Editing in Process: In the Stars I'll Find You by Bradley P. Beaulieu

In late 2012, author Bradley P. Beaulieu (pronounced "Bowl-yer") launched a Kickstarter campaign in order to self-publish a short story collection. The collection, entitled Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories, was successfully funded by the end of January 2013 -- and I had the pleasure of working with Brad on the editing of this collection. You can read my blog post of April 22, 2013, on this project, if you wish.

Two years later, on December 1, 2014, Brad and five other authors launched a new Kickstarter campaign -- "Six by Six: A New Kind of Spec-Fic Anthology" -- in which six authors each provided a collection of six stories. This Kickstarter was a rather unique idea involving, as I said, six authors (including Will McIntosh and Martha Wells), and was fully funded along two stretch goals by the end of December.

After Brad met his "Six by Six" Kickstarter goals and rewards, he then combined those six stories with four additional stories -- and put together a second collection of short stories: In the Stars I'll Find You & Other Tales of Futures Fantastic, which he also plans to self-publish.

Brad was fortunately satisfied with my work on Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten (You can read the author's acknowledgement in the first collection here.) because I was given the opportunity to work on this second collection as well.

As with the first collection, I performed a developmental review of the four new, previously unpublished stories:

"And a Girl Named Rose" (5,100 words)
"Born of a Trickster God" (16,900 words)
"Compartmentalized" (6,400 words)
"In the Stars I’ll Find You" (9,400 words)

Then, after Brad had reworked these stories as necessary, he pulled together the full collection of ten stories -- approximately 83,000 words of fiction -- and I did my line and copy editing thing. Even though I had already reviewed the four new stories, including them in the overall copy edit allowed me to catch any new errors that might have been introduced during the rework, plus I could then ensure consistency in word usage and such throughout the entire collection.

So, in addition to the four new stories above, the collection includes these six published stories (also in alphabetical order):

"Bloom" - first published in Realms of Fantasy, June 2008

"Chasing Humanity" - first published in Man vs. Machine, November 2006

"Flashed Forward" - first published in Help Fund My Robot Army, edited by John Joseph Adams, 2014

"No Viviremos Como Presos" - first published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, October 2007

"Quinta Essentia" - first published in Clockwork Universe - Steampunk vs. Aliens, edited by Patricia Bray and Joshua Palmatier, 2014

"Upon the Point of a Knife" - first published in The Crimson Pact, Volume V, edited by Paul Genesse, 2013

The original sources for these six stories are quite varied -- anthologies and magazines -- and since most readers don't have access to such a variety of publications, a collection of Brad's short fiction is the best way to read these stories. In the Stars I'll Find You will be published in both print and electronic editions later this year.

With these two collections, I've now read twenty-seven stories...and what continues to impress me with each new story is the breadth of content -- and the storytelling: from a medical procedure on a man's brain so he can control individual actions and memories ("Compartmentalized") to the relationship between a ship's AI and a young girl ("A Girl Named Rose") to unlocking the secrets of the fifth element ("Quinta Essentia").

I would recommend that you connect with Bradley P. Beaulieu: the author's website has links to Facebook, Twitter, G+, etc. so that you can stay informed of his activities, as I know he'll let his readers know when the new collection will be officially released.