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As with the first collection, I performed a developmental review of the four new, previously unpublished stories: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

Bradley P. Beaulieu Has Booked Passage

Back in April, I published a blog post highlighting my then current project: copy editing the crowdfunded short fiction collection, Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories, by Bradley P. Beaulieu (pronounced "Bowl-yer").

Well, that blog post was four months ago, and I now hold in my hand my contributor's copy of Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories, with cover art by Sang Han, and original black and white illos by Evgeni Maloshenkov that open each of the seventeen stories.

The book is a trade paperback, and the quality is as good as, if not better than, books published by any New York publisher. I'm quite impressed with this book, and pleased to have been a part of this crowdfunded project.

I want to thank Brad Beaulieu for providing me the opportunity to work on this project with him (Here's to hoping there will be others in the near future!) and for his kind words, which he shared with readers in the book's acknowledgements:

To Marty Halpern, you have my thanks for lending your keen eye to the three new stories, and then applying it again to the entire ms. This collection would have been riddled with errors without your help.

Aw, shucks. Thanks, Brad.

Bradley P. Beaulieu's Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten

Artwork by Sang Han

Fate (if you believe in that sort of thing) has a way of, occasionally, flipping reality onto its head.

I have worked for Night Shade Books for these past nine years: the very first book I worked on was Adam Roberts's Swiftly, which I completed in May 2005; the last book I worked on, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Seven, edited by Jonathan Strahan, was completed in January of this year. In the course of these nine years, I edited, line edited, and/or copy edited content for approximately 190 books for Night Shade. 190. One of these days, I just may list all the titles. Unfortunately, I should have stopped working for Night Shade at least six months ago, but we'll leave that discussion possibly for another blog post.

About the same time I was wrestling with the decision whether or not to take on another Night Shade project (which I didn't, thankfully), another author was wrestling with a similar decision: Bradley P. Beaulieu (pronounced "Bowl-yer") was owed money by Night Shade Books (Aren't we all?) and the publisher had decided to push out volume three of his Lays of Anuskaya trilogy for at least another full year. Brad chose then to leave Night Shade, take volume three, The Flames of Shadam Khoreh, with him, and self-publish the book. He explained all this in a blog post entitled "A Slight Change of Plans," which he published on February 19, 2013.

Now, while all this was going on, Brad was also running a Kickstarter campaign for his short story collection, Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories. Funding ended for Brad's collection on January 11, with the primary goal reached, as well as all six of the stretch goals.

Which brings us to the present: Bradley P. Beaulieu was in need of an editor for Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten, and I was in need of a new editing gig -- and I am pleased to announce that I will be working with Brad on this project.

Initially I edited the three stories written exclusively for the collection as part of the Kickstarter stretch goals:

"To the Towers of Tulandan" is a prequel story to his Lays of Anuskaya trilogy (The Winds of Khalakovo, The Straits of Galahesh, and the forthcoming The Flames of Shadam Khoreh).

"Prima" is somewhat of a sequel story to the trilogy: the story takes place 25 years after the end of The Flames of Shadam Khoreh, but is not related to the main events in the trilogy.

"Unearthed" is a prequel story to the world of Bryndlholt, a new middle-grade series that Brad has recently begun writing.