Anthology ONE MONTH update

It has already been one month since the open call for "Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations" anthology was announced!

Each day I am amazed at the brilliant and gruesome ideas that are sent to me. I am so excited to work on this - This book is going to turn out really fantastic.

Big news, Big news:

It appears that I have found a publisher who is as excited to be a part of this anthology as I am! Once the contract is finalized within the next week or two, I will announce the details. The company is an independent publisher which specializes in horror fiction.

ALSO! I am in discussions with a few established authors to include their stories in order to really fill out this collection with fantastic writing. I will announce further details about this later as well, but they are authors who I have long admired and are deeply involved with the HDF writing world.

Statistics and selection process:

As of yesterday, July 22, I have responded to all inquiries and submissions.

The statistics for the first month of submissions are as follows:

I have so far received 44 submissions. I accepted 2 stories immediately, added 22 to the short list and declined 20. (NOTE that most stories will be short-listed first and final acceptances offered after open call is ended.)

Besides the United States, I have received submissions from 9 other countries, including representation from each of the six main continents!

I am adding stories to the short list based on three qualifying factors:

1. The story is interesting

2. It is without obvious flaw

3. It fits the theme of this anthology

Once a story achieves the nomination of the short list, I assign a rank (grade) to it, of which I will then select the best ranked stories after open-call has ended. If the short list becomes too long, I will begin rejecting stories throughout this open call process.

I anticipate that I will receive about two hundred submissions to this anthology. So far, I have short-listed about half of the submissions that I received and I expect that percentage to remain steady until the closing date of October 31.

The average word count per story so far is 4,371. My original estimate was to have a book of about 88,000 words which would calculate to 22 stories if the average word count was at 4,000 words. With a higher word count, it will be less stories accepted. Thus, if the current average word count of 4,371 remains, I would probably accept only about 19-20 stories. However, since I am adding in a few stories from established authors, I will try to increase the overall size of the book to about 100,000 words (estimating 3 authors' additional works), so that I can still accept the same amount of competitive stories. This is all a bit speculative right now and the numbers may change, but I just wanted to share my thought process.

I have received tales in many fiction sub-genres, the greatest amount being "Speculative Fiction". I would really like the overall feel of this book to be horror and dark-fiction oriented, so preference will be given to stories with those elements in it. With that being said, I do have room for tales of humor, experimental work, etc., as long as it relates somehow to a collapsed (collapsing) civilization, either real or imagined, and focusing on discovery of its genesis or destruction as a society.

Updates may be found at my blog, http://ericjguignard.blogspot.com.

Best of regards,

Eric