We’ve almost hit our $3500 goal, so I guess we need to come up with some stretch goals, right?
Leave a comment on the linked post about what you’d want!
Mongoose & Meerkat Almost Funded!
Monthly Archives: January 2025
The Complete Tales of the Mongoose and Meerkat on Kickstarter Now!
The Mongoose and Meerkat Kickstarter is Live!
He’s a brash young bravo, eager to prove his worth with a blade. She’s a mysterious rogue with a head for history and razor cunning. Together, they are the Mongoose and Meerkat!
Whether they’re looting haunted dungeons, fighting demons and necromancers, or just settling labor disputes, this swashbuckling duo is ready for anything! Mangos would love nothing more than to earn a name for himself and keep himself comfortably in coin. Kat, however, has more far-reaching plans for her wealth.
The City State of Alness has fallen to a band of mercenaries and brigands who have ravaged the north lands. Amidst the rumors that an Alnessi royal may have survived, the Mongoose and Meerkat must navigate all manner of intrigue and betrayal to win the fame and fortune necessary to restore the once-mighty city.
Originally serialized in 18 installments from 2017 through 2023 in Cirsova Magazine, Jim Breyfogle’s Mongoose and Meerkat became one of the iconic Sword & Sorcery teams of the Pulp Revolution. Now, you can have all of their adventures in a single gorgeous volume!
Plus, this collection includes an all-new side-story, Chasing the Cat Sword, featuring the mercenary sisters Daini and Kairi and has world-shaking implications for the Mongoose and Meerkat lore!
This new collected edition is being offered in eBook and two physical formats:
Retail Softcover – $20
This standard edition paperback features a cover that longtime fans might recognize from The Sword of the Mongoose. Line art by Dark Filly and colors by Raven Monroe [Fragment, Machi the Lazy Witch].
The paperback edition is a thick 300+ page 7 x 10 “Executive” volume. Art is reproduced slightly larger than the original 6 x 9 (and obviously the pocketbook) editions. It features all of the same interior content as the Deluxe Storybook Hardcover edition in a more economical package.
Deluxe Storybook Hardcover – $50
The Deluxe Storybook Hardcover is the ideal way to enjoy the adventures of Mongoose and Meerkat.
This hardcover features a reversible dust jacket with gorgeous portraits of both Kat and Mangos by the incredibly talented OshRed.
Each page is set with large type for easy reading to young loved ones [or for the ease of your own tired eyes], and the 8.5 x 11 trim allows us to reproduce Dark Filly’s beautiful illustrations at much closer to their original size.
Add-Ons
Pursuit Without Asking Audiobook -$10
This audiobook edition of the first volume is read by the fantastic Erin Mitchell. MP3s will be made available to backers who select this add on.
A Bad Case of Dead (Softcover) – $15
We’ll include a copy of Jim Breyfogle’s swashbuckling fantasy horror romance, A Bad Case of Dead!
The Paths of Cormanor (Softcover) – $15
We’ll include a copy of Jim Breyfogle’s mythological fairytale romance, The Paths of Cormanor.
Original softcovers of trilogy – $45
We’ll include a set of the original softcovers of the Mongoose & Meerkat trilogy.
Original hardcovers of trilogy – $90
We’ll include a set of the original hardcovers of the Mongoose & Meerkat trilogy.
Own Original Interior Artwork!
We are offering the original physical artwork of the interior illustrations done by Dark Filly as add-ons. The following original pieces are still available:
Gate Demon – $250
Kat Fighting Rhygir – $250
Kat Killing “Mangos” – $300
Battle for the Loop – $300
Mangos Fighting the Submarine – $300
Fight on the Beach – $300
Crucifixion in Alness – $300
Poisoning at the Party – $300
Mangos and the Gladiator – $300
Mangos & Little Kat – $350
Kat Fashion Show – $350
Killanei – $350
Launching Wednesday: The Complete Tales of the Mongoose and Meerkat
He’s a brash young bravo, eager to prove his worth with a blade. She’s a mysterious rogue with a head for history and razor cunning. Together, they are the Mongoose and Meerkat!
Cirsova Publishing began serializing Jim Breyfogle’s adventures of Mongoose and Meerkat in 2017 in the 6th issue of their flagship magazine. It went on to become a fan favorite and was originally collected in three standalone volumes.
This new edition collects all 18 adventures into a single volume, including a large print coffee table / bedtime reader format, and also contains an all new story set in the world of Mongoose & Meerkat!
Robert Zoltan’s Sexy Fantastic Magazine
Past Cirsova Contributor and Rogues of Merth author Robert Zoltan is currently running a kickstarter for a “Best of” of his magazine, Sexy Fantastic. Check it out!
On the Passing of Howard Andrew Jones
The news went out last week that Howard Andrew Jones passed away, having lost his short battle with cancer.
I hadn’t made a post commenting on it yet because I’d been at a loss for what to say.
While Jones and I weren’t exactly close, we had been in touch and exchanged communications a few times over the years.
It comes as an even greater blow because the last I had heard, he had been doing better and was even checking his own emails again (though that had been a couple of months ago).
When Tales from the Magician’s Skull first launched, Howard reached out and arranged to do ad swaps with Cirsova, which was extremely cool of him.
He sent me a review copy of For the Killing of Kings, which I enjoyed greatly (though to my embarrassment I still haven’t gotten around to reading the rest of the series).
When the review copy of Lord of a Shattered Land that Baen was supposed to send me got lost, he personally sent me a signed copy.
We’d sent him Mighty Sons of Hercules, and there was an outside chance of him contributing to the second volume (we’d briefly discussed it, though at the time we hadn’t made any concrete plans to move forward with said volume)
To say that Howard’s passing is a blow the scene is understatement that cannot be qualified or quantified.
