Happy 5-Year Anniversary to Neon Druid: An Anthology of Urban Celtic Fantasy

The short version:

IrishMyths wouldn’t exist if not for a little passion project/short story anthology I put together five years ago: Neon Druid: An Anthology of Urban Celtic Fantasy.

The long version: 

With the year coming to a close, I can’t help but reflect on how much fun I had writing the essays and stories that appeared on IrishMyths.com in 2023. 

Granted, I’ll be the first to admit that the actual number of posts I published this year was smaller than in years past—and that’s because I had a new medium I wanted to experiment with…video. 

Launched in December 2022, the IrishMyths YouTube channel has grown from zero to just shy of two thousand subscribers. Is that a lot? I don’t know. It’s also not the most useful metric because you’d think with nearly two thousand subscribers all of your new videos would get (at least) nearly two thousand views but I can assure you that is definitely not the case.

I mean, just look at my Celtic Santa video, which I thought for sure was gonna be a yuletide triumph but ended up being a lump of coal—at least in the numbers department. I still think it’s some of my best work, but I digress…

I’m not writing this to reflect on my hits and misses, I’m writing this to reflect on the fact that the only reason I decided to take a swing in the first place is because of a little passion project I completed five years ago: Neon Druid.

The Short Story Collection That Launched a Thousand Myths

Allow me to set the stage for you. 

It was 2018, back in the before times, and I had just finished ghostwriting a business book for a tech CEO. 

Super boring. But it paid the bills.

Anyway, to cleanse my palate afterwards, I decided to dedicate some time to a project I was actually enthusiastic about. 

At the time, I was finding my niche as a fiction writer, and found myself gravitating toward Irish and Celtic myths and mythic characters, reimagining them in modern settings.

There was something fascinating about letting ancient Celtic gods and monsters and their legendary weapons loose in today’s cities. And I suspected other writers would find this genre—urban Celtic fantasy—fascinating as well.

I was right.

I got dozens upon dozens of submissions. Maybe fifty total? Maybe more. I forget. But I read each and every one and agonized over every rejection letter. I winnowed the pool down to the sixteen absolute strongest stories, and then tacked one of my own stories, “Druids of Montreal,” onto the end for good measure.

After learning how to create a neon light effect in Adobe Illustrator, I was off to the races, designing the original paperback and ebook cover and, sometime later, the hardcover collector’s edition cover.

But What Do the Critics Think?

At the time of this writing, Neon Druid has fifteen reviews on Amazon, giving it a star rating of 4.6 out of 5.

Not too shabby.

However, that also means it’s only averaged three reviews a year for the past five years. That is pretty shabby. I mean, who the heck has been marketing this thing? What have they been doing?

Welp, I created IrishMyths.com.

That was the original play: launch a little blog about Celtic and Irish mythology to promote Neon Druid.

Of course, somewhere along the way, over the course of the past five years, my priorities shifted, and I realized IrishMyths could be much more than what I had originally intended it to be.

And here we are now.

So if you’ve been enjoying IrishMyths, could you please do me the biggest of favors and snag yourself a copy of Neon Druid? And if you enjoy it, go ahead and leave a review. Not only would you be adding an awesome new book to your collection, you’d also be honoring the origins of IrishMyths.com.

Thank you and happy New Year,

-I.E. Kneverday

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Neon Druid: An Anthology of Urban Celtic Fantasy

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