(and everything in between, below, beyond, beside)

By Kris Katzen

My first reaction when Steven Savile sketched his concept for Latchkeys:  WOW!  WAY COOL!

My second reaction:  me, too, please!

Steve graciously included me in with his diverse group of writers who are all scary talented.

Writing is so often solitary that when an opportunity comes along to collaborate with a bunch of pros on a project, it’s a great joy and a ton of fun.  With everyone’s vastly different backgrounds, personalities and perspectives, we set out to fill in some of the blanks Steve had left and build a framework we all could use.  It wasn’t contention-free, but all the debate and the back and forth made for something much different than any of us would have come up with alone: something exciting and unique to the Hive.

Which brings us to those Roaring Twenties, in the form of The Bootleg War, also known as Speakeasy Part One.  This story contributed a piece to our shared world, but more than that, it served as the first half of a story to be concluded by a different author in the group.

James Reasoner.

James is a gentleman through and through.  It was a huge pleasure to work with him.  We consulted and planned, shooting questions back and forth, figuring out exactly what story we wanted to tell, then deciding how to break it down, and what pieces to put where.   We hope we came up with a fast-paced thrill ride through the era of gangsters and molls and prohibition in New York City.

Many of the Latchkey‘s episodes showcase a particular character or two.  Unlatched introduced Tanglewood not just to the readers, but to Matt as well.  Kaitlyn played a major role in The Ugly Little Bloke and Jeremy took the lead in Nevermore.  For this story, we wanted a team effort from the get-go.  The rest of the Wardens are already seasoned adventurers.  Matt’s fitting right in with them.  James and I wanted the dynamic of all of them working together, showing how they all have fantastic skills, but together add up to so much more.  Upcoming installments will give Mercy, Marguerite and Will—and even Amina and Emmaline—their due.

For The Bootleg War, though, I spread around the action and gave everyone plenty to keep them busy—and get them into a heap of trouble.  Which I then passed to James to get them out of.  He did a masterful job, but that’s for him to talk about next month.

For now, I can’t praise the rest of the Hive enough for all their contributions to the project, and for everyone’s incredibly helpful and thoughtful comments which improved my story immensely.  I’m thrilled to be in such good company.  Special thanks to Steve for letting me play in his sandbox, and to James whom I worked with most closely on doing the actual writing.

Finally, any litany of thanks would be sorely incomplete without mention of the wonderful artist Vance Kelly and the lovely covers he’s done.

We’ve been pleased with the early response to Unlatched and The Ugly Little Bloke but we’d certainly love to hear from more of you. And if you like what you’ve read so far, please tell your friends. It’s been a little mystifying in this viral world of ours that we’ve had some trouble making people aware the books are available.

Meantime, we’re incredibly proud of the work Vance Kelly has done on the covers. We’ll be getting him to talk about the process next month but for right now, we thought we’d show off some of the process steps in the creation of a cover, using Nevermore as an example.

The rest of us at Crazy 8 Press also have plenty of other projects in the works and in May we’ll have a number of announcements that should carry us well into the summer.

As you know, we have plenty of work we do elsewhere, such as Peter David’s recent novelization of Battleship and Aaron Rosenberg’s recent Pete and Penny’s Pizza Puzzles for younger readers. My Star Trek: The Complete Unauthorized History is now available for pre-order so you shouldn’t miss out on that. And while Glenn Hauman hasn’t done much writing of late, it has more to do with the deluge of traffic ComicMix experienced during the recently completed March Madness event. Aaron and the Hivemind’s Paul Kupperberg are also among the contributors to Animal Planet’s Most Dangerous Animals graphic novel, which I edited and is now available.

But if that doesn’t convince you to rush out and download this for your reading pleasure, we’ve got a free PDF Aztlan1teaser for you!

It’s 2012. Maxtla Colhua is an Investigator for the Empire–an Aztec Empire that, having successfully repelled Hernan Cortes in 1603, stretches from one end of what we know as the Americas to the other. Now the Last Sun is upon Maxtla’s people, and someone has decided to punctuate it with a series of grisly murders reminiscent of the Aztecs’ pagan sacrifices in ancient times. Can Maxtla find the killer before his city is ripped apart and the Last Sun becomes the death knell for the Empire?

I am not a short story person.  I don’t tend to read them and I hate writing them.  It’s ironic, but writing a short story takes me longer than writing a novel.  Also ironically when I do write a short story most people comment (correctly) that it sounds like the setup for a series of books.  It always is because I think about big, large plots that can’t be completely condensed down into a few thousand words.

What makes Latchkeys so cool is that even though I was technically writing a short story, it was more like writing a chapter in a novel.  There’s an entire world we have built, rich characters that we’re just starting to explore on paper, and miles and miles of plot much of which has only yet been hinted at.  It is awesome.  I basically wrote chapter three for this epic story that I helped to craft the outline for.

I hope that’s how it reads to people.  When you have multiple writers it can be difficult to control tone and voice and make something flow smoothly.  One of the points of creating the Latchkeys universe was a bunch of us wanted to do something as a group showcasing our ability to work together and our ability to shine on our own.  I think we’ve managed to do that.  There are continuing style elements that let the readers know this is all the same big story.  There are also ways and places in which we can shine individually and bring our own creative drives to our individual chapters, er, stories.

So, start from the beginning.  Keep reading until the end.  Because let me tell you, this is one heck of a thrill ride.

Hold on, amigo. Before you donate the contents of your bank account to Bart Simpson’s favorite charity, tell your boss where he can stick that twelve-dollar raise he gave you, and go sky-diving off Mount Rushmore–get a grip on yourself!

