Nemonymous

For those interested, there’s an interesting market I’d never heard of before, which the esteemed author and Interzone e-subs slusher Jetse de Vries mentioned recently on his website. Nemonymous is a series of anthologies put out by Megazanthus Press, a British publisher, and edited by D.F. Lewis. The neat thing is that they publish stories — temporarily — without a byline. (Though they’ve taken to printing the contributors’ names, not in order of contributions, on the [back] cover.) That is, they publish your work anonymously, and then later on let the various cats out of the bag. There was even a contest to guess the authors’ names for the various stories, which was the reason de Vries mentioned it — he won! That sounds very, verrrrry neat to me.

The call for submissions and the guidelines for Nemonymous Eight: Cone Zero are up, and I’ve got this idea going that I had long, long ago, and kicked around elaborating on with a friend in novel form, though there was never really enough steam to get it running, and I think he adapted it (in part) to an RPG setting, but that was the end of it. I’ve still got this notion to make a short novel of it someday, but it seems it’d be worth it to try out a short story or novella first, and see how it works out. And I’ve got the perfect title and character for it.

But I can’t say anything much about it here, which will be strange. Keeping my writing to myself is not something I usually do: I like to blab about it, discuss and prattle on. It helps me because that’s how I often work my way through building a story up — by talking about the ideas inherent in it. But no such luck, this time, not if it’s to be truly anonymous.

(I may ask some friends to look it over, though… as long as they’ll let me swear them to secrecy.)

In any case, I know just enough to write a bad story about this guy, so I’ll need to pop by the library on the way to my office tonight for final exams. Thy have plenty of books on the subject, including ones I thought they didn’t have, so things are looking up for me.

But I think I’ll be setting this aside until January. I have a novella to rework and submit to Tesseracts, and a few short stories to finish drafting. I also have a ghost story to rework, a space-opera-ish thing to get feedback on, and, of course, a bunch of pages to write for A Killing in Burma, but there’s no particular time-deadline for those pieces, and there is one for Nemonymous… plus the idea for this particular story has been leavening for years, literally years, so I think I could probably use the sponge and make a pretty good bread, for a market that’s perfect for it.

I even have the perfect, um, title.

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