Greetings, adventurers.
Our long journey—one that began for me in 2008, and one that began for us together in 2017—has nearly met its conclusion. Yes, this adventure of 18 years in the making is now reaching its apex, for Mushroom and Anchovy will now be released in just one month’s time—32 days, to be exact. I’m sending this a day early as I will be very busy tomorrow (and this is when I kindly remind you all to support your local comic shops on Free Comic Book Day).
To say I’m a cauldron of goopy green mystery feelings would be… well, pretty accurate, actually. 18 years is a long time for a project to come to fruition—a novel, no less, which feels like it should have come out sooner. But I’ll give you a brief history of this book in particular, since we’re nearing the finish line, just so you have some insight as to why it’s taken so long to see the light of day.
Mushroom and Anchovy started off as a silly little “what if”. I was working at a Tex Mex restaurant where all of our call names were Texas themed. In my non-working hours, this prompted a question that I don’t think anybody else on the planet has ever asked before: what if there were adventurers who had pizza topping code names, for some reason?
Like most weird ideas or questions I ask, this grew into a novel. I hammered out book one in its in entirety in November 2008. Then, the following year, I wrote book two. After a few years of redirecting my focus, having written and self-published my novella Hub City Survival in 2010, book three was written in 2012, the year after my husband Brad and I got married.
The books sat in a state of limbo for several years. Every so often, I’d open them up and edit them. As I’m sure you can imagine, book 1 in particular has received extensive editing and rewriting over the years, but it still retains its original themes and story. I considered submitting the entirety of the book under an alias on a fiction website but never ended up doing it. I considered self-publishing it, but I didn’t know if I really wanted to self-publish them as a trilogy. I considered reaching out to publishers, but the book itself didn’t feel particularly marketable. What publisher would take a flyer on an adult adventure-comedy trilogy with characters who use pizza toppings for names? My target audience for this book was always “adults with a weird sense of humour” and I had no idea what publishers would take on a completely unknown first-time author with a risky title, premise, and target audience. I didn’t know if it would be worth the legwork of finding out. I didn’t know if I ever WOULD find out.
I wrote other books in the meantime, some to completion, but Mushroom and Anchovy always sat in the back of my mind. It seemed a shame not to do anything with the books. But where could they go?
In 2015, our first child was born. I went back to work in 2016, and, at this job, ran into a writer friend of mine, who was putting up posters for their crowdfunding campaign. This friend is A. C. Baldwin, author of the also Quill-published book The Traveller’s Cup, which sits on my bookshelf. They told me about Inkshares and instantly I knew what my rogue trilogy about pizza-codenamed treasure hunters was destined for. I would publish the books as three segments of one book.
I finally launched the crowdfunding campaign in 2017 after some planning. I actually stopped it and started again to give myself more time to prepare. In the fall, we hit 250 preorders, which was the goal for Quill at the time. The night we hit the 250 mark, I came home to my husband pulling a celebratory bottle of champagne out of the fridge.
We didn’t expect such a long process, but with paper shortages, a pandemic, and the birth of our second child thrown into the mix, there were long periods of silence from both ends. The future for my silly book felt uncertain, and I felt silly for worrying so much about a book that I wasn’t even sure deserved to see the light of day. Nevertheless, through delays and imposter syndrome, I pressed on, until I got that fateful email from Noah at Inkshares informing me that it was my turn. More edits and rewrites ensued. Then, finally, we selected a date: June 2, 2026. A date that is now rapidly approaching.
On Monday, June 1, at 11 am Atlantic time (10 AM EST), I’m going to do a quick Facebook live check-in—my first, and probably only, State of the Onion Address. I want to take a moment to thank you all, out loud and in my own voice, for your incredible support over the 9 years we’ve been adventuring together toward getting this book into your hands. As well, on Sunday, June 7, I will be at Chapters book store in Dieppe New Brunswick to do a signing event from 12pm-4pm. Please feel free to bring your books in so I can sign them! And, if you haven’t managed to get one yet, Chapters will have them for sale.
I do have other finished books, but I’ve wanted to wait on the next steps with them because I don’t want to start asking for more of your attention before putting this book in your hands. Should you wish to hear from me about these future projects, I invite you to join me over at my Substack, where I post somewhat regularly/when the mood strikes.
So, all this said, I hope you’ll join me on Facebook live on June 1st. For now, I’ll leave you with a profound thank you for all your YEARS of support. It sounds cliche to say “I couldn’t have done it without you” but it’s the truth. This book exists in this form because of you, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
One final reminder to please update any part of your address that may need updating with hello@inkshares.com ASAP! The books are heading to print soon, after all!
For now, I leave you again with immense love and gratitude—more than you can ever understand. Rest assured I won’t be disappearing after the book is out and will have further news for you shortly after its release. But until June 1st, I am signing off.
May your adventures be fraught with wonder and just enough peril to keep them interesting,
K. M. Cooper
