The paperback editions of eMergent Publishing’s Chinese Whisperings anthologies launches today. The publishes, Jodi Cleghorn and Paul Anderson, are both part of the #FridayFlash community as are many of the authors involved. I encourage everyone to drop in on the official launch party over on Facebook and leave an encouraging word or two, and seriously consider the purchase of a copy of one or both of these excellent collections. The launch party runs through Friday. You can also follow the #pangaean hash tag on Twitter where many of the authors from the Yin and Yang are live tweeting as their characters. The Yin and Yang Book revolves around the collapse of the fictional Pangaean Airlines, thus the hashtag.

The Red Book is the first of the CW brand and features ten interconnected stories arranged in a circular fashion. This means you can start reading at any point and work your way around and still get the full impact. It is a very cool concept. It is set in a small university town somewhere in North America and deals with ten characters who “grapple to stay sane in an insane world.”

The Yin and Yang Book is also an experiment in collaborative writing, but here the stories are arranged in more of a “sliding door” arrangement, where characters, situations, and timelines come together in unexpected ways. There are twenty stories from contributing authors, (ten men and ten women – the Yin and Yang of the premise), which are tied together as a unified whole via a the prologue and epilogue, written by Jodi and Paul. The effect is something more than an anthology, bordering on a novel. Again, quite an interesting concept and a fun project to be involved in. Yes, I do have a story in the the collection: No Passengers Allowed.

If you look at the list of authors involved you will find many names you are quite familiar with. Please drop in and wish them well. And remember, Christmas is just around the corner.
~jon