Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown? Jolly old town!

It's Oz day! It's Oz day! Oz Reimagined is available now from a bookstore or online retailer near you. I am over the moon, because Oz is the fairyland of my childhood, Oz is where I always wanted to wake up (when I didn't want to go to Gallifrey; my real ideal would have been a pair of silver slippers and a trip to the University of Gallifrey to become the first rainbow-riding Time Lady), and now I am a part of Oz. And that's genuinely amazing.

There are fifteen stories in this book; all are available to buy as Kindle singles, which is an interesting experiment that I've never been involved with before. According to Amazon's webpage for my story, "Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust," some of them may also be available for Amazon Prime members to borrow for free. I haven't read the full anthology yet, but I trust a lot of these authors, and I have faith that it will pass my "must contain three stories worth keeping on my shelves" benchmark.

Now I just want to address something that I've seen crop up in several reviews, because I seriously and genuinely do not want anyone buying this book under false pretenses: this is not an Oz sequel. This is not an homage filled with loving continuations of the canonical Oz. These are stories reimagining Oz, much like Syfy's Tin Man, or the fantastical ongoing comic, Namesake. They are not for children. The book even says so on the cover. Picking this up because you want a children's book will do you a disservice, and may cause you to have Vegemite issues with some otherwise fine pieces of writing.

My story is an urban fantasy. Dorothy has grown up and is living with Polychrome, in a committed lesbian relationship. Is this because I wanted to stain someone else's childhood? No. It's because when I was a little girl, I genuinely believed that Dorothy and Ozma were going to be married someday, and could support that claim with examples from the text. Maybe I was projecting, but that was the memory I went back to when it came time to write my story: my earnest belief that Dorothy was, well, a "friend of Dorothy," and would never marry a man, whether she grew up or no. People get hurt in my story. People die. And I am not the only one who approached the kind of themes in my Oz story that I approach in my day-to-day writing.

Please, pick up this book if it sounds interesting. I'm incredibly excited about it, and I hope you'll love it, just like I hope that the general "you" will love everything I write. But don't pick it up for your ten-year-old and then look astonished when they ask you to explain something you'd been hoping to put off until later.

Oz!

Tags: publishing news, shameless plea, short fiction

ebartley

February 26 2013, 16:45:12 UTC 4 years ago

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The Kindle singles are $1.99 each. The entire book is $5.99. I think the singles are mostly useful as a courtesy to readers who are interested in the author(s) they follow but not in Oz.

I prepurchased the anthology from Amazon, started reading en route to work today. So far it's all good stuff, but whether I like any given story is hit or miss simply because whether my concept of Oz can stretch to match some but not all of the worlds depicted in the book. I suspect everyone will find three stories worth keeping but the selection of *which* three will be different (even more so than usual for a good anthology.)

Your story made me wonder if Dorothy's perception of Ozma is accurate. It's even sadder if Ozma, like Dorothy, is a basically good person doing the best she can in a rotten situation. We don't know the limitations of Ozma's power beyond that she's unable to simply send people back to the real world.

Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown? Jolly old town!

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