My New Novel: Rules of Order and Montag Press

I'd played around with speculative fiction in the past with my short stories. Elements of two of my speculative stories, "The Neighborhood Division" and "Lilac in October" were combined for my first attempt at something longer... my novella, Parable of Weeds, available: here

In the very early spring of 2020, I realized that my short story "Load" had the potential to be something longer. I started to develop it with the idea that maybe it could be a novella. After I started the writing, I was about seven thousand words in and was thinking that finishing the novella or novel would make for an excellent summer project.

Then, the pandemic hit. And lockdown hit. And our school moving from face-to-face to strictly online hit.

Since we'd had nine weeks of the semester already finished, I was mainly waiting for my students to send me written work... either for comments or for a grade. My approach to finishing the semester was to keep things as simple as possible for my students.

As I spent hours on the couch waiting for student emails to trickle in, I continued work on my manuscript. I ended up finishing a fifty thousand-word draft of what turned out to be a novel in six weeks. I then spent another three months rewriting (and slightly expanding) the draft until I felt it was polished enough for some small presses to consider it.

I did have an early acceptance of the manuscript, when it was titled Falling Sky. I wrote about how I ultimately turned down that offer: here

I did worry that turning down that offer might be turning down the only offer that the manuscript would receive. But, as it turns out, turning down that offer was the right decision. It wasn't too long after that I received another acceptance email... this time from the wonderful Montag Press (named after the title character from Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.)

It took awhile for us to move from acceptance to production, but I was fine with that because I was still busy marketing my short story collection, The Neighborhood Division (Whistling Shade Press).

When production started, I was very pleased. Charlie Franco, Montag Press' managing editor, was great to work with. He gave excellent feedback on some narrative issues. He even encouraged me to play around with some different titles, and together we agreed upon the much preferable, Rules of Order. He allowed me to suggest cover art and, with the expertise of Amit Dey, Montag Press designed the following cover/back cover.

It wasn't long after approving the cover that I began the proofreading/final edits stage. Again, Amit Dey was great to work with. I would send him edits, and he would send back the manuscript within a day or two for another read-through by me. Though I got sick of reading the story, Amit's thorough process allowed me to catch numerous proofreading errors (and even some consistency errors). Had I only had one chance to proofread, I surely would have left some errors in the manuscript. But Amit patiently returned the manuscript to me five times, and it was clear that he was willing to keep going until I was ultimately satisfied with my proofreading efforts.

The rest, as they say, is history. Rules of Order is now released and available for purchase. I would love if you'd consider taking a chance on it: here