A Book Cover Reveal & What It Means to Me

Not the book cover; just a meaningful image.

This Halloween is the cover reveal date for the anthology my latest short story will appear in! I hope it always feels this exciting. It's an anthology of short speculative fiction stories called On Fire, published with Transmundane Press.

Yes. 

On Fire.

If you know my personal story, you understand why I clarified that they were works of fiction. And lest you don't find it funny, I assure you that gallow's humor is the bread and butter of recovering serious pain and moments of facing one's serious mortality.

October 31 will also be the second anniversary of my being on fire. Of when I was on fire. I never quite know how to put it. Words seem to fail the experience.

I'm not big on anniversaries as a rule, but the fact that this accident fell on a holiday makes it a bit more difficult to distance it from the upcoming calendar date. It's not like I'll be like, oh last Tuesday was the anniversary. I forgot. Not ever. But it's a day. It's just a day. It will pass. And someday it will pass and fire will not be the first thing I think about.

And this year there is a happy note to the day. The story in this anthology is the first story I finished after my accident, while I was early in recovery. My latest work, "The Last Seven Tribes of Ketchari", contains a thread related to my journey, the thread of finding courage in a hopeless situation and rising above it to become something more than you imagined possible.

In an original, fantastical world, it's about how we adapt to survive.