Tales From the Year Between
Each volume in Tales from the Year Between is set in a different, unique world... a world that didn't exist before the anthology itself. We start by gathering dozens of writers, then throwing them together to play a world-building game. Over a series of weeks, each participant adds to the history, characters, and geography of our setting. When we're done, the contributors explore this new, shared world in their writing: through flash fiction and short stories, through poems, songs, and recipes. In the end, we publish a book that's more exciting, stranger, and just plain fun than anything else out there.
Then we gather a new group of artists and do it again. Intrigued? Read on! Want to join us? Check out the CONTACT US to see if we're currently accepting applications...
Learn more about the settings and contributors from the first four volumes in the series...
The Origin Story...
Chris Van Dyke came up with the idea on May 27th, 2020 while quarantined in Brooklyn during the Covid-19 pandemic. He missed playing D&D with his friends, and although he was getting a lot of writing done while being stuck at home with his kids, he wanted to do something social. He'd been sitting on the idea of a massive game of The Quiet Year for... well, years, and it seemed like a good time to try it out. He put out a call on Twitter hoping for 10-15 participants, and in under 24 hours had more than 30.
He spent the next week home-brewing custom rules for Avery Alder's The Quiet Year, as the game is designed for 4 people sitting around a table, not 32 people spread from Dubai to Australia. The writers then spent a week playing the game to create a world, then used the world to create the book that became Achten Tan: Land of Dust and Bone. Some of the writers had so much fun, they decided to accept Chris's invite to form Skullgate Media.
Each time we start a new book in the series, the rules, setting, and writers are different. However, the spirit and the goal is the same: use a game to create an amazing, fantastic, and exciting world, then unleash a group of writers to tell thrilling stories. Each book turns into a community in its own right as we value fun, collaboration, and creativity above all else. All our writers own not just their writing but the shared world they invent, and we encourage them to take risks, push the boundaries of genre fiction, and let their imaginations soar. As Chris says over and over: it's all good. "Factum Est Bonum."
