The Fungi anthology by Innsmouth Free Press is now out (the official release date is 1st December, 2012). It has a mushroom person on the cover! You can’t get much more shiny than that. When my contributor’s copy arrives, I’ll put it on the shelf and admire the mushroomness.
But back on the word part. My story is called Letters to a Fungus, and is a bunch of letters written to a fungus. Admittedly, I don’t get any elaborate title points for that one*. It’s also my first published story about fungi, which is funny considering how much I like them.
The basic inspiration was giant fungi, such as the one discovered in Oregon. People tend to assume the mushroom is the fungus, but a lot of the mushrooms in an area may be produced by a single fungus (much as a bush may have lots of berries, but it’s still a single bush). As fun as mushrooms can be, we shouldn’t ever forget the real body of the fungus is out of sight, and might not be what we expect.
The Fungi website has a short piece on why they picked my story, and my answer to, “Why write about fungi?” (Though I’ll note I’m not a gigantic mushroom with a laptop**.) The Innsmouth website has a page with purchase information, including links to online shops and the option to buy directly from the publisher.
There’s also a Goodreads giveaway going on, ending on December 31, 2012. It’s open to people in the US, Canada, UK and Australia. You can add the book to your to-read list, or review it, from the Goodreads pages: hardback, paperback and Kindle versions.
That’s all the linkage. If you get hold of a copy, I hope you enjoy it!
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* If it’d been a series of limericks written to a cat, and been called Letters to a Fungus, I could call it surrealism. But as it is, it’s one of those stories where people will ask, “What’s it about?” because they don’t entirely believe it really is a series of letters to a fungus. Maybe they’ve never written to a fungus. Some people are anti-fungal like that.
** I’m actually a tiny mushroom with a desktop.
# The art is by Oliver Wetter.