Remember back in 2014 when I said I would publish a reprint collection of my short fiction the following year? Well, better late than never — The Dead Ride Fast will be available as an e-book next Tuesday.
The Dead Ride Fast collects six of my weird Westerns, all of them stories of existential dread on the 19th-century frontier.
I cannot express how much fun it’s been to put this book together.
There are many reasons why I wanted to publish under my own imprint. I try to live by P.J. O’Rourke’s maxim that a writer should always be paid at least twice for a piece of writing; and like the T-shirt says, What part of 70 percent royalties don’t you understand?
Yet what I enjoyed most was the absolute control over the entire product, from the cover to the typography to the interior layout. Writing can turn a little stale over time: you write something, it’s published, you receive a check. That two-beer buzz, so sharp when you’re in your early 20s, dulls as the years pass. The excitement I still feel when I write derives from the actual creation itself — the alchemy of writing and revision — but dwindles as soon as I send it off to the editor.
That thrill of creating, that alpha-to-omega electrification, was something I felt the entire time while assembling Dead.
If you want to know the technical nitty gritty of how I did it, Daddy Jack will tell you after the jump! jump!