Scott Dyson talks about putting the anthology together

When I first saw the call for this anthology in the Horror Writers' Net group, I wasn't interested.  I didn't want to write a new short story for it.  I didn't have any ideas.  I was pretty busy with life, having college kids getting ready to return to campus and a practice that was still figuring out how to handle COVID.  So how, one might ask, did I then end up contributing a story and being the primary driving force behind actually getting it published?  

I thought about it.  Yeah, even though I had decided that I wasn't interested in writing a story for it, I couldn't get the theme out of my head.  I was part of an anthology called QUANTUM ZOO back in 2014 (or thereabouts) and we were given the theme of writing a story about zoos.  And I had one I hadn't finished that I called (for lack of a better title) "The Zoo Planet."  Yeah, it was science fiction. But it came to mind as I read the call, and so I finished it and submitted it.  And lo and behold, it ended up being one of the chosen twelve stories, with the title "Playing Man."  

The other stories were loosely associated with the word "zoo."  Some were SF, some were horror, some were virtually uncategorizable.  I loved  that the authors had gone to so many places with that single word.  

Chaos seemed to be a similar sort of word.  And I had a story, written back in the 1990's as an entry in a contest for our reading and writing forum on Delphi Internet Services, that I thought just might fit.  That contest was one of those that gave you six words and an opening sentence, and you had to construct a story around them. I had previously published the story in my collection, 14 Dark Windows. 

I decided to update and rewrite that story, taking into consideration our pandemic.  I thought it fit the theme of "The Gates of Chaos" well.  Gone is the first sentence (which was, if I recall correctly, "All things are found in the blood.").  I imagine that at least some of the words from the six word list are still in the story, but I don't remember what they were, so I can't be sure.  

Now I had a story, but the anthology was falling apart.  No one was doing anything.  It was going to fade away.  James Miles had written a story and left it in the comments section of a post, so I grabbed that, copied and pasted it into a document, then said, if you all want to send your stories to me, I'll format them if Will does the cover and I'll make sure it gets published.  

I wanted to do it right.  So I developed a contract, solicited help from friends in the forum, and finally, garnered commitments from enough authors to fill out the volume.  My original plan was to simply publish it as an ebook, but the authors' ambitions exceeded that plan.  I had no idea how to format the artwork into the template I use for my formatting process, so again, I solicited a little help from my friends, and it became what it is today.

So here it is, as an ebook.  A paper version is coming soon.  But I'm proud of it.  I love the variety.  I love what the authors did with the theme we provided.  I love the artwork for all the stories, including my tale, "America's Pastime."  (Yes, it's about baseball.) And I love that we created this and overcame the challenges that arose along the way to get it published and out there in front of our fans.

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Scott Dyson is a writer of horror, mystery and science fiction from the Chicago, Illinois area.  He is married with two college-aged boys.  He is the author of four novellas, three short story collections, and one novel.  You can find more about him and his writing at scottdyson.com.  

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