Greetings from NO! First, I must apologize for my relative silence (I feel like I’ve done that before, and if so, again); I meant to get the ball rolling on promotion for Mooncalves over the last month and a half, but life conspired to distract me. Long story short, I was laid off from my previous position in early October, and my job search consumed two months of my day-to-day. I considered mentioning that, here on the blog, but even as this change did not and has not affected Mooncalves‘s status, doing so would have only raised concerns to be addressed, and I had neither time nor energy to field that own-goal.
As of yesterday, two things happened: I gained employment once again, and the entire run of Mooncalves hardcovers began shipping to the new NO HQ in Corvallis, Oregon. It should arrive before the end of the year, and contributor copies will be going out soon thereafter. I’m moving from Denver for my new job job, and while the move will take time and money, over the next few months my income should be increasing quite substantially; there is a real possibility that NO could spread its wings. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Mooncalves is not a business venture, in that I didn’t factor in potential sales in the cost of making it real.
So after my move next week, I’m committing to doing some promo, here on the blog, and hopefully elsewhere. I’ll also fully build out the preorder/ordering page (you can currently preorder here: https://no-press.org/mooncalves/) to reflect all the details of what you’ll be getting. Look out for that in the coming weeks!
Beyond that, I’ve signed NO’s second release: the third collection from Adam Golaski, tentatively titled Stone Gods. Adam’s work has always captivated and shaken me, and this collection is, I dare to say, his most startling work yet. So if Mooncalves is NO Press Editions #1, Stone Gods will be NOPE#2. It will get its own post soon.
One other bit of housekeeping, certainly not the least: Given that I’m my own boss, I’ve reflected on the previously announced June release date for Mooncalves, and given that Stone Gods will more than likely be ready for sale around that time, I’m planning on bumping Mooncalves up its original April release, perhaps even earlier. It may depend on the promo I can put together; I feel I owe it to my authors not to be haphazard about it.
Everything is coming together, the culmination of years of work. At this point, waiting is the hardest part.
Hello for the second time! Quiet as this site has been over the last six months (???) much has happened in the interim. I’m here with you now, dear reader, to speak on those developments.
In a nutshell: Save for the half of payment due on delivery of the hardcovers, everyone involved with MOONCALVES has been paid in full for their hard work. McNoughton & Gunn have been contracted for the printing – white linen, blue foil stamping beneath the dust jacket – but with that industry in a bit of a state due to supply chain issues, there is a pretty significant delay. There’s just no getting around it.
This puts the delivery of the books at approximately 12/29/22. People far more seasoned than me in the publishing business have advised me to provide a cushion between product delivery and initial sale. Ergo, I’m moving the release date, such as it is, from March 31 to July 2023.
I’m hoping to be at Readercon in Quincy, Massachusetts from July 13 to 16, 2023. The plan would be to hawk in person there (keeping in reserve however many preorders this thing gets) and maybe hold some kind of event. We’ll see!
That pushing of the date will also give extra time for promo readers / potential blurb writers. One of the lessons I’ve learned winging my first project as a publisher is that the workflows involved can clash with one another… I elected to have the stories in Mooncalves copyedited a la carte as they were accepted, which left us with a more or less fully proofed manuscript when the final acceptance was confirmed (some of my slips were caught after that point by beta readers Adam Golaski and Chris O’Halloran, to whom I owe a debt).
Still, this meant that the inclusion of blurbs and the introduction I had arranged in the printed product became complicated. With the printer requiring finalized material before I could secure a spot on the calendar, and delays already significant, I elected to leave out those elements from the hardcover. They will be present in the digital version.
I contracted a smaller printing service with extremely quick turnaround to crank out 25 softcover galleys. They arrived over my August vacation. The cover turned out just a tad darker in shade than it should have, but they couldn’t avoid being pretty, given HR Hegnauer’s design work. Contra the cover warning, the text in it is final:
One of 25 paperback Mooncalves galleys, printed via Bookbaby
Of the 25 copies, a good half have already been sent out to reviewers, writers, and blurbing folk who prefer paper to digital print. I’d like to hold some copies for annual best-of consideration come 2023. The work in Mooncalves is certainly worthy. People who’ve read it already have their favorites.
As to what happens after July 2023, I have some idea of what I’d like to publish – I have already read some very exciting things – but there’s nothing else to announce just yet. Soon.
I really cannot wait for you to read these stories.