He will be missed, and one can only hope that his influence and passion for writing and love for fantasy will live on without him.
Adrian Cole’s The Dream Lords Out Now
The 50th Anniversary Edition of Adrian Cole’s The Dream Lords is Out Now on Amazon!
Mankind and its empire spanning the Nine Worlds are ruled by a powerful triumvirate of long-lived dreamers: the Dream Lords!
The Dream Lords project a vision of utopia to obfuscate the alien hostility of Zurjah, the world long claimed to be the true seat of humanity. A vision that grows hazy as the power of the Dream Lords wanes.
Destroyed by ancient wars, Earth has become a backwater prison colony, and its native inhabitants are called “Barbarian” and enslaved to perpetuate a myth that Mankind came from the stars.
Galad Sarian, son and heir of one of the Dream Lords, discovers not only the truth behind the crumbling Zurjahn empire and faltering of the powers that maintain humanity’s grasp on alien worlds but also a plot by Daras Vorta, the Warden of Earth, to overthrow the Dream Lords with the aid of demonic forces.
This edition collects A Plague of Nightmares (1975), Lord of Nightmares (1975), and Bane of Nightmares (1976) in a single volume, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Adrian Cole’s Dream Lords.
Fantastic Review of Adrian Cole’s Dream Lords
Ben Espen has just posted a fantastic review of our 50th Anniversary Edition of Adrian Cole’s The Dream Lords.
The 50th Anniversary Edition of Adrian Cole’s The Dream Lords will release on Amazon on January 15th, 2025, and you, my loyal readers, simply must pick this up, because this is the book for anyone who wanted Dune to be a comedy instead of a tragedy.
If you want to know more about what I mean by that, read on, but since The Dream Lords is not as well-known as Dune, I’m going to offer fair warning that this will be literary criticism and not a review. I’m going to talk about whatever I feel like talking about, and that will involve spoiling the book. But trust me, this will be good.
My review is: this book is awesome, go buy it if you trust my judgement. This book is John Carter of Dune, anyone who likes sword and planet adventures will probably like this.
The full review can be found here.
Adrian Cole’s The Dream Lords will be out on Amazon 1/15.
On Realities of Short Fiction and What Audiences Want
This is sort of corollary to the post the other day announcing our intentions for the future of Cirsova Publishing.
On Twitter the other day, one of our followers posted a thread asking why aren’t authors publishing more short stories. It’s a good question! So I thought I’d try to address it as someone who has been publishing short fiction for nearly a decade.
The audience for short stories is different from the audience for longform fiction, and contrary to the bluster of boomer writers complaining that people don’t support long series anymore because of GRRM, the big money is still in long-running series of shorter novel-length works.
The main paying audience for short fiction is short fiction editors who enjoy publishing short fiction. Consumers of short fiction are often other short fiction writers. General readership, however, often tends to view short stories as merely nice bonus content. The real hunger is for longer series and longer forms. Not necessarily doorstoppers, however.
The market seems to want series but not epics. Sequential standalones. [The modern market is being tapped by Light Novels, however, the west did have a long tradition of books and series in this format until fairly recently].
The problem with short fiction is the stories don’t stay around long enough to make any real lasting impact, no matter how good they are. Serial short fiction is able to sort of split the difference.
One of the reasons why we’re retooling Cirsova is so that we can focus on ongoing series. If Conan was just one really cool story, he’d be forgotten like a thousand other one-shot pulp heroes. The magazine will [with some exceptions] be primarily a collection of episodic series.
Happy New Year! + Major Announcement Regarding the Future of Cirsova Magazine
Happy New Year, everyone! If you picked up the Winter Issue, this may be old news to you, but…
2025 may be Cirsova Magazine’s last year as a quarterly.
We’re shifting our focus to working on releases by a handful of our regular authors [Jim Breyfogle, Misha Burnett, Michael Tierney, Adrian Cole, and relative newcomers JD Cowan and Ken Lizzi].
We DO plan on keeping the magazine going, however somewhat differently, into 2026.
Cirsova Magazine will, for the foreseeable future, remain a home for our regulars, including the ongoing series we’ve had the privilege of publishing [Harold R. Thompson’s Anchor Brown, Mark Mellon’s Melkart, and Richard Rubin’s Burke Fletcher just to name a few].
I understand this will hit aspirants trying to break in hardest, but not being buried for two months going through submissions followed by another two or three months of editing will free up time to work on some passion projects for both myself and Cirsova’s authors.
I DO still have every intention of getting a second volume of Mighty Sons of Hercules off the ground.
I’m already insanely stacked up with projects that keeping the magazine quarterly beyond this year will eat into:
- Mongoose & Meerkat Omnibus + Whatever Jim Breyfogle has coming down the pipe
- Misha Burnett’s new Dracoheim book and everything else he’s cooking up
- the fix-up of Adrian Cole’s new Dream Lords
- the final 4 volumes of Michael Tierney’s Wild Stars
- Ken Lizzi’s Cesar the Bravo + whatever else he might want to pitch us down the line
- a manuscript from a current author I still need to print and read
I’ve already got the centerpiece story for Mighty Sons of Hercules volume 2 [Maxus and the Temple of the Eagle], so all I need to do now is send out solicits, but I’ve got so many Kickstarters in the queue that I don’t want to have too long between solicits and raising funds to pay for them.
Anyway, yeah, 2025, our 10th year as a publisher, is going to be absurdly busy and we hope you’re looking forward to everything we have lined up for you and won’t be too disappointed that you won’t have 4 new issues of Cirsova every year after this one.
Cirsova 