Welcome to the Apocalypse.

    In 2004, I made the rounds of small press writers and publishers, recruiting talent for my latest creation, the shared-world anthology titled “Sha'Daa.” My concept was that an apocalyptic event occurs every 10,000 years when the forces of evil break across the dimensions that surround and protect the Earth. The next Sha'Daa is due to occur in the near future.

    I wrote twenty 1-to-3 paragraph scenarios and e-mailed them out to a fantastic collection of writers, women and men whose work I hold in the highest regard, giving them free reign to expand as they saw fit. I wanted them to make the stories their own. It was my idea that the battle to come would be fought in odd places, by unlikely heroes, and run the gamut from true horror to action adventure to outright comedy.  

    And so a group of us began the Sha'Daa journey together. One year later, not all of us made it to the end. Tragically, one died. Another battled serious illness and surgery. One’s computer flamed and permanently took the work (all 10,000 words of their story) and their heart out of the project. One withdrew rather than be edited. One recently suffered a brain-stem stroke and can only type/write with one hand. A few took rather eclectic field trips in researching the backgrounds of their stories. Some did double duty and picked up an additional story and added to the growing epic. With writers spread across the U.K., Canada, and the United States, the Internet and e-mail proved invaluable in the coordination of this gargantuan effort.

    Eventually we ended up with a quarter million words of Sha'Daa stories. I’d not figured on the hardihood of my writers. Usually in such projects people talk big but don't produce. My Sha’Daaists fought on, with writer after writer producing fine work, sometimes far in excess of the requested word count.

    North Carolina based author Ed McKeown had been helping me behind the scenes with some of the proofreading when I came to the conclusion that this mass of stories needed a more determined and aggressive overall edit. Ed agreed to undertake this daunting task and so has become the official “Editor” of this venture. And after several weeks of intense editing and review Ed and I came to the realization that we did not have one book on our hands, but two! And so was born “Sha'Daa: Last Call.”

    “Sha’Daa: Tales of the Apocalypse” was picked up by Altered Dimensions Press (an imprint of Cyber Wizard Productions) and published on May 1, 2009!

    This vision is given life by the following talented writers:

    Edward F. McKeown, Deborah Koren, Arthur Sanchez, Nancy Jackson, Lee Ann Kuruganti, Wilson G. Marsh, Jamie Schmidt, Duncan MacMaster, Adrienne Ray, Robert Adams, T. Anthony Truax, Paul Barrett, Jordan Lapp, Sarah Wagner, Bruce Durham, Michael H. Hanson, and the late James Wasserman.

    Stay tuned for further developments.

    And be warned. The Sha’Daa IS coming.

Michael H. Hanson

Piscataway, NJ                                 

2011