Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds Live on Kickstarter!

Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds is live now on Kickstarter!

Ours is a culture that adores the elephantine, the cyclopean, the Brobdingnagian. Bigger is better, we are told, and the biggest is the best. People love big stories, with a cast of thousands, and Vista-vision widescreen special effects. Heroes must be larger than life, and devils blacker than they are painted, and entire worlds must be set aflame to create an ever-growing hunger for spectacle.

Oh, says I, that’s interesting. But that’s not what I do.

I write short stories, about little people in small worlds. That’s what you’ll find in this collection. In a couple of cases, they are literally small worlds, flyspeck heavenly bodies far out in space. In others the constraints are more metaphysical, worlds bounded by the vision of their inhabitants, an event horizon close enough to almost touch.

But one mustn’t suppose that the Lilliputian character of these stories means that nothing of significance happens in them.

Small worlds need saving, too. – Misha Burnett

Cirsova Publishing is proud to present Small Worlds, a brand new anthology of fiction [much of it previously unpublished], from short fiction master Misha Burnett. 

Small Worlds has all of the hallmarks of Misha Burnett’s fusion of SFF with classic weird, inviting the reader into the uncanny realms where the mundane has been pervaded by the strange, but also brings to the table his unique brand of white-knuckle thrilling adventure sometimes seen in the pages of Cirsova Magazine.

This collection features “Better Off Dead,” an all-new novelette-length Erik Rugar fantasy-noir thriller, “This Green and Pleasant Sky,” a novella about farming… on an asteroid populated by women prisoners, “My Grandfather’s Grandfather Balled Goddesses,” a Sword & Sorcery adventure set in the world of Cha’alt, and much much more!

The Stories

• Josef: A Fable – What happens when Society has officially decided that you’re just not good enough?
• Better Off Dead – In an all new Erik Rugar adventure, Dracoheim’s premier agent investigates a potential undead uprising that coincides with the return of a legendary serial killer!
• 284 Miles to Empty – A mysterious phone call from out of time brings two strangers together!
• Johnny and the Nightmare Machine – Johnny discovers that farming gold in an abandoned MMO somehow pays out real cash! But where is the money coming from, and what is the catch?
• They Delved Too Deep – Construction workers in an underground parking garage accidentally break into forgotten catacombs!
• The Irregular – The last survivors of human kind wage guerilla war against the aliens who have occupied earth!
• This Green and Pleasant Sky – Todd Allard is given a debtor’s sentence to an asteroid penal farm, only to find that it has already been run into the ground by the women prisoners who have made it their playground! Can he turn things around before they’re all liquidated?!
• Fragile – A technician with brittle bone disease on a remote space outpost must face off against a deadly femme fatale!
• The Fall of a Storm King – Luther lives his life overclocked so he can pilot around the rings of Saturn until an accident forces him to find new work!
• My Grandfather’s Grandfather Balled Goddesses – An unlikely duo must join forces to survive the wastelands of Cha’alt!

Rewards

$3 – Small Worlds eBook

Receive digital copies of Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds.

$20 – Small Worlds Pocket Paperback

Receive a pocket paperback copy of Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds + ebook.

$20 – Small Worlds Trade Paperback

Receive a paperback copy of Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds + ebook.

$40 – Small Worlds Hardcover

Receive a linen-wrapped hardcover copy of Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds + ebook.

$70 – All Formats

Receive all physical formats of Small Worlds + eBook.

Add-Ons

$10 – Digital Add-on Pack

eBooks of An Atlas of Bad Roads, Endless Summer, and Bad Dreams and Broken Hearts

$10 – Signed Bookplate

Bookplate signed by Misha Burnett

$10 – Audiobook of An Atlas of Bad Roads

Audiobook of Misha Burnett’s An Atlas of Bad Roads, read by Brandon Cassinelli! Be one of the first to get this DRM-free audiobook edition BEFORE it’s available anywhere else!

$10 – Audiobook of Misha Burnett’s Endless Summer

Audiobook of Misha Burnett’s Endless Summer, read by Brandon Cassinelli.

