Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, New York Times and USA Today bestselling writer, Dean Wesley Smith published over two hundred novels and over seven hundred books in forty years, and hundreds and hundreds of short stories. He has over thirty million copies of his books in print.

At the moment he produces novels in four major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the old west, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the cold case mystery series, Cold Poker Gang series, and the superhero series staring Poker Boy.

During his career, Dean also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, they wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies.

He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of almost a dozen films, from X-Men to The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown.

Dean also worked as a fiction editor off and on, starting at Pulphouse Publishing, then at VB Tech Journal, then Pocket Books, and now at WMG Publishing where he and Kristine Kathryn Rusch serve as executive editors for the acclaimed Fiction River anthology series. He took over the editorship of the acclaimed Pulphouse Magazine in 2018.

For more information about Dean's books and ongoing projects, please visit his website at www.deanwesleysmith.com

Cattitude by Dean Wesley Smith

From the pages of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine come eight delightful stories featuring cats—some who charm, some who connive, even some who simply demand attention.

In short, these stories have Cattitude.

From some of Pulphouse's best and most prolific writers, these stories embody the Pulphouse spirit: no genre limitations, no topic limitations, just attitude and top-quality writing.

Including:

"Queen of the Mouse Riders" by Annie Reed
"The Fur Tsunami" by Kent Patterson
"Bushtits Gone Wild" by Stephanie Writt
"The Goddess Particle" by Dæmon Crowe
"An Incursion of Mice" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
"Erwin or Ralph" by Ray Vukcevich
"The Mouth that Walked" by Dean Wesley Smith
"Life, with Cats" by Annie Reed

CURATOR'S NOTE

Dean Wesley Smith edited the stories in Cattitude, which features some of the best cat stories from Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine. (You can subscribe through our Kickstarter, which is running concurrently…provided you like these stories, of course. And I know you will. Here's the link: http://kck.st/3zip0rs ) There are some true classic cat tales in here. You don't want to miss this one. – Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Introduction

I discovered one thing about cat stories besides them being fantastic fun. Not that many writers write them and even fewer write Pulphouse types of cat stories. And the few who do, write numbers of them.

For example, Annie Reed, one of the best writers working in the pages of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine wrote three cat stories in the first number of years.

I included two of them in here.

Also, by the time I planned on doing this book, I assumed I would have fourteen issues or so to pick stories from. Nope, I have eleven. Like the rest of the planet, we were slowed down by the pandemic. (We are up and running now and doing six issues a year instead of four.)

Kris and I spent the last year editing a series of 100 cat stories in twelve volumes. Those were fantastic fun, and a number of the stories I got for the cat books I also want to put into Pulphouse. Eventually.

Just haven't gotten a chance to get to them yet. But I will for certain with one from Ray Vukcevich, one of the wildest writers working in Pulphouse. It is included here. I just couldn't pass it up.

Plus a few years ago I edited a volume called Snot-Nosed Aliens that was a Pulphouse book of original stories. Two of those stories were cat stories, so they are in here.

And then I decided that since I am the editor of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, and this is a fun book, I would include a cat story of mine that I first published in Amazing Stories Magazine back in the late 1990s. It really, really shows cattitude.

So all-in-all, as with these stories, the editing process of this book was fun and challenging at the same time. But in the end, I hope you will enjoy cat stories with a Pulphouse twist as much as I do.

Dean Wesley Smith
Las Vegas, Nevada