Paul Barnett, aka John Grant, sold his long novelette, “The Gara Smood,” to Vera Nazarian at Norilana Books for her forthcoming anthology Sky Whales and Other Wonders. Barnett/Grant writes of this story: “it’s been about twenty years in the writing, I think. I started playing with it as a fantasy of perception/surrealistic urban fantasy ‘way back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, but at the time, and every few years since then, it didn’t want to come together. Only when I was consciously writing stories towards my ‘mosaic novel’ Leaving Fortusa did a sciencefictional idea and a future-history idea come along and clamour to be melded in with the original fantasy. The three strands together gave a story that had a nice strong backbone as well as, I hope, some conceptual depth.”
He goes on to say, of the anthology itself, “I was amused to notice that, when Mike Allen announced his own sale to Vera for this anthology, he indicated his piece didn’t comfortably fit in any single genre—that it sort of straddled several, sort of, kind of, sort of… The same is obviously true, as you’ll gather from the paragraph above, of ‘The Gara Smood’. This is the kind of editorial policy that, as a reader, I like to see in anthologies, you bet!”