$10 – An Atlas of Bad Roads Trade Paperback

Add on a physical copy of An Atlas of Bad Roads. [US-only]

$10 – Misha Burnett’s Endless Summer Trade Paperback

Add on a physical copy of Misha Burnett’s Endless Summer. [US-only]

$10 – Bad Dreams and Broken Hearts: The Case Files of Erik Rugar Trade Paperback

Add on a physical copy of Bad Dreams and Broken Dreams. [US-only]

Risks and challenges

The Book is in the can! The biggest challenge is going to be fulfillment. Cirsova Publishing has a 7 year track record of delivering on high quality publications on-time and often early.

Epic Fantasy

I’ve been reading Footfall by Niven and Pournelle lately. It’s the second joint of theirs that I’ve read, the other being Mote in God’s Eye.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that they’re basically writing epic fantasy where they namecheck Carl Sagan.

>multiple POV
>world/empire-spanning action
>epic fate of the world stuff
>monsters and magic

One of the places where these works are different from most l’epic fantasies is that they’re self-contained works. You get all of your heroes, villains, factions and whatnot, and you get your complete story, beginning, middle, and end in one go.

Lately, there has been some very loud complaining that the market seems to be shifting against Epic Fantasy, and the blame is, naturally, being put on people like Martin, Rothfuss, and Jordan. Yes, sometimes authors never finish their foreverlong series cuz they get lazy or don’t have an ending planned and find they’ve written themselves into an inescapable corner. Other times, authors die, leaving their story to be completed by others.

But there’s also a general shift, I think, in what readers are wanting: stories with payoff. It’s not just a question of whether a series will finish, it’s a question of will it stick the landing and make the lead-up worth the investment. If a series goes for 5 books, and the ending sucks, readers might feel cheated by their investment in the previous 4 volumes. It’s been speculated that one reason Martin can’t finish his series is that he realizes he can’t offer any satisfying payoff in a series that was about destroying tropes and expectations of Epic Fantasies.

Conventional wisdom has been “Write long series to boost your numbers and milk the fans of your series.” There’s an assumption, with some data to back it up, that standalone books are harder to market than series, in part because series can build momentum.

But momentum is not exclusive to series: telling good stories and establishing a solid track record builds momentum, too. Michael Crichton only wrote one sequel, and he likely whiffed it to not become the series guy. Dick Francis’s stories were mostly standalone, though thematically tied. Tony Hillerman’s mysteries are part of a series, but they’re all standalone stories. There are not intense debates over the read order of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books.

While everyone loves Tolkien, and some will go out of their way to posit him as a herculean be-all, end-all of fantasy, one of the examples no one wants to follow is “write your story first.” Tolkien submitted Lord of the Rings as a complete work which his publisher broke into separate volumes due to the length. He did not write the first 20% of a story and hope it did well enough to justify writing the other 80%. But no, some would argue, it’s impossible to expect that authors wanting to follow in Tolkien’s footsteps, these hypothetical “Tolkien 2s” as some writers have referred to them, follow their idol’s example and write their whole damn story before asking for reader buy-in.

While it’s taken awhile for us to roll out Mongoose & Meerkat serially, it was actually brought to us as a finished work. It could’ve been published as a single doorstopper volume, but it worked out better for us, and hopefully for Jim, to publish the stories first serially in the magazine and then as collections as the serialization progressed. But the series has been in the can since at least 2017, and we’ve had the full publication arrangements for it in place since at least 2019.

Wild Stars is a bit of a different animal, and I think that the realities of today’s market is what makes it a tougher sell for us. While Wild Stars is unfinished, we stepped in as publisher VERY late in its history [nearly 35 years in, to be exact], yet 2/3s of the Wild Stars in print now has been both written and published in the last 4-5 years. If anything, our own publication schedule has been slowing Michael down since his retirement, but we can only manage serializing and publishing one Wild Stars book a year. This year, we begin serialization of the 7th installment, collection of the 6th, and Michael has already shown me the draft for the 8th book in the series. While most of the Wild Stars adventures work as stand-alone stories, the length and history of the series, not to mention the drastic shift in mediums might make entry into the series somewhat daunting for new readers.

