“Anthology” or “So Many Stories, So Little Time to Wait!”

Less than One More Month until the December 2^nd release of the “One More Day” “collection of selected literary pieces”!!!

I swear, the closer the day draws, the less real it feels. My first published work with J. Taylor Publishing. Ho, ly, wow. My brain has died. I don’t even know what to do with myself. Good thing I’ve had my review of the anthology sitting around for a little while now, or who knows what kind of gibberish you’d get. As it is…

The Book: “One More Day” by seven J. Taylor Publishing authors, including headliner L.S. Murphy and yours truly. (:

Genre: YA anthology.

Blurb: What if today never ends?
What if everything about life—everything anyone hoped to be, to do, to experience—never happens?
Whether sitting in a chair, driving down the road, in surgery, jumping off a cliff or flying … that’s where you’d be … forever.
Unless …
In One More Day, Erika Beebe, Marissa Halvorson, Kimberly Kay, J. Keller Ford, Danielle E. Shipley and Anna Simpson join L.S. Murphy to give us their twists, surprising us with answers to two big questions, all from the perspective of characters under the age of eighteen.
How do we restart time?
How do we make everything go back to normal?
The answers, in whatever the world—human, alien, medieval, fantasy or fairytale—could, maybe, happen today.
Right now.
What would you do if this happened … to you?

My Thoughts: One underlying premise, seven widely divergent end results. The anthology hits the ground running with Anna Simspon’s chronology-hopping “Time Piece” and Marissa Halvorson’s reality-bending “Dark Rose”. It made for a real page-turner of an opening, though I admit the preference for action over explanation displayed in both tales had me sometimes feeling as confused as the stories’ protagonists. The pace of J. Keller Ford’s “Dragon Flight” suited me better, and I enjoyed the narrative voice.

Reading “The Thirteenth Month”, I could appreciate why L.S. Murphy got top billing in this anthology. Her piece was just good. Pulse-pounding, breath-catching, scary-dark, “oh, snap, how is this going to end?!” good. I kinda feel like rereading it right now, actually, but I’m in the middle of a review, here, so I’ll have to postpone the pleasure. In briefest summary: Epic story, well executed, go read it.

Lightening the tone was Kimberly Kay’s “Sleepless Beauty” – which, from the moment I knew it as a fairytale spin, I anticipated would be right up my alley. Kay did not disappoint; on the contrary, her humorous touch with the charming plot had me smiling pretty much start to finish. And while I could not always quite understand what was happening when during Erika Beebe’s “Stage Fright”, much of the emotion at the heart of the story I could understand all too well, forging a moment of emotional connection between me and the tale’s main character which not nearly every author out there can manage.

As for the concluding piece, “A Morrow More”… well, I wrote that one, so perhaps my thoughts upon it wouldn’t be entirely objective. (That being said, I thought it was a lovely, lyrical work of art, and I look forward to this author’s future publications.)

HSYRT? (Hey, Should You Read This?): Um, yeah. I’m in it! And even if (for whatever peculiar reason) you don’t happen to be a diehard Danielle E. Shipley fan, I’m still of the opinion that there’s a little something in this collection for readers of all stripes. So don’t wait One More Day than you have to (I’m sure you saw what I did there) to get your hands on a copy of these stories.

Get hyped, guys. IT IS COMING.