still like superheroes.  If I want evidence of that, all I have to do is look at how many hits my old "Why We Need Superman" post has gotten over the more than two years since I wrote it.  The idea of a superhero romance is an intriguing one, since that's an area that so often gets overshadowed by the action and combat.  There have been a few famous superhero romances, sure, but still it seems a relatively undervalued subject when you look at the sheer number of superheroes that have been invented over the last few decades.  Also, I confess I've read a lot of storylines wherein the superheroes I hoped would end up or stay together simply...didn't.  Disappointing, if you like romance.

This call for submissions sounds like a challenge, but I still have a couple of other fiction projects in the works, so we'll have to see what calls the loudest.