So…now that everyone’s preordered the September package from the wonderful people of Night Worms (thank you, by the way! Knowing the care and attention Sadie and Ashley put into each month’s box, you’re in for a treat; I mean, yay, you’re getting my book, and a signed bookplate from me, but you’re also getting so much more and I’m excited for people to get them), what are Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing and I doing with people who just pre-order Standalone from us?

Check out below!

The above is one of six (6) limited-edition trading cards that will be sent, along with a bookplate and the book itself, to the first 350 preorders. Did you collect trading cards, as a kid, like sports cards or, if you were like me, the Marvel Comics cards of the early 1990s? Those were the springboards for this.

Designed in-house by the wonderful Lori Michelle, the illustrations were done by Luke Spooner (who’s illustrated a ton of my stuff over the years, from I Can Give You Life in Nightscape Press’s Ashes and Entropy, to “The Universe Is Dying” in You, Human from Written Backwards, to “Everything You Leave Behind” in PMMP’s Lost Signals anthology), based off descriptions I dreamt up from the novella itself. In fact, readers of that book will find the Scarecrow figure very familiar.

On the back of the cards is trivia and thumbnail origins, which was fun to make up. It reminds me of articles you see periodically of all the novels Stephen King has referenced he has had ideas to write, but never did (like, I dunno, that I, Jason tweet I shared on my social media).

Here, though, are slasher movies I’d be pretty excited to see, personally (it beats watching, I dunno, Pieces again). In fact, while writing the copy for these cards, I got an idea for a story.

I guess we’ll see where that goes.

Anyway, you should probably pre-order Standalone now, huh? These are going to go fast.