This anthology is all Laura Anne Gilman’s fault.

A while back Laura Anne forwarded me an e-mail from author Rosemary Edghill, who was putting together a murder-in-a-fantasy-setting anthology. The e-mail came with a message from Laura Anne, which read, “You should do this.”

That’s Laura Anne, always big with the subtle.

I’d never written fantasy. I don’t even read that much of it, because after Middle Earth what is there? I like my speculative fiction hard, nuts-and-bolts, what happens next door. I want to go back to the moon and on to the asteroid belt and Mars and the moons of Jupiter and from there to Beta Centauri. Sword and sorcery is a little too woo-woo for literal-minded me.

But I confess, I’m afraid of Laura Anne, so I doodled around a bit, so I could say “See? I tried!” and she wouldn’t hurt me.

And then these two characters showed up between the doodles. Both women. One wore a sword, and the other carried a staff. They had magical powers, some of which appeared at puberty, some of which were acquired. More doodling, and they rode into town, one of them even on a white horse. A young woman was strangled, and by various magical means my duo discovered and brought the murderer to justice.

By the time I stopped doodling I had forty-two pages, and to add insult to injury it was a sword-and-sorcery tale.

It was also twenty pages too long for the anthology. Rosemary asked me to cut it to fit. I refused. I guess I thought my prose was too deathless to be tampered with. Yeah, right.

So after all that, my story didn’t even make the anthology.

Fume. So, I thought, I’ll put together my own magic-and-mayhem anthology. (Can we spell “hubris”?)