Crazy 8 Press celebrates its three-year anniversary this summer, and as part of the festivities they will showcase their first ever anthology, Tales of the Crimson Keep.

This collection will feature seven brand new stories from Crazy 8 Press authors Michael Jan Friedman, Peter David, Aaron Rosenberg, Russ Colchamiro, Glenn Hauman, Paul Kupperberg, and Robert Greenberger. Tales of the Crimson Keep, edited by Greenberger, will also feature an introduction by fellow author Kevin Dilmore, whose winning first line inspired the entire concept.

At Shore Leave 2011, Crazy 8 Press solicited opening lines to a story which would be written in round-robin fashion from the show floor. With a dollar donation to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, anyone was welcome to contribute a first line during that con’s Meet the Pros event. The following day, at the introductory Crazy 8 Press panel, the one-liners contributed were read aloud, with the audience voting for their favorite line.

Dilmore’s “There’s no way we’re going to get all of this mopped up in time!” was the hands down winner and over the next 36 hours, the Crazy 8 Press authors took turns in the tiniest space available, reviewing notes and writing what ultimately became Demon Circle. Friedman did a final polish and the completed eBook was released soon after with proceeds going to the CBLDF.

Now two years later, Crazy 8 Press is revisiting this spooky realm, with familiar and new characters in stories set before and after the introduction tale, which as an added bonus will be included in the Tales of the Crimson Keep collection. For the Crazy 8 Press authors who were not a part of the story’s creation, it presented an interesting challenge. “I had to be a quick study, tapping into the fiendish part of my writer’s brain.” Colchamiro said. “Wizards, demons, and The Keep itself. Okay, well … here we go.”

Tales of the Crimson Keep will be available in Kindle and Nook formats for $5.99 as of Friday, August 2. The print edition will debut during that evening’s Meet the Pros event at Shore Leave, and then be available through Amazon.

Crazy 8 Press has published more than thirty titles during its first years alone, with new offerings coming this fall, starting with Michael Jan Friedman’s I am the Salamander, the first Crazy 8 Press project to be funded via Kickstarter. As an expanded line of fiction, older works, long out of print, will be brought back beginning with Sir Apropos of Nothing by Peter David.

Additional details of Crazy 8 Press’ future will be unveiled at their panel during Shore Leave in Cockeysville, MD. They cordially invite all to attend.

And keeping with the tradition of The Crimson Keep, who knows what other surprises Crazy 8 Press will unveil …

I have been blessed through the years, attending conventions as a teen and getting a chance to chat with many of the greats of the day. Perhaps the first author I got to really chat with was Isaac Asimov, a perennial figure at the first few Star Trek conventions.  (It might have been, instead, David Gerrold with memory blurry as to what order I met these two.) We chatted about this and that, as you do at a convention and certainly nothing about writing.

The first time I spoke with an author about writing was Ben Bova, who came to SUNY-Binghamton in Fall 1976 to speak and since he was there as a guest of my professor, I got invited along to dinner before his talk. Bova was kind and encouraging about my interest in writing. This led to a potential job interview with Bova at Omni when I was graduating a few years later but a transit strike kept me out of Manhattan and the meeting never happened.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Theodore Sturgeon for Pipe Dream, SUNY-Binghamton’s campus newspaper, at the San Diego Comic-Con in 1978. We spent a good two hours at a bar and he was incredibly forthcoming about the craft and I was mesmerized.

Since then, I have had a series of encounters with literary and/or creative figures as I went from fan and student to professional. As a result, I was blessed to get to know many writers, producers, directors. But, this month we’re talking about our most unforgettable/inspirational meeting with one of these titans. Here, I stall because several compete with one another.

Two, though, involve houses. In 1983, I was in California and Starlog arranged for me to interview Nicholas Meyer, less about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but more about The Day After, his harrowing television miniseries that showed America what might happen should, the unthinkable become reality. He invited me to conduct the interview in his home and I got a sense of what success as a writer brings you. We talked about writing versus directing and his prose versus his filmed work, opening my eyes in many ways to the possibilities.

A few years later I was fortunate to cap a trip to San Diego with an invitation to visit the Wonderland that is Harlan Ellison’s home. While Meyer’s place was sparsely but tastefully furnished, Harlan’s house was and is a treasure trove. There are books everywhere, shelves three and four deep with books and comics and magazines. Draped over a railing were stories he was in various stages of editing for the final and still-forthcoming volume of Dangerous Visions, all ringing the desk and manual typewriter where he made words do magical things.

This was a writer’s home and it was something to envy and want for myself. Harlan and I have talked comics and life but never about writing, which is a shame. He turned 80 recently and I have no idea if we’ll ever have that chance, but his hard work and dedication to his craft have never left my thoughts.

The one that got away?

The truth is there have been a great many of them. So many that as I recall them now, it feels like it’s a miracle I got any work at all. But one stands out from the rest, I think. The one about the chain of dinner theaters, which will remain nameless, and the shortsightedness of the legal profession.

About fifteen years ago, a smart, aspiring TV producer with roots in the sports broadcasting world asked me to partner up with him. You see, he had a business relationship with this chain of dinner theaters (yeah, you’ve probably guessed who they are by now) and he had a vision that this chain could be the basis for a successful reality show.

