Writing can be hard – not hard like mining diamonds in Zimbabwe or making cheap clothes for westerners in Bangladesh, of course, but anyone in the 21st-century knowledge economy who wants to write a novel must have some kind of masochistic streak. Word processors have taken some of the strain out of editing and publishing, but there’s no app to automate the hard slog of getting 100,000 words down on paper in something resembling a coherent narrative. And the work doesn’t stop there for SFF writers, who have to construct an entire fictional world to support their stories.
Enter the Apocalypse Weird, stage right. If any group of authors can find a way to collaborate on telling stories it’s those rebellious indie authors, authors who have already broken all the rules of publishing by stealing the ebook market out from under the industry. While writers may not be able to collaborate on individual books, they can work together to create the fictional “shared world” those books happen within, the world of Apocalypse Weird.
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