If you’ve been here for a while, you might remember that last year I wrote about being in my first publication. Well, a year has passed and anthology time has rolled around again. I just got my copy last week, though I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.

This is an event the Toronto Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s group puts on every year. The group votes on a theme (this year’s theme was Heretic) and picks a day. We take 24 hours to write and edit a short story based on the theme we voted on. You can have an idea prepared, and even notes or an outline, but no actual writing is supposed to happen until that specified 24-hour period. Our organizer then compiles all those stories and puts them into an anthology.

This anthology is unique in that there is no submission or selection process. There’s no after-the-fact editing. There’s no second guessing and fine-tuning. What you have at the end of 24 hours is what gets published. Of course, this means it looks very different from what you’ll normally find in an anthology. There are typos and grammatical errors. There are continuity errors. The stories are generally not as clean and polished as you’d normally see.

I don’t say any of this as an insult. My own story in the anthology (The Death Of The Syndhat Dar) is as messy as any of them. I’ve gone through some peer review on it since I wrote it and have a lot of rewrites planned. Whole chunks of it need to be cut, others need to be rearranged, and some need to be expanded.

But the idea is there and that’s the lovely bit. I love my ending and I love the little world that this story built in my head. Every one of these stories, even if it’s not as complete as it might have been with more time, is a beautiful little window into the writer’s mind and process.

If you’re into that sort of thing, if you enjoy finding the shiny, beautiful things amidst the flotsam and jetsam, then take a look. You can find it here either free for Kindle or at the bare minimum price we could charge for a trade paperback. We don’t make any money off it, because it is unpolished. It’s just there to share the stories, the worlds and the ideas. I hope you enjoy reading it. I certainly enjoyed creating my little piece of it.