Today is the last chance to back Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds! The Kickstarter ends at 6PM Central Time this evening. While the book will go up on Amazon eventually, you won’t want to miss out on the deals to get An Atlas of Bad Roads on audiobook for only $10, not to mention the exclusive Kickstarter hardcover!
You’d better hurry, time is running out!
How do you hope your readers will react to these stories?
By feeling good about themselves.
That may sound strange coming from me, since my work so often deals with the dark and dismal side of human nature, but I mean it.
The fact of the matter is that I love the human race, in spite of everything. It’s not that I have many illusions about us being being good in any objective sense, but this is my species and you’re all I’ve got.
I try to use the Fantastic to shine a light on the Mundane. I like to present my characters with interesting and difficult ethical choices and show them choosing to take the best of a bad lot.
I want my readers to identify with my characters and to think, “If I was in that situation and I reacted to it like that person did, I’d feel good about myself.”
I don’t always succeed. And sometimes, to be honest, I change it up and write a story designed to make people think, “I’m glad I’m not the kind of person who would react to that situation in that way.” (There’s a lot of that in my last collection, An Atlas Of Bad Roads.)
In general, though, I am hoping that people will finish Small Worlds feeling good, and strong, and brave. I want to give people hope. And if many of my stories are dark, well that’s because when it’s darkest even the smallest candle can shine with a mighty light.
[Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds is on Kickstarter now but ends tomorrow! Be sure to pre-order this amazing collection, and don’t forget to check out the audiobooks of Endless Summer and An Atlas of Bad Roads as DRM-free add-ons, only $10 each!]
How do you think your own life and experiences have influenced your writing?
I paint what I see.
When I first started writing I tried to emulate the writers I admired. That’s a natural step in the process of learning the craft. I would advise anyone who wants to write to start by imitating the masters, just as art students do. (Or used to, anyway. I don’t know if they still teach art that way.)
But that’s just for learning technique. One’s voice, the nigh-indefinable something that gives humanity to words on paper, has to come from within.
I’m not sure how to describe the process of discovering your own voice except to say that it’s when you start to realize what the old masters got wrong. This sounds more arrogant than I want, but I haven’t been able to improve on the wording.
It comes when you are familiar enough with the tropes and beats of fiction that you can integrate them into your own experiences. You start to see both fiction and reality stereoscopically. When you read you think, “Yeah, but if that happened in the real world….” In your daily life you think, “If this happened in a story…”
Your voice is the point where that double vision becomes focused into one three dimensional image. And that image is different for all of us because it is based on what we know to be true from direct experience.
For me, it’s the nuts and bolts, the hardware of reality that I see most clearly. I am able to look at the Science Fiction and Fantasy conventions with the eye of a blue collar worker. I ask uncomfortable questions like “Where do starships dump the sewage tanks when they are in hyperspace?”.
Often the answers I come up with resolve themselves into stories.
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!
$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]
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.
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.
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 