“Lost Echoes: Volume One” is a chapbook published exclusively for Brian James Freeman’s supporters on Patreon. This is the first of our chapbooks to be perfect bound.

About the Chapbook:
The first in a series of “lost” chapters from Brian’s first novel Black Fire. 

A Note From Brian:
While revising my first novel Black Fire to post as a serial novel for my Patreon supporters under my original and preferred title The Echo of Memory, I realized something just wasn’t working. And to explain what that something is, I need to tell you a little bit about how the book came to be.

Back in 1999 or so, when publishing the book was still just a beginning writer’s daydream, most drafts were coming in around 60,000 words. As a well-published friend keep reminding me in not so gentle AOL Instant Messenger notes, this was not a considered novel by the New York publishing houses. He said to look at the themes in the book and “pull them out” a bit… which basically meant, “You need to pad that sucker if you want to sell it!”

He wasn’t wrong.

I found places where I could add more details, expand on the themes, and so forth, and I got the manuscript up to the required 90,000 words. And the book did sell! Don D’Auria at Leisure bought it and published it in a very nice mass market paperback edition. Reviewers and readers seemed to dig the book. And then, like most paperbacks, it was gone and forgotten a few months later.

But during my recent revisions, I realized those 30,000 words of padding really needed to go. They added nothing that was necessary, and I’ve really come to loathe bloated stories.

So, I’ve been chopping out the extraneous details and superfluous scenes. The resulting draft will be much leaner and maybe even a little meaner, but it’ll also be what the story always wanted to be.

That said, I really did like “The Nightmare” chapters that were meant to show historical events in (hopefully) an interesting way, so I’m collecting these chapters in a new series of chapbooks for Patreon supporters only called “Lost Echoes.”

This is volume one, and you’ll join Eddie Farris in the first of these flashback nightmares…

Publication History:
Published as a chapbook for  Brian James Freeman’s Patreon supporters in May 2020.

Publication Format:
Each chapbook Brian publishes for his Patreon supporters is “housed” in a custom-printed envelope with a fine linen finish and the LetterPress Publications logo printed on it in silver metallic ink. This chapbook was the first one to be perfect bound. The inside-covers feature faux marbling. Each chapbook is also signed and hand-numbered. Limited to a print run of 225 copies.