New Release: Secvenţă de zbor

Back in March 2013, I debuted in print with my Romanian short story collection Efectul de nautil (The Nautilus Effect). It included a selection of short stories published in various on-line magazines since my debut as a writer in 2008, plus a few new ones. Later on, Efectul de nautil was nominated for the Colin Awards in the Best Sci Fi Short Story Collection category.

In the summer of 2015, it occurred to me I had enough stories published in anthologies or submitted for publication to put together another short story collection. I wrote a message on Facebook about it, and the same day, the book found a publisher. This is how Secvenţă de zbor (Flight Sequence) came to be.

This time, the stories are longer, breaching into novella territory, because I tend to write longer stories when I write for anthologies. The themes weren't my choice since I usually wrote when a submission call was put out, so they're all over the map in the sci fi and fantasy genre. I confess a couple I didn't care for and I initially considered I had nothing to say in those genres, but then I took it as a challenge and proved myself I could write stories to match those requests, stories that I enjoyed. Obviously, the editors agreed with me since they accepted the texts. In the end, it turned out to be an interesting exercise that broadened my horizon as a writer.

Under the broad umbrella of sci fi and fantasy, you'll read a mix of action, adventure, romance, mystery, and horror, featuring steampunk, time travel, dragons, mind control, zombies, parallel universes, aliens, cyberpunk, and space opera. These are all stories I enjoyed writing and I still enjoyed re-reading them during the process of putting the book together. Some of the anthologies they've been written for haven't been published yet, so those texts are technically new.

Out of all of them, my favorite stories are Adevărul din privire (The Truth in their Sights), Punct de rendez-vous la +3000 (Rendez-vous Point at +3,000), Dacă aerul n-ar avea miros (If the Air had no Smell), Jumătatea lipsă (The Missing Half), Niciun port din galaxie (No Port to Land - the prequel to Law and Crucible saga), and of course the story that gives the title of the book, Secvenţă de zbor (Flight Sequence). That one is probably the more atypical for my writing style. You'll have to read it to figure out why. I thought the title was fitting for the book because it illustrates my trajectory as a writer. We all need a flightplan. Visul broscoiului (A Toad's Dream) gets a special mention because, unlike the others, it wasn't written for an anthology, but it's set in the Broken People universe.

The book is available at Final Frontier book fair in Bucharest this weekend, with the official book launch scheduled for Sunday at 12:30 (I won't be there).

You can also order Secvenţă de zbor on Millennium Books website. Add it to your Goodreads to read list, read it, and let me know what you think!