Hello all;

Hope you are all well and surviving in comfort. Between Covid and the wildfires, it all seems like a bit apocalyptic in the states right now, so I’m hoping that you lovely lot are all in safe places but there isn’t too much smoke and definitely no flames!

So the reason I have been quiet for awhile – apart from the usual episode of burnout – is that I was asked if I would like to submit a story to a charity anthology called ‘Hellcats’.

A friend of mine, Kate Pickford, has a relative who is 79 and about to be thrown out of her house. The whole story is on her go fund me.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/grandma039s-final-chance

But basically the old lady, whose name is Erada, is in a really horrible position and has been so stressed and down about it for so long that she was absolutely at her wits’ end. Kate came to me and said “We need to raise $70,000 in the shortest time possible. I am going to do an anthology – would you be prepared to put a story in?”

“Of course,” I answered. “Also, I have a formatting program, so if you would like, I will format the file when we’re finished.”

The three dots on the screen suggested that she was typing something else, and when the message came through she just said “That would be very kind. Normally I go via a publisher so I have no idea how any of this works.”

Righty then. Regulars will know that of course I jumped in to help her, and then to actually do it – after all, it was only a little charity anthology and I’ve done loads of things. Or was it???

The number of people offering stories got larger and larger . And then some people who make a really good living off their stories turned up and offered to help, and some people who have won prizes, and that sort of thing. Then other people heard that the larger authors were involved and they volunteered to write something as well. Did it snowball? That is the understatement of the year!

On the 1st of September, we started with a handful of authors interested. By hand-in date on the 16th of September, we had 69 stories by 71 offers. We also had six separate teams working on putting it together – a whole posse of people proofing and editing around the clock, graphics people, social media people, a particularly splendid website… Whatever we thought of, someone would stand up and say “I can do that. Would you like me to?”

In a undertaking under as much time-pressure as this, there is often a certain unwritten resignation to the fact that things can’t be done as best as you might like them to be done. This is emphatically not one of those anthologies. Turns out, Kate is a really top class editor. And half of our proofing team also have worked for Craig Martelle or Michael Anderle, who are big names in the in the indie world, so they really know their stuff.

The quality of people volunteering their services, and being willing to drop everything for a couple of weeks to make this happen, it’s just staggering. It’s joyous. And it has left us in the utterly flabbergasting and utterly epic position of having thrown together in an impossible short time a huge and very entertaining set of stories to a quality that we are really proud of.

We are about to unveil a new line of merchandise – and again, all of the proceeds from the merchandise as well as the books will be going directly to Erada once it has been paid. The paperbacks are processing with a view to going live any minute, and we getting very positive feedback about the book itself.

On the glossy website which Kenzie Giardina very kindly set up for us, there are autobiographies and summaries of each individual story, and we’re also doing a blog about each author, one per day. I really encourage you to nip over to the blog and look at it. Not least, the merch page….

https://hellcatsanthology.com/2020/09/11/an-interview-with-hellcat-author-j-a-clement/

Here is the link for your perusal – and in the days to come, we will have a few other guest posts, as well as updates on the progress of the fundraising for Erada.

If you’d like to buy a copy of the book, you can find it at https://books.to/hellcats or if you don’t fancy 69 stories of cat-related derring-do (or in some cases, derring-don’t), you can also help Erada by donating at her Gofundme here https://www.gofundme.com/f/grandma039s-final-chance

If you feel so inclined, reads on Kindle Unlimited are particularly helpful, and reviews, shares, or just forwarding these posts are too.

It’s all for a good cause!

Thanks peeps. Take care, especially those of you where the air is bad or fires are near. I’ll be posting another blog soon. In the meantime have a lovely week!

J a C