I’ve told the authors, but some of the rest of you are probably curious, too. So here’s an excerpt from the letter I sent them:

Some of you may have heard the rumor that Wheatland Press, our publishing partner for Twenty Epics, has run into financial trouble and had to cut back on pretty much all their projects other than the Polyphony anthology series. This rumor is true. Unfortunately there was an email mixup, and Susan and I didn’t hear about this as soon as Wheatland intended to tell us about it, so we’ve had to scramble a bit to make other arrangements.

After talking to a couple of other possible partners, we’ve decided that the simplest option, and the one that offers the best chance of still meeting our original goal of having the book out by the end of May, is just to publish it ourselves, directly. This shouldn’t have any noticeable effect on the book's availability or quality.

The main downside is that the book manufacturing service we’ve decided to go with (Lulu) doesn't offer a full range of print sizes, and we’ve had to reformat the book for a 6"x9" size rather than the 5.5"x8.5" it was originally designed for — this has eaten up some valuable time . . .

Plus there’s been the whole moving-to-Switzerland thing. :)

So, to make a long story short, that’s done now, and while the end-of-May schedule is a little tight, we still ought to be able to make it.

We’ve got a manuscript, and we’ve got a cover painting (pix soon). So we ought at least to have advance reader copies available at WisCon. An honest-to-goodness first edition if I can manage it, but that at the very least. If anyone has a really strong desire to proofread, now would be a good time to raise your hand. :)