By way of introduction, my name is John, and this is the site for NO Press. Our first venture is an anthology of original fiction called Mooncalves, featuring stories solicited from authors acclaimed and unsung, and due for release in early April 2023. In this introductory post I’ll explain how Mooncalves came to be and explain where it is, as a project, in February 2022.
It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been less than a year since I sent out the first exploratory messages and emails regarding what would become Mooncalves. Time has moved strangely enough with the pandemic that, as of this writing, continues to befall us. The notion of becoming a publisher occurred to me in June 2021. I was visiting family in a somewhat remote part of Oregon, and the pandemic had me feeling cooped up even when I wasn’t. During that time I could either be found reading (at that time, M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart and the NYRB edition of William Sloane’s The Rim of Morning / The Edge of Running Water) or riding bikes while listening to John Langan’s The Fisherman. Drought was hitting western Oregon hard, but you wouldn’t know it by looking; everything was still green.
I could call Mooncalves and NO Press a response to those conditions, to the surrealism of living through crises that, contra the movies, could be and were ignored by the engines of American life (and subsequently generated, is still generating, mass death). But mostly I loved fiction, wanted to support it, wanted to generate what I personally liked and aspired to read. I have loved short fiction since I was a boy reading Philip K. Dick’s “Upon the Dull Earth” in the bleachers at football games, brushing falling snow off the pages.
In recent years I’d come to admire the curation of outlets like Undertow Press, Tor and Ellen Datlow, the Nightscript collections, Black Static, New Genre. As much as I loved them, I was seeing many of the same names repeated in extant markets, editors’ stables developing, TOCs partially calcifying year to year. I loved horror fiction and “the weird” but I longed to see preserved a borderlands of genre, from which certain elements could exist immanently within the fiction, where the fiction could exist without demand for a particular named allegiance. Even “weird fiction” had become, in my view, codified to some extent.
I wanted to see more of that unnamed, nationless fiction. I wanted to preserve – or perhaps create – the borderland. Mine was a gnostic feeling: If I described the ideal thing that I was looking for, it would wilt and dissipate. So with that same spirit of pretense I use to describe all of this, I set to create a space for that fiction to exist. Hence NO Press, and Mooncalves.
I’d been corresponding with some writers I admired, discussing the faint possibility of a periodical, but I was conscious of the continual effort it would require to maintain. The better suggestion put to me was an anthology in hardcover. Having just read and admired such releases from Centipede Press and Tartarus Press, the idea took root very quickly. I hired HR Hegnauer to create a mock cover, from Odilon Redon’s painting Head Within An Aureole, and looked to the aforementioned presses for measures of quality that I wanted to meet in printing.
I resolved from very early on not to open submissions to the public, at least for this first book. I sent pitches tailored to each writer I wanted to solicit (this is less work than it appears; if you know who you want, you’ll be able to tell them why why) with the promise of payment on draft acceptance. I think because of those efforts my response rate has been, from what I understand, unusually high. Mooncalves is not a themed anthology, but my initial pitches to writers requested (after Brian Evenson and Eugene Thacker) a kind of horror in which it’s unclear whether the wrongness is in the world of the story, or in its characters. Later on, as the anthology began to assert its own shape, this pitch changed to what M. John Harison called “Anti-Pavlovian” writing: formally experimental and cleaving toward the uncertain.
8 months after those first emails, counting the 14 stories I’ve bought, copyedited and sequenced plus the small handful that are informally accepted and in revision, I’ve got roughly 80,000 words of a prospective 90-100. I expect the final manuscript to come together in April or May; I’m currently exploring the exciting world of printing and storefront logistics.
By May, I’ll also have endsheet illustrations in graphite from Justine Neuberger – here’s an early draft of one such illustration:
Art by Justine Neuberger
The current confirmed Mooncalves Table of Contents includes stories by:
L. Marie Wood
Mark Meyer
Ernest Ògúnyẹmí
Thomas Mavroudis
Sofia Samatar
Briar Ripley Page
Steve Rasnic Tem
Lisa Tuttle
Adam Golaski
Christi Nogle
JAW McCarthy
Janalyn Guo
Glen Hirshberg
Elwin Cotman
More to be announced…
Once the final manuscript is complete and the TOC set in stone, I’ll begin author interviews and other entertainments in the leadup to April 2023. An electronic version of the book will be rendered after a period of a few months. I hope to produce an audio version, but all my focus is presently on the print version of Mooncalves.
Cover Mockup by HR Hegnauer
Thank you for reading! I hope you’re as excited for this strange little book as I am. More to come! John WM Thompson
