From the start, our goal for the Paradisi Chronicles was to make it a truly open-source universe, where any author could write a story, novella, novel, hey––maybe even a poem or a song—set in the universe we had created. What we didn’t know was whether anyone would be interested. Optimistically, we came up with a method of providing access to the World Bible we created and a procedure for an author who wanted to make their work part of the official Paradisi Chronicles canon to follow. (See For Prospective Authors).
What we didn’t anticipate was the response we would get when The Futures Chronicles Facebook group, headed by Samuel Peralta, learned of what we were doing from a facebook share by Hugh Howey. The Future Chronicles is a group of science fiction/fantasy authors and readers who have for the past year been putting together SFF short story anthologies by traditionally published and independent authors—generally around a specific theme. Currently there are The Robot Chronicles, The Telepath Chronicles, The Dragon Chronicles, The Alien Chronicles, The A.I. Chronicles, The Z Chronicles, and Alt. History 101 available on Amazon.
Samuel Peralta, who is the curator of this group, instantly saw the possibilities of producing an anthology of short stories set in our Paradisi Chronicles universe—and within 48 hours he had put out a call to his members for authors who might be interested in submitting short stories to what he was calling Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi.
Today, less than three weeks from this call, we have had almost thirty authors express their interest in writing in the Paradisi Chronicles universe, with a lively discussion going on between these authors and our original group over such geeky things as what you would call a tracking system on a space ship, how long it would take to make the shift from micro gravity to AGG, and how much of Florida might be underwater by 2092 if global warming continued at the current rate?
Needless to say this has been incredibly gratifying response to all the hard work we put in over the past year. In fact, the whole idea creating collaborative worlds has taken off, with two additional Chronicle Worlds open for interested authors—Chronicle Worlds: Drifting Isle and Chronicle Worlds: Feyland.
You can hear me talk more about how this all happened towards the end of the interview I just did for Hank Garner’s Author Stories Podcast.
And I hope you will all subscribe to this website so you will be the first to hear when the first volume of our Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi come out. Meanwhile, don’t forget you can go and pre-order most of the books coming out September 1 right now—go here for the buy links.
Louisa Locke, August 4, 2015
