MONDO SASQUATCH: The Latest News, Happenings and Personal Internal Fears!

Remember MONDO SASQUATCH? It's the Bigfoot trash-fiction anthology that Bookgasm, Cinema Fromage and I have been putting together, hopefully for a May, June or July 2011 release. Definitely by August. September at the latest.

When we undertook this endeavour, I gotta be honest with you: I had no idea how much work this was gonna be! I thought it was going to be all collect some stories, read some stories and, in a stroke of luck, get Harper-Collins to put it out, saving us a good lot of the job. Sadly, that last part hasn't worked out the way I hoped. But, hopefully, when the final product rolls off the print-on-demand factory line, you'll buy a copy, enjoy it and then, you know, it'll all be worth it. We've got a cover--designed by the incomparable Jim (THE GUILD, THE PLAIN JANES) Rugg--and I think it's a total work of art. You'd probably buy the book based on it. I'm kinda hoping you would.

As for the stories themselves, we received 50 or so entries and had to narrow it down to about ten. I honestly wish we had room for all of them, so picking out the ten best was insanely difficult and, often times, a maddeningly repetitive process of hand-written checklists and red-ink, but, in the end, I think I--and we--did a great job and picked all the right, most appropriate ones for this introductory volume. So, with that, the final selections for MONDO SASQUATCH are as follows:

• “I Have Always Wondered What Bigfoot Meat Tastes Like: An Introduction” by Louis Fowler
• “Arlo Felling Exists” by Richard Tiernan
• “Bigfoot and the Bone Face Murders” by Michael May
• “Bigfoot Must Die” by Frankie Marino
• “From Hell’s Heart” by Desmond Reddick
• “Incident at Crater Lake” by Casey Criswell
• “Roadside Attraction” by Matthew P. Mayo
• “Sacrifice” by Shawn Gilbreath
• “Sasquatch vs. El Chupacabra” by Douglas Waltz
• “Strike” by Michael D. Winkle
• “The Ballad of the Skunk Ape” by Jarret Keene
• “The Encounter” by Mike White
• “The Tale of Peter Rabbit and the Sasquatch” by Beatrix Potter and Rod Lott
• “The Tragic Hazing of Bryan Igfoot” by Eric Dimbleby
• “Theodore Roosevelt and the Great American Anthropoid” by Bill Adcock

Now, it's time to really get my ass in gear and work on the layouts. I gotta admit that this is the part where I feel like I am really in over my head! I want it to look not only good, but professional. I don't want it to be confused with every other carelessly designed self-published tome that seems to continually cross my path--as a book reviewer, at least once a week there's a new contender for the new worst book design I've ever seen and, sorry to say it, but people do judge books by their covers. I know I do. This type of extreme self-awareness make designing pretty hard to do, especially when self-publishing for the first time with few real resources. If you have any experience and want to help do layouts, by all means, please, e-mail me at damagedhearing@gmail.com. After all, we're all in this together, right bro? Right?