I didn’t want to write for a reality show, I told him. I wanted to do an hour-long ensemble drama based on the broadly sketched characters in the dinner theater. He liked the idea. He pitched it to the management of the chain, who liked it as well.

I wrote a script and surrounded it with a proposal, and gave it to my partner (who is still a friend—the only lasting benefit of the whole shebang). He in turn peddled it at meeting after meeting, deftly unveiling its merits for the benefit of one New York network exec after another.

And one of them bought it.

That’s right. In fact, that exec was going to make our show the first of several dramas his network planned to roll out. We rejoiced. We were going to produce a TV show.

Of course, it wasn’t just our proposal that had wowed the network. It was the success of the dinner theaters, which nationally drew more people in a given year than did the New York Yankees. Still, it was a show, right?

Then we got a call from the management of the chain. Their lawyers had chimed in. “You’ve got a successful dinner-theater business going,” said the lawyers. “Why blur the picture by tying it to a TV show. What if somebody falls off a horse and sues you? You need this headache?”

Never mind that a TV show would only vault the chain to a new level of success. The lawyers prevailed. The chain backed out. And without their immense audience, we had no leverage with the network.

In other words, we were…cooked. Yes, that’s the word we’ll use. Cooked.

A few weeks later, I’m reading Inside Star Trek, a terrific book that I heartily recommend if you haven’t read it already. In the book, Herb Solow, the head of TV production at Desilu in the early sixties, had just come back from New York with orders for two offbeat, hour-long dramas. One was Mission: Impossible, which he had sold to CBS. The other was going to NBC. It was called Star Trek.

Lucy and Desi were pleased. Then their lawyers chimed in. “You’ve got a successful half-hour sitcom business going,” said the lawyers. “Why blur the picture by bringing in hour-long dramas? What if somebody falls off a spaceship and sues you? You need this headache?”

Fortunately, Lucy and Desi overruled their lawyers and produced the hour-long shows anyway, and the rest is history. Their law firm, by the way? The same one that advised the guys at the dinner-theater chain.

The same damn one…

I am not the person I was at 10 or 18 or 30 or even 50. I am certainly a more accomplished writer than I was in college or even at Starlog Press. Experience, age, and a little wisdom have made me better than I was and I hope with even more time and practice I will continue to grow. I remain justifiably proud of my stories and novels and books through the years, ever since I began with Trivia Mania back in 1984.

Still, there remains one nagging book, one that I truly screwed up and was not the right writer at the right time. Given the chance to redo one thing I’ve ever written, this is the one that immediately leaps to mind.

It was back in the 1996 so I had already been writing fiction for several years and received a call one day from the talented packager, writer, editor, and provider of chocolate Bill Fawcett. He had sold a three book series to Ace so they’d run under the house name David Evans and he needed them done fast. Fast like four weeks fast. Could I do one?

After he explained the premise about the Time Wardens, men and women who traveled the timestream to keep things neat and clean, he then said he picked three cities these stories were to set in. I was offered Time Station: Berlin which immediately brought up John F. Kennedy’s famous appearance and speech where he proclaimed, in German, “I am a Berliner!”, endearing himself to Europe.

I had an idea, an offer, and a stupid tight deadline. There was no series Bible and I, to this day, have no idea who the other two David Evanses were. The Internet was still an infant so the mass amounts of research about Berlin in 1963 and Kennedy’s visit meant time in the library, doing old fashioned research. There was nowhere near enough time to properly examine the city, the street maps, Kennedy’s itinerary, etc. I still had to invent original characters, tighten the springboard into an outline I could follow and write this over a month or so while still holding down my day job at DC Comics.

Why did I accept the assignment? It wasn’t Star Trek. A look at my bibliography will show that my only fiction up until that point was set in Gene Roddenberry’s universe. This was a chance to establish myself elsewhere, even if it was under a pen name. I could use the wiring challenge and the money so of course I said yes.

I gave it my best effort but even then I suspected my best in 1996 was not good enough. Bill accepted the manuscript and I don’t recall hearing much from Ace so I foolishly thought that I did better than I thought I did. The book was released on September 1, 1997 and it wasn’t long before I realized how wrong I was.

My first Amazon review said, “This was my first purchase of a book by Mr. Evans and it will be my last…Having been stationed in Berlin from 1966 through 1972, it quickly became evident that Mr. Evans’ knowledge of the physical layout of the city was deficient.” Ouch.

Another intelligent reader noted, “The premise of the novel itself isn’t bad, but the execution is disappointing, with little of the flair the author demonstrated in the previous book. Time travel is hardly even integral to the plot; it’s a few tweaks away from being a bland historical thriller. It’s especially disappointing as Evans’s rich concept could have supported any number of novels, though given the tepid execution of it here perhaps it is for the best that he stopped where he did.’ Clearly, my fellow Davids did better with the time they had.

The nicest review was found at Goodreads, stating, “In general I like time travel stories and I like this unassuming series. I read the other two long ago and somehow had missed this one. It’s a quick and fun read.”

Other reviews pointed out storytelling flaws and writing lapses that were missed and it hurts to see them so clearly spelled out for me.

So, imagine my surprise to discover this week that just last year, Audible released an unabridged version of the book, narrated by Gildart Jackson. For a mere $17.95 you can hear my writing at its weakest.

The premise remains a solid one so yeah, I’d take a mulligan on this novel.