However, if you are waiting for Wild Stars to be finished before committing to the series, please know that I do not think you are, as one FamousTM Epic Fantasy writer so recently put it, an “entitled little shit.” Instead, let me say that I hope that you will check out the series when it is finished, which should be around 2028 at this rate. By then, we will probably have 3 coffee table omnibus collections, each collecting four volumes of Wild Stars. If you’re wanting to give the series a shot now, however, you can pick the first omnibus up for $68 + S&H if you use the promo code WELCOME15 at checkout.

Or, if you just don’t like huge sprawling epics or even series at all, we invite you to check out Misha Burnett’s upcoming anthology, Small Worlds, or his Chinaski Award-nominated An Atlas of Bad Roads (audiobook coming soon), Erik Rugar, or Endless Summer.

Coming Soon: Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds

Ours is a culture that adores the elephantine, the cyclopean, the Brobdingnagian. Bigger is better, we are told, and the biggest is the best. People love big stories, with a cast of thousands, and Vista-vision widescreen special effects. Heroes must be larger than life, and devils blacker than they are painted, and entire worlds must be set aflame to create an ever-growing hunger for spectacle.

Oh, says I, that’s interesting. But that’s not what I do.

I write short stories, about little people in small worlds. That’s what you’ll find in this collection. In a couple of cases, they are literally small worlds, flyspeck heavenly bodies far out in space. In others the constraints are more metaphysical, worlds bounded by the vision of their inhabitants, an event horizon close enough to almost touch.

But one mustn’t suppose that the Lilliputian character of these stories means that nothing of significance happens in them.

Small worlds need saving, too. – Misha Burnett

Coming soon!

Tales of the Mongoose and Meerkat Volume 2: The Heat of the Chase is Out Now on Amazon!

The retail version of Mongoose and Meerkat volume 2 is available now! Even if you’ve been following along in the magazine, there’s plenty of new and exciting bonus content to entice you, including an all new fantasy murder mystery novella, Thunderhead, TTRPG content, and additional artwork from DarkFilly and Raven Monroe [Machi the Lazy Witch, Cookies & Scream].

• eBook
• Paperback

Cirsova 2023 Lineup!

Okay, everything has cleared, and we can announce our amazing 2023 lineup!

Among our major recurring features, we’ll be serializing Wild Stars VII: The Gold Exigency, in which a space cop gets roped into the cosmic struggle between warring titans, space pirates, and a telepathic dragon cult! Jim Breyfogle’s Tales of the Mongoose and Meerkat race toward their dramatic conclusion this year in three stories, culminating in The Redemption of Alness! Adrian Cole’s New Dream Lords saga continues, chronicling another of Arrul Voruum’s early adventures in Across the Poison Sea!

We have a number of other returning Cirsova veterans as well as some new and exciting names! 2023 is going to be fantastic!

Spring

• Quicksilver – J. Comer
• Egg – Jaime Faye Torkelson
• The Unshrouded Stars – David Skinner
• Search Pattern – William Suboski
• Starring Hedy Lamarr – Troy Riser
• Hunger in the Void – Andrew Gallant
• The Gold Exigency (pt1) – Michael Tierney
• Comes the Hunter – Bill Willingham
• The Feast of the Fedai – Jim Breyfogle

Summer

• Across the Poison Sea – Adrian Cole
• An Affair of Honor – Will Lowry
• Curse of the Iron Moon – Frank Sawielijew
• Meat on the Bone – Tia Ja’nae
• Olvir’s Dream – C.D. Crabtree
• The Red Queen of Ustari – Shuya Nanahara
• Terror-trap of the Jintra – John Gradoville
• The Machine of Fear – Harold R. Thompson
• The Ruins of the Dalgre – Richard Rubin
• The Serpent and the Spire – J. Thomas Howard
• The Gold Exigency (p2) – Michael Tierney

Fall

• Black Sky, White Knight – Mark Mellon
• Children of Summer – Louise Sorensen
• Dead Men Do Tell Tales – Teel James Glenn
• Fossils of Truth and Grace – E.E. King
• Trapped in the Loop – Jim Breyfogle
• Metamorphoses at the Gate – Lysander Arden
• The Dusk Next Door – Mark Pellegrini
• To a Dead Soul in Morbid Love – Matthew Pungitore
• The Chilling Account of The Wolf-Bann of Krallenburg – J.E. Tabor
• The Angel Hanna – Rodica Bretin
• The Gold Exigency (p3) – Michael Tierney

