A Busy Christmas Season of Successes

December has been a hectic yet rewarding month for Odd Voice Out with KC and Kell cramming events, readings, sales, interviews, fundraising and awards into a few short wintry weeks. We started on the last day of the Chester Literature Festival, performing readings from Fallow Heart and Shrinking Sinking Land to a crowd gathered on the main floor of the Storyhouse. We presented Odd Voice Out press and a sample of our fiction as part of ‘Litfest Elevenses’, a free morning session for Chester residents to get a taste of the city’s local literary talent. We signed our first paperback releases at this same event before taking the rest of our stock onto the Sustainable Winter Fayre, presented by Friends of the Earth at the Industry in Handbridge. With the focus on ecology, Kell gave another reading followed by a talk on the cli-fi genre and its role in green activism.

December has also been a month of happy surprises and successes. Along with successfully hitting (and exceeding) our very first kickerstarter goal, KC got the good news that her fantasy novel ‘The Book of Shade’ had been selected as a General Fiction first prize winner in Top Shelf magazine’s Indie Book Awards of 2018. Six years after it was originally written for NaNoWrimo, KC was delighted to see ‘The Book of Shade’ still doing so well. This latest accolade is the perfect way to build up excitement for both new editions and the final installment of the epic Shadeborn series. Odd Voice Out will be re-releasing KC’s award-winning saga as part of its summer season for a brand new audience to enjoy!

Kell also received a rather wonderful shock this month as she was contacted by Scott Lankford, a teacher at Foothill College in Silicon Valley, who let her know that he's been teaching her original short story version of 'Shrinking Sinking Land' for the last two years, since its release in the Everything Change climate fiction anthology. Scott described her story as “a perennial student favourite” and invited Kell to take part in a Skype interview with his specialist class studying fictional & factual climate writing. Scott also sent a few sample essays from students who'd analyzed Kell’s story, providing plenty of inspiration for Odd Voice Out as we make plans to embark on school visits and educational workshops in 2019.

As a final bit of online publicity, KC and Kell also conducted detailed interviews with Amy Bernal of My Books  - My World. Click the links below to hear KC discussing Fallow Heart and Kell talking about Shrinking Sinking Land. If you ever wanted to learn about the methods behind our madness, now's your chance!

K.C. Finn Interview
Kell Cowley Interview