Under New Management

 As you may have heard we are under new administration. My country, that is, not this newsletter. The past year has been a strange one from a historical standpoint here in the US and across the globe, and that creates new challenges for fiction authors. Unless one writes speculative fiction, most fiction is tethered to the actual history of this reality. So now, this reality includes COVID-19, a failed coup, and a black/Asian/female Vice President. Cues written in the text will from now on forever place those stories in either the before times, the during times, or the after times. There's no getting around it. 

Fortunately for me, my WIP (work in progress) is dystopian speculative fiction. Which means it can be alternative reality and therefore timeless. In a previous newsletter, I sent an image of the working cover for that story. But I had to change that. The previous title was taken from a quote by a famous fantasy author. I had written the author's estate to ask permission to use the entire quote in an epigraph (the short quote that often precedes the text of a story) in order to give the title context, and I was granted the permission for a fee and only for a 3 year period. So I'm changing the title, and the epigraph, because I prefer that my titles and epigraphs be timeless, just like my fiction. 

Here is the updated cover.