Automobilia At Last At Publication Destination

First seen on Facebook Sunday night: AUTOMOBILIA is finally available in Trade Paperback and Kindle Digital from Amazon.com. Now starts the work of promoting the book to benefit the contributing authors and provide some great reading entertainment for fans of that one machine that affects everyone’s life, the Automobile. The hardcover version will be available in February 2024. Please SHARE if you are inclined to help spread the word. In that it happens I have a story of my own in it. . . .

Or, via Amazon: Since the first automobiles rolled down a street, the range of human emotions attached to these machines has run from love to hate, humor to horror, joy to sadness. This book is a sampling of how fiction writers have viewed the automobile, from yesteryear to tomorrow.

Famous writers, experienced story tellers, and new literary voices are mixed together between these covers.

Automobilia is the first in a trilogy of stories and poems featuring that one machine that has changed the face of the earth, for the good and for the bad…the automobile.

Not much more is said, though it is a whopping 494 pages (“41 stories, 9 poems”), according to the site. And as for my small part, to quote this blog from some time past (cf. November 3 2020): I’d sure forgotten it, yes, a story originally sent on May 26 . . . 2016! Yes, that’s four and a half years. But today the word came from Editor Jason Marchi.

This will come as a shock to you after all this time . . . but after many interruptions, long waits on a number of permissions, and factors beyond our control, the AUTOMOBILIA book is finally nearing completion and will be published in August 2021.

We would like to include “The Christmas Vulture” in the anthology.

“The Christmas Vulture?” Originally published in Fall 2010 in UNTIED SHOELACES OF THE MIND, as well as elsewhere (cf. March 21 2012; December 23 2010), a tale of poor driving habits and an unexpected just-before-holiday rescue, this highway horror will now re-emerge in AUTOMOBILIA in, tentatively, August 2021. Other details were offered involving contracts and payment, to which I sent back my “yes” this evening.

As for AUTOMOBILIA, original guidelines having long been lost, I can still quote from THE GRINDER from way back when: as the title suggests an automobile should be such an integral part of the story that if removed the story collapses. While as for the rest, well, time will tell.

So, yes, such is the writing life, that some things may take a little more time than others. Re. the waitup from 2020 in this blog, see also January 11 2022, and December 10, 2021. And this isn’t even academic publishing, as with Dennis Wise’s SPECULATIVE POETRY AND THE MODERN ALLITERATIVE REVIVAL seen more recently (cf. January 15, et al.) in these pages.

But it has come, at last, and with it my “Christmas Vulture,” for more on which — and for possible ordering — one may check here.