StereoOpticon is finally available here and at Mobipocket, and will be available soon from Fictionwise,  Amazon, and their affiliates.

What took so long? Every time it was formatted for a different reader, I found another little mistake: misplaced comma here, an odd italics there. It was a little crazy making.  But the real reason is because we’ve made it available in Palm, Sony (LRF), EPUB (for, among others, the Stanza reader on the iPhone and iPod), Microsoft Reader, PDF, Mobipocket (readable on the Kindle) and executable HTML (so if you’re handheld will open a windows browser, you can read the book no matter what your preferred format).

I’ve been told that once it’s in XHTML, it should take no time at all to format it for everything else. For us, that’s not quite true. Every format in which we provide our books is optimized for that format. So, for example, you see the beautiful image to the right when you read the PDF, but you’re not bogged down by internal images when you read on your Palm, and the other formats range somewhere between the two.

The table of contents is linked to the story title, and the end of each story includes a link back to the table of contents.

If you buy it and run across a mistake, please let us know. It is our goal to provide you with beautiful books that you love to read, no matter what format you prefer. We’ll be making all of our books in the future available for all of those formats, and we’ll be adding formats to older works as we can fit them in. In addition, we’re working on more “extras” so if there’s something in particular you’d like to see, please let us know.

And what is StereoOpticon about?  I’m going to quote from the introduction because I wrote it and I can’t think of a better way to describe these beautiful stories.

The stories in this volume are fairy tales in split vision because they’re not quite the fairy tales of childhood, but they evoke that same sense of wonder. A handful are re-imaginings of old favorites, such as David Sklar’s Little Red Riding Hood, “Red ’Hood”, which could have happened—be happening—in any major city today; C. S. Inman’s lyrical Beauty and the Beast, “The Castle of Masks”; Cindy Lynn Speer’s regency-flavored Bluebeard, “A Necklace of Rubies”; and Imogen Howson’s futuristic “Falling”, a retelling of Rapunzel.

Some of these stories are entirely new but still tell us tales we know in our heart of hearts. In “Dream-Drinker,” Heather Ingemar’s Isabele must rise to a frightening occasion and be the heroine she never dreamed she could be. In “Flame in the Night Regions,” J. A. Howe’s heroine fights to give the woman she loves exactly what she wants. Which, you know, in fairy tales never ends as well as one might like. Bree Donovan takes us to a thoroughly modern Ireland for a tale of a kind of green knight, a man who uncovers the best in everyone he meets.

Trulie Peterson’s story, “Spellbound”, is a quest tale and the fairy tale of my youth. It’s the most traditional in style, made new and utterly beautiful, and then Francesca Forrest takes us back to the fairy tale before the Grimm brothers made it pretty in “The Gallows Maiden”. G. L. Simmons’ is a Jack story. In “The Orb of Enori,” an innocent Jac makes the right decisions for all the right reasons, despite what people might think. Joselle Vanderhooft’s lyrical prose marries grace and myth to make the villain real in “The Chess-Girl and the Sorcerer-King”. Finally, Mureall Hebert finishes the collection with a novella that takes us to another world, a once upon a time where Gods and Monsters touch the earth and are touched by it with “In the Light of the World There is a Tree”.

The anthology was edited by Cindy Lynn Speer, who did a tremendous job bringing all of these stories by a bunch of talented and wonderful authors together into one cohesive whole.

There are excerpts from “The Orb of Enori”, “A Necklace of Rubies” and “Falling” available in the bookshop since they used to be sold alone. Now, they’re only available as part of this collection. I hope you enjoy the anthology. It required an amazing amount of work on the part of everyone involved, but it was most definitely worth it.