Winter

• The Redemption of Alness – Jim Breyfogle
• Moonlight Over Sussex – Daniel J. Minucci
• Red Queen’s Race – Paul Lucas
• Rising Shadows – Adam S. Furman
• Incident in Burma,1942 – Mark Arvid White
• That Hideous Brain – Jeffery Scott Sims
• Commander – Richard Martin
• Ithuriel’s Spear- Joseph W. Knowles
• The Gold Exigency (p4) – Michael Tierney

Just don’t forget about 2022, we’ve still got several months and another issue left! The Fall issue just dropped in physical formats [softcover, hardcover] with part 3 of Orphan of the Shadowy Moons and Part 2 of Vran, The Chaos-Warped. You don’t want to miss it!

Review: Rags and Muffin by D.G.D. Davidson

While I’m not especially overdue on book reviews [except for a couple I’ve been sent that I just don’t know that I’ll ever get to; sorry], I think that I’ve managed to get to a spot where I can knock three out at once this week, starting with Rags and Muffin.

I picked this up last winter around the same time as They’ll Get You and read it right afterwards, but I’m just now getting a chance to sit down and write about it. This one was a bit of a surprise, I’ll admit. All I knew going in was crime-fighting catgirl with an Asian dragon dog. I didn’t know what to expect, really. Certainly not an incredibly rich fantasy setting heavily inspired by Indian mythology.

I used to be something of a Hindu Mythology wonk in my younger years, so this was a pleasant surprise. Davidson incorporates the cultural textures without overly romanticizing them, showing both the beautiful aspects which Lord Curzon fell in love with as well as the ugly and downright evil.

Rags & Muffin takes place in a fantastical pseudo-India that’s under the control of a steampunk/magitek pseudo Romano-British empire. Humans live and work alongside furry cat-people; while they are able to interbreed, the resulting hybrids invariably die before adulthood but are revered as living gods because of the psychic experience they’re able to grant worshippers. Same psychic experience can also be harvested from a gland at the base of the brain, so they can fetch good money on the black market.

The main character is one such hybrid who has devoted her life to save her fellow hybrids from being trafficked. There’s a lot of waif-fu, though the prana-based martial arts is able to somewhat justify how Rags and her friends, the Ragtag Army, are able to hold their own against powerful crime lords and human traffickers.

There’s a lot of excellent worldbuilding in Rags & Muffin, but as a book, it’s a little all over the place in setting things up. A number of seemingly unrelated events, as well as side excursions of the main characters, tie in to the world and add a backdrop to the story but go nowhere on their own in this volume. While this volume’s main story is a simple and straightforward rescue mission that, against all odds and many complications, the main characters manage to pull off, so much of this book is devoted to setting up the puzzles and mystery boxes that I find myself feeling that I can’t judge it until I’ve read the [as yet unpublished] sequels to see if any of these threads will pay off.

If the subsequent volumes are able to stick the landing and answer the questions that this first book poses about the characters, the world they live in, and the nature of their city and the strange hybrid goddess girls, then this will be an excellent first entry. If we don’t get a sequel, or the sequels don’t provide satisfactory answers on the questions about the characters, who and what they are and what choices they’ll ultimately make, then Rags & Muffin will have been a pretty fun and entertaining, though a little long and in some spots meandering, ride that could’ve stood to have been tightened up a bit.

On its own strengths and weaknesses, it’s a solid three stars. If a sequel is able to make good on the bits that it’s laying into place, it would be bumped up to a 5.

https://www.amazon.com/Rags-Muffin-Deus-Magical-Girl/dp/1737573547

Wild Stars V Out in All Formats

Michael Tierney’s Wild Stars V is out now in all formats.

• eBook
• Softcover
• Hardcover

Need to catch up on Wild Stars? Really, at this point, the cheapest and easiest way is with the Wild Stars Omnibus. Use promo code WELCOME15 at checkout for 15% off. This tome contains all 4 previous volumes of Wild Stars in a single coffee table format.

