THE LITTLE DEATH of CROSSED GENRES to be edited by Jaym Gates...and me!

After that post from a couple days ago (linking to Tycho Garren's blog) about scaling one's projects and managing one's time, I took a big cleansing breath and decided that I ought to add another magazine to my editing duties. That's not quite what happened. A couple months ago, writer Jaym Gates and I offered our assistance to Bart Leib and Kay Holt of Crossed Genres as slush readers for their new erotic sf/f quarterly. Yesterday, Bart and Kay informed us that time constraints were making the project unwieldy for them and asked Jaym and me if we would like to step up and actually edit and produce the zine. And, of course, we said yes. We're excited about it, and it should be a very cool (or, probably hot) zine.

Check out THEME AND VARIATIONS

I keep forgetting to direct everyone's attention to Theme and Variations. This is a super-cool podcast anthology of speculative fiction produced by Michelle M. Welch (a story by her upcoming in M-Brane #12/Ergosphere). Listening to it has been on my "List of Things to Do" since I first heard of it, but I figured I had plenty of time since it grows in weekly installments. Well, there's seven weeks of it online now, and I just finally got caught up. The stories, presented in (obviously) audio form by Michelle and the stories' authors, are spec fic tales with music at their hearts. I'll give a special shout-out to Rick Novy, well-known M-Brane contributor and editor of issue #12 (Ergosphere), who reads his story and plays some music. The whole thing is terrific. I really like audio fiction anyway, and I wish that I would manage to leave myself more time in the schedule to listen to it, because we seem to be in a new golden age of it.

Signal Boost: Keep a geek in training

I have never met Caren Gussoff in person, but I know her as a colleague and an ally. She is a brilliant writer (I've published her once in M-Brane already, in issue #5, and will again in #12--the Ergosphere book--in a few days). She is also a brilliant editor, as is evident from her webzine Brain Harvest. I don't know her spouse, the artist Chris Sumption, at all. Never even exchanged an email or tweet with him. But I hear that he is doing his best to further his education and employability in this shitty economy, and that he and Caren are a mere $600 short on making his tuition payment. His Pell grant ran out. What? The Feds run out of money? Why? (Look no further than Afghanistan and Iraq...don't get me started...) Anyway, they need the money by December 21. That's in just a few days, y'all. So go to Caren's website and see what she has to offer in exchange for a donation to their cause. She's not just begging over there. She's offering some fine services in trade. She'll write you into her novel--her real novel that she has grant money for--or critique your fiction. Or, what the hell, just throw her a donation in return for nothing but that good feeling. As many of you know, I just recently completed successfully a little fund drive to help my guy Jeff do some school, and it breaks my heart that so many people are being so completely fucked over by such petty amounts of money. I know people in the online spec fic community (especially my readers, jeez!) get burned out on being shaken down for donations all the damned time. But there it is. Once again. Help if you can. 

The Little Death

Bart and Kay of Crossed Genres just announced minutes ago their exciting new project, The Little Death of Crossed Genres, a new quarterly publication of erotic science fiction and fantasy. I've actually been waiting for weeks to be able to say something about this. What? Did I know about it already?  Yes! I'll be providing my services as a slush reader along with Jaym Gates, and I was just about ready to burst from keeping it secret.

Arkham Tales folds

Brandon Bell has a very worth-reading post at his blog about the demise of Arkham