At the Super-Stupendous MOD Magic & Variety Show this Thursday, we’ll be collecting canned and nonperishable foods for the LA Food Bank. Every donation of a can, box of cereal, jar of peanut butter etc. will earn you a raffle ticket for cool prizes at the event, including T-shirts, signed books, and more!

Here’s dat FB invite again

These pictures are of the press kit for the upcoming Italian version of MOD1, La Macchina della Morte! The exclamation point is not in the title of the book, that is just me being excited. The Italians are going all-out with a promotional blitz that includes custom bookmarks inserted into other books in stores, point-of-purchase ads and displays, media coverage in the Italian press, even some sort of app. It’s incredibly exciting to watch a large publisher’s promotional machine swing into action on our behalf. I hope the book does well in Italy when it comes out next year! Tell all your friends in Italy to buy a copy!

Oh and if you have friends in Germany, tell them to buy one too, when the German edition comes out in January.

Oh and if you have friends in Spain, tell them to buy one of the Spanish versions too.

If you have friends in France, you might as well tell them too.

Ditto for all your friends in Croatia, Korea, Japan, and Israel.

That’s right — there will be eight different foreign editions of MOD1 coming out next year across the world, and we are just pleased as punch! I hope all of the covers will be as cool as that flowery skull design.

We’ll be reading from the Italian press kit (and doing many other things) at the Super-Stupendous Magic & Variety Show in Los Angeles this very week! It’s on Thursday night, the 17th, 8pm at the Fake Gallery in Hollywood (4319 Melrose Ave, 90004). Admission is free. Drinks and snacks will be served. I will be there in person along with MOD illustrators Kris Straub and Kevin McShane, and Ryan North will be there via Skype (for you to chat with!). We have a Facebook invite too. There’ll be magic. Music. Games. Talking — including the official public announcement of the stories that will comprise MOD2. If you can’t come, watch the livestream right here on the blog. So excited about this.

I’m excited to see a magic show, sure. But just as much, I’m excited to say “I want to do something fun. What’s stopping me? I guess…NOTHING” and then I just put on a dang show. I really hope you can come be a part of it.

If you have not heard from us regarding your MOD2 submission

Please contact us right away. All emails should have gone out by now. Some are bouncing back. We do what we can.

Regarding the illustrations

Here is some demographic information on the illustrator submissions! There were 151 valid portfolio submissions in all. 85 were from men and 66 were from women, for a % split of 56/44 — it’s super great to see it be that close.

110 submissions (72.8%) came from the US
18 submissions (11.9%) came from Canada
9 submissions (6.0%) came from the UK

We also had:

Australia: 4
Greece: 3
Ireland: 1
Hong Kong: 1
China: 1
Indonesia: 1
Thailand: 1
Sweden: 1
New Zealand: 1

for a total of 12 countries and 4 continents represented. Not bad!

We will be contacting the artists we wish to hire soon. We will not be contacting the ones we don’t need for MOD2, but we will be keeping all info on file for any future projects.

Future projects

What of them? Thanks for your great suggestions in the comments to the last post. We’re taking all options under advisement, although we are definitely keeping MOD2 at the forefront of our attention right at the moment. We still have to edit the stories, commission the illustrations, and put the book together, which is a big job. But we are definitely carefully considering possible next steps as well. So keep the ideas coming!

Evidence Photo Contest Winners

Will be announced this week.

An MOD subreddit

Is now a thing.

We leave you with

Tiffany showing a little team spirit. MOD apparel is available in our TopatoCo shop.

Most of you who submitted stories to MOD2 should have by now received an email from us. There are still a handful that have yet to go out, as we correct typos in email addresses and so on, but they should all be sent soon. If you have not heard from us by Tuesday November 8, please contact us with the title of your story and the email address you used to submit. With 2,000 emails to send, it’s possible a few got missed, for which we apologize. Thanks for your patience!

Okay, so what now?

Matt will be at the Minneapolis Indie Expo this weekend along with MOD1 artist Katie Sekelsky and (on Saturday morning only) MOD1 author John Chernega! Stop by, say hello, pick up a book or bring yours to get signed, and grab one of our free MOD2 sampler booklets!

Some folks have been posting their stories online. If you’d like to read some of the stories we couldn’t fit in the book, you can search the #MachineofDeath hashtag on Twitter, or one enterprising reader has also set up rejectedmod2.tumblr.com. There’s also a list growing here at Tree Lobsters.

The official title and full table of contents will be announced at our Super-Stupendous Magic & Variety Show in Los Angeles on November 17. It’s a free evening of entertainment we’re putting on as a special “thank you” to celebrate a year of MOD — and you’re invited! But even if you can’t make it to L.A., you’ll be able to watch a live stream right here on the site.