It’s not really the end of the world. Not the end of the real world, I mean. It’s only the end of the world in Aztlan: The Last Sun, the first in my brand-new series of 21st-century Aztec murder mysteries– available now as an e-book from Amazon. The Nook edition will follow in a day or so.

Imagine if Cortes never conquered Monteczuma. Imagine if the Aztecs expanded their empire from Tierra Del Fuego to Baffin Bay. Imagine if 2012 rolled around and that empire was plagued by a series of grisly murders that recalled the human sacrifices of ancient days?

No need to keep on imagining. It’s all in Aztlan: The Last Sun.

People often ask me what it’s like to write with other people.  Frankly, it can be a nightmare or a rhapsodic dream. Writers tend to see their work as their children and get very upset when anyone else messes with their babies.  A writing collaboration, though, can be like happy, constructive co-parenting.  You make decisions together for the good of the family.  When this works well it leads you to have a stronger final product.

Latchkeys from the start has been a very different kind of product.  Instead of sharing the actual effort of co-writing each story all of us involved have merely shared the effort of creating the universe and setting up the premise for each story.  From my point of view creating the world is one of the best aspects of writing.  It is much more exciting than the actual job of putting the words on paper to tell the story.

With as many writers as we had we suffered from a wealth of ideas as we got this project going.  Compromise was the name of the game as we decided everything, including what to name the characters.  Individual egos were set aside and majority rule almost always applied.  That’s what led to us creating the name HiveMind.  We are all worker bees serving the collective.  It can be exhilarating and at the same time frustrating.  I for one, argued strenuously that Jeremy be named Biff.  You can see that I lost.  Ultimately that was okay, though, because the group’s voice was heard.  Plus I got to reference him once having the nickname of Biff in my story.  (Just in case you thought writers ever let anything go easily!)

Deciding who would write what stories was actually one of the simpler tasks as I recall.  I have a tendency to write very dark fiction so when it was clear that story number three needed to be something a bit creepy I was happy to hop up and down in my chair and say, “Me, me, me!”  Of course, I had to type that a few seconds later since none of my colleagues could see or hear me.  Which is probably a good thing.

One of the advantages of being a writer in the modern age is near instantaneous communication with co-authors.  This can be especially helpful when you’re scattered all over the world as this group is.  The only real frustration is time zones and figuring out when someone isn’t responding because they’re asleep.  When great ideas are blossoming forth in rapid fire succession and you’re sitting on the edge of your seat to see what others are going to say next at some point you have to be rational and tell yourself that people need to eat, sleep, or take time to work on other projects.  That’s just life in the Hive.

Here’s the cover for Aztlan: The Last Sun, which kicks off my brand-new series of 21st-century Aztec murder mysteries–probably the only series of 21st-century Aztec murder mysteries you’ll ever see. That is, until other authors see how it takes off and start to rip me — I mean, come up with Aztlan homages.

Nice cover, eh? So’s the price that goes along with that cover–only $2.99. Because here at Crazy 8 Press, we’re nothing if not sensitive to the havoc being wrought on people by the economy. (Also because a novella is shorter than a novel–but why split hairs?) Underneath this cover, you’ll find it’s still 2012–but in an alternate reality in which the Aztec Empire not only survived Cortes but went on to encompass what we know as the Americas. It’s in this world that Maxtla Colhua, Investigator for the Empire, has to solve a series of grisly murders as his calendar’s Last Sun drops toward the horizon. Can Maxtla find the killer before his city is ripped apart and the Last Sun becomes a death knell for the Empire?

Aztlan: The Last Sun. First the cover…and then the world!

We’re starved for feedback so if you’ve this or our first piece, Unlatched by Steven Savile, drop us a note.

I mean how can you not love a civilization that tore the hearts out of more innocent, trusting human beings than the Season 11 auditions for American Idol? Of course, the Aztecs first got their victims drunk and gave them a nice panoramic view of the kingdom from the top of an architectural marvel, so who–I ask you–are the real barbarians?

Anyway, I got to thinking…there’s been a lot of hoopla about the year 2012 because it marks the end of the Aztec/Mayan calendar. But what would the Aztecs have made of the year 2012 if their empire had survived that long? In fact, what would a 21st-century Aztec empire even look like?

And because I’m on a murder mystery kick (I and the rest of America, apparently), I further got to thinking…what if a series of murders took place just as the 21st-century Aztecs were about to close the books on their calendar and start a new one?

Which is where I got the idea for a series of mystery stories to be presented under the heading Aztlan–the name of the Aztec city where these stories take place. Not in the form of novels, because that would be almost normal, but instead in the form of e-novellas.

The plan is to publish the e-book Aztlan: The Last Sun later this  month and the e-book Aztlan: The Courts of Heaven a few months later, and then to collect them as a single, novel-length paperback in August. So all you 21st-century Aztec murder-mystery novella fans make sure to check this site for further announcements–or we may just have to get you drunk and treat you to that panoramic view of the kingdom.

But how many know of him as a writer of original science fiction and fantasy? As a reminder, there is his King Arthur trilogy, his Sir Apropos of Nothing books, and other novels and short stories.

There’s a lot fewer of you who know this than there should be because if you like his comics, you’re sure to enjoy his original visions. It’s certainly one reason he’s a part of Crazy 8 Press. He has been sharing new works such as The Camelot Papers and The Hidden Earth novels with you. Here comes something else for you to enjoy. Back in 2011, Peter sold the novelette “Bronsky’s Dates With Death” to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Locus named it one of the year’s best.

It’s a wonderful work and deserving of attention. More specifically, it’s worthy of your attention. The work is eligible for a Hugo Award nomination and the deadline for nominations is March 10. We’re offering the story free of charge if you just click over to here.