Happy Goat Horror

Dark bleatings everyone! Today I’m here to tell you about a new werewolf anthology, set for release later this year, from French Press Publishing (an indie press owned and run by author Stephen Kozeniewski). The first thing to know, for my fellow authors out there, is that there are plans to open a submission call window. The second thing to know is that we badgered several amazing authors…er I mean… spoke with several amazing authors about contributing. The third thing to know is that wrangling all the people and elements we want to include is contingent on the Kickstarter campaign.

So before I move on to my plea, who’s involved? The aforementioned wrangled authors are:

Amanda Headlee (Till We Become Monsters, Consumed)

John Durgin (The Cursed Among Us, Livid Comics)

Somer Canon (You’re Mine, The Hag Witch of Tripp Creek)

Simon Clark (His Vampyrrhic Bride, Ghost Monster)

Rebecca Rowland (What Hath Women Rot, White Trash & Recycled Nightmares)

Mary SanGiovanni (Alien: Enemy of My Enemy, Chills)

And – and if you follow Happy Goat Horror at all, you’ll understand my ridiculous excitement level over this one…

TIM F***ING LEBBON! (The Silence, Among the Living, Coldbrook)

And to wrap this in the gorgeous bow it deserves, we have a cover designed by Matt Seff Barnes.

Obviously, any donation at all to the Kickstarter campaign is massively appreciated because no one is obligated to contribute, so we put our heads together and tried to come up with unique reward tiers. We have tiers that offer eBooks, print books, and merch, and then we also added some pricier but more special tiers that are author specific. We included everything in the lower tiers for the special tiers, and added things like author feature weeks here with the goats, and also some story editing services.

The Kickstarter runs until the end of this month (July 2024), so time is sort of the essence – even if you don’t chip in, I’d be so appreciative if you wouldn’t mind sharing this post, or news of the project somewhere. It really helps just to get the word out!

For authors, when we’re able to open the sub call, we’re hoping for werewolf stories that are a bit outside of the box. If you’ve got werewolf robots, rabid poodle weres, or anything else weird, we want to read it! I’ll be fielding the entries in the first instance so, you know, if you could somehow also work in evil witches or the apocalypse, that’ll likely impress me, just FYI.

And now, for my additional selfish (but hopefully slightly comical) plea….

Last time we released an anthology, we agreed to only spend what we raised, because deviating from that leads to financial madness. We did really well with the campaign but didn’t hit all of the stretch goals. “Oh nuts,” I said, “I guess we just can’t have as many open sub places as we hoped for then.” But oh no, Stephen and Wile E. Young (the other editor on that project), just went ahead and waived their own cut so we could fit more in. Not only that, but there were so many great submissions that they just went ahead and paid out of pocket to include a couple of extra ones. AND THEN, after learning they’d done that, one of the contributing authors drastically reduced his fee to help include one of those extra stories. Meanwhile, after turning in my own story early and already being paid for it, I was just sat there, the only editor on the team, with my cut. Like an asshole.

I fear that if something similar happens with STRANGE NEW MOONS, he’ll do it again. Guys… he’s like that, he acts all like “oh look I own a press and want to make money from all this hard work” and then he does things like not take any money for his time or contributions, whilst insisting on paying me for MY time and contributions (I work for him, you see, but don’t have a stake in the press – that’s his baby!), and then I feel like a big selfish dickheaded dickhead.

So please, I beg you, help us spread the word so our chances of complete success are raised and I can save face…

Once again, you can find the STRANGE NEW MOONS campaign here.

A-whoooooo!

and

bleeeeeat!