Submissions Question: How long does it take to hear back?

Here’s a question we get sometimes: When should I expect to hear back from you after I’ve submitted my story?

It’s kinda hard to say, since I’m the one reading all of the stories. If we get a lot of stories, it takes longer to hear back from us.

First of all, we will always send a confirmation of receipt email once we’ve received and downloaded your manuscript. If it has been a few days and you have not gotten a short, polite “Thank you for your submission, blah blah blah,” it means we probably didn’t receive your manuscript, in which case, try to follow up no later than the 10th of August. We’ll allow for some grace depending on the circumstances, but it depends on more factors than I can really outline here.

Now, regarding rejections and offers:

If you submitted to us on the first day of submissions and it’s taking awhile to hear from us, it likely means we’re still considering your story but haven’t reached a final decision based on our budget and space constraints.

If you submitted to us on the last day of submissions and it’s taking awhile to hear from us, it likely means we haven’t gotten to your story yet. We really do try to give everyone who submits a fair shake, but there does come a point where I’m pretty happy with a stack of stories that I’ve read, and every story I read after that stands a chance of getting in means bumping off something I’d already been strongly considering, possibly even set my heart on!

So, it’s not a bad idea to submit early if you can! [and by early, I mean on the first day that we are open, not before we open–please don’t do that].

I’ll try to have everything settled by the end of September: that’s the target. Earlier would be nice. If we’re still holding onto your story by sometime in September but we haven’t contacted you with an offer yet, we may contact you to let you know that you haven’t been forgotten about and are still under consideration.

Again, the biggest factor is how many stories we get. Could be a hundred. Easy peasy. We get nearly 200 or more like we have some years? That makes it tougher. Like I said, we try to give all the stories a fair shake, but we’re really limited in how much we can afford to buy and place. And yes, I will play favorites with past contributors and IPs I’m personally a fan of, but there’s never a guarantee.

Don’t forget to support An Atlas of Bad Roads in the meantime! It’s the absolute last chance for Cirsova to make additional on-hand cash for 2023 acquisitions!

Cirsova Interview with Dave Martel of Bizarchives

In this interview, we talk Cirsova deepest lore, going back to even before we found Jeffro, plus music, and dunking on bad SFF covers!

This was a lot of fun. Check it out!

Don’t forget to check our Mongoose and Meerkat on Kickstarter! Time is almost up for pre-orders!

Mongoose & Meerkat Fan Theory-post!

Not John Daker recently posted some of his current fan theories about Cirsova’s ongoing Mongoose and Meerkat series.

https://themixedgm.wordpress.com/2022/06/27/the-mongoose-meerkat-theory-post/

He’s definitely right that there are a lot of hints that have been dropped from the very first story we ran back in 2017 and over the course of the dozen stories we’ve published so far, and he’s on the right track! [Unfortunately, Jim Breyfogle has confirmed that Deathwater does not take place in the same universe as Mongoose and Meerkat; it was included as a bonus for people who had already read all of the original magazine stories in Cirsova.]

Major clues about who Kat really is and what’s going on with her are dropped in Death and Renewal, which is out now in our latest issue. One major thing to remember is that despite being an adventuring duo akin to Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser, Mongoose and Meerkat’s adventures are principally from Mangos’s perspective: Kat is the mystery box of series. Mangos’s hesitance to puzzle it out for himself are likely as not from a fear that he might lose what he has in his reliable adventuring partner who has helped him earn a reputation as a reliable sell-sword. He could always just ask her: but what would that cost him? Would he lose her forever if he knew the truth?

Mongoose and Meerkat’s adventures are entering their final arc with the story in this issue, as well as the stories in our fall and winter issues, Fight of the Sandfishers and Thunder in the North, where most, if not all, secrets will be revealed!

You can get caught up on the first two years of Kat and Mangos’s adventures together by backing our latest Kickstarter for Tales of the Mongoose and Meerkat Volume 2: The Heat of the Chase. All backers will receive digital copies of Volume 1: Pursuit Without Asking.

[Also, keep an eye out for Not John Daker’s Sister Winter, which will be the cover story for our winter issue!]