After many months of planning to release a second edition of The Ruin of Beltany Ring: A Collection of Pagan Poems and Tales, I began work on the publishing end of the project this week and then promptly dropped the idea. Originally, I had thought to unpublish the first edition and replace it with a second that bore my own ISBN. But this week I realized that was a more cumbersome and imperfect process than I cared to undertake for a body of work already so long in the tooth (some of these stories and poems are a decade old). So I dropped the paperback and Kindle prices and re-enrolled the e-book version in KDP Select to maximize future profits in the only place the collection had ever sold (sorry, Kobo users).
But as you might recall, I recently went on a three-day artist's retreat to record the audio for this collection and for Grandmother Mælkevejen's Belly. I didn't finish the collection, but I do have a handful of stories and poems in the can. I gave it some thought and decided to let this collection continue to be the practice work it had always been for me and use the pieces I have to hone my audio mixing skills.
The result will be a series of free stories and poems released once a week until I've exhausted what I have in the can. They'll be in MP3 format, and you'll be able to download them from my new SoundCloud account for use on your favorite listening device. If you like what you hear and haven't bought the collection, well then, you know where to find more stuff like it.
Here's the first one. Please let me know what you think!