event

TL;DR version:

What: A reading with Jessie Kwak, Grá Linnea, Andrew McCollough, and Mark Teppo
When: May 17th at 7pm
Where: Belmont Books (3415 SE Belmont St, Portland, OR)
Why: Because it could be done

A couple of months ago, my local sci-fi writer-friend mastermind group (the Tiara Club) decided we should do a reading.

Mark Teppo, an overachiever, decided that we should produce a physical collection of the short stories we’d be reading in order to sell at the event.

He started coming up with poignant literary covers. They were lovely.

But I was starting to get a little nervous they would give readers the wrong idea about, well, how high-brow the stories were.

“I wouldn’t want people to get confused when they read my story about space gangsters and space pirates fighting over space cocaine,” I wrote on Slack.

And Mark came back with this:

Perfect.

Introducing Space Cocaine. From the back cover:

It’s not literary. It’s not a themed anthology. Though, it definitely staggers across all sorts of interstitial slip-streamed speculative fringes.

Look, there are space pirates. There’s cocaine. There might be dragons. And stuff blows up.

You’re welcome.

On May 17th, the four of us (me, Grá Linnea, Andrew McCollough, and Mark Teppo) will be doing a reading from this ridiculous collection at Belmont Books in Portland.

(My story is from the Durga System universe — it’s titled Rogue and is currently only available to newsletter subscribers.)

The anthology will be available to purchase at the event.

Will it lead to other, equally ridiculous anthologies?

Don’t tempt us.

See you there.