Books Growing Like Weeds — Connie Willis and Bruce Sterling
Really, we try to keep these career retrospectives to reasonable lengths Initially, we envisioned Bruce Sterling’s Ascendancies as 150-170k words, and did our best to hold it to that. That grew impossible, but we did manage to keep it to 500 pages — until Bruce published a wonderful 18,000 word novella, “Kiosk”, in last month’s Fantasy and Science Fiction. We couldn’t resist the urge to add that novella to the now well over 200k word book, adding it after we’d sent out Advance Reading Copies for review, making the book longer by 50 pages. Not to worry, we’ll still make our projected August publication.
We had the same problem with Connie Willis’ book, The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, which was supposed to be a nice svelte, 230-250k words. So much for plans. The one story we left out, “Jack”, one of her WWII novellas, kept eating at us until we decided to add it, making her collection a full 270k words, all for only $40. Connie just turned in her delightful introduction yesterday, so we’ll be sending out to have ARCs produced this week, with the book on schedule for its late summer release.