And what’s next? We’ve made no secret of the fact that we want to publish more of your stories. We’re going to focus hard on MOD2 for now, but then what? More books? Ebooks? A podcast magazine? There are lots of directions we could go, and we have lots of crazy ideas, but we’d like to hear yours too. What would you like to see? (Remember that we have to, and want to, buy the stories that we publish — so “put ’em all on a blog!” is not necessarily the most viable option.) But leave a comment with your thoughts!

That’s it for now. Thanks, everyone. What a crazy year this has been. Come on, let’s do it all again.

A little while ago, David put up a quick update about where we are with our story decisions. There weren’t a whole lot of details in the post, which caused some folks to speculate about what’s going on. David is recovering from the post-convention haze of World Fantasy Con, so I figured I’d fill in some of the gaps.

Expect a response in the next week. We hope to email everybody over the next several days — the sooner, the better. I expect that the bulk of emails will go out by Friday, but some decisions may take just a little bit longer.

Some folks have been speculating that it’s taking us longer to reply because we’re writing personal responses to everybody. This would be an amazing thing to do! But sadly, that’s not what’s causing the delay. You should expect to get a form response. We are trying to add a little extra detail to some of the form responses, but unfortunately none of them will really be personalized.

At this time, we are still making decisions. Some people were speculating that everybody who’s been accepted has already been contacted. This isn’t true. We are still making final decisions and sending out acceptances. This is the part that’s taking a while, so there’s no reason to assume that the response is one way or another until you actually hear from us.

What’s taking so long anyway? There are a few things that are contributing to the delay, but mostly it’s because we have so many great stories to pick from. Here’s a little insight into what we’ve been doing for the past few months.

1. First, we’ve read your stories! We laughed, we cried, we were delighted. But there were so many that not all of us were able to read every single one. I’m still catching up on a few stories that Ryan and David have marked as their favorites but which I haven’t read yet. They are both also doing the same. So there is a small amount of second and third reading being done, but luckily the list of contenders is (by this time) pretty manageable.

2. Second, even for the hundreds of stories that all three of us have read, we don’t always agree. In fact, we often disagree. Imagine if you and two of your friends had to take a list of 2,000 movies and agree on which 30 were the best. You’d probably easily agree on broadly which ones you liked… But when it got down to the nitty gritty of the top 1%, your different tastes would come out. So this is what we’re doing right now: arguing about which of the stories we like are the absolute best ones. Just think, at this moment, one of us may be making a passionate argument in favor of your story. This is actually happening!

3. Finally, in addition to picking the best stories, we have to consider variety too. There’s another dimension to our decision-making, which is that we want a broad range of stories in the book — different genres, different viewpoints, different settings. So we find ourselves sometimes diving back into the pile of contenders to pick out stories that have qualities that may be otherwise underrepresented. This balancing act is a pretty complicated calculus, and it’s taking longer than we thought.

Whew! So that’s what’s going on with us. One of the things that this experience has taught me is that a rejection from a publication doesn’t always mean that your story isn’t good. A book edited solely by Ryan would be different from a book edited solely by David or a book edited solely by me. Different editors love different kinds of stories — just like different readers love different kinds of stories. Because that’s what we really are: we’re readers.

When we publish the table of contents for volume two, it’s not going to be a list of the “best” stories out of the 2,000 submissions we got. It’s going to be a list of about 30 stories that we think make a great book together — a book that we’re going to love reading and we hope other people will love reading too. For many, many, many stories that we don’t accept, there is some other hypothetical book that we decided not to publish that they would be perfect for. So keep that in mind if we decide not to go with your story.

Why don’t you publish all those other hypothetical books too? One thing at a time! We’ve talked about whether there’s something else we can do with some of the stories that won’t fit into volume two, but we haven’t made any decisions yet. We have some fun ideas, but first we have to finish what we’re working on now.

We also don’t want people to get sick of Machine of Death. That’s why we’re not publishing a book with 200 stories in it. (Also, it would be super expensive.) But if readers keep clamoring for more and more stories, then we certainly have a lot of material we can consider again. But this is all in the distant future of six to twelve months from now, and we may have a whole new set of ideas in that time. We want to keep doing awesome stuff whenever we can, but we don’t know exactly what shape it will take.

Anyway, thanks again to everybody who submitted. We’ll be contacting you as quickly as we can with the results!

We know many of you are very anxious to see which stories will be in the next MOD book. For a variety of reasons, we don’t want to publicly announce a Table of Contents for Volume 2 until we have had a chance to email everybody who submitted. With 2,000 submissions, this is taking a bit longer than initially expected.

Apologies for the delay, but we do expect to have contacted everybody by the end of the week. Please hold off querying us until at least then. In the meantime, read this and this!