I found myself at the Twin Cities Book Festival in 2010, standing next to Tyree Campbell, owner and publisher at Sam’s Dot Publishing. Tyree and SDP had published the first Minnesota Speculative Fiction anthology, Northern Lights: 20 MinnSpec Tales, and I was helping Tyree sell the anthology and other items to the people passing by his table.
Northern Lights was selling well, an anthology of stories by local writers being a hit with the Minnesota crowd. I asked Tyree if he would like to publish another anthology in conjunction with MinnSpec. He agreed, and we set a tentative publication date for early 2012. I brought Eli Effinger-Weintraub, another MinnSpec member, on board as copy editor.
I sent out a call for submissions to the group. The stories arrived in my email inbox. All of the stories were high-quality. These twenty stood out for various reasons. Of the twenty-one author’s, nine had appeared in the previous anthology, so it was good to get some new blood between the pages
This second anthology was significantly easier to get off the ground than the first, proving the value of both networking and having a product that sold reasonably well against which to measure another potential project. It is my hope that you enjoy reading Sky-Tinted Waters as much as I enjoyed putting it together!
Michael Merriam
Hopkins, Minnesota
2012
With Sky-Tinted Waters, award winning small-press publisher Sam’s Dot Publishing and the 350+ member strong Minnesota Speculative Fiction Writers follow up their successful Northern Lights: 20 MinnSpec Tales anthology with twenty new tales certain to thrill, entertain, and illuminate. Within these pages the reader will find exciting fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories featuring:
…Rampaging steam-powered constructs
…Bioengineered killer squirrels
…Military serums filled with nanotech
…A demon who pounces on mispronounced words
…An invisible flying pony
…The two worst friends in the world at the edge of space
…And fourteen more tales of adventure, enchantment, humor, terror, magic and science gone wrong, the unexplained, and the unanticipated by twenty authors ranging from debut talents to established professionals in the field of speculative fiction.
Sky-Tinted Waters is available from Sam’s Dot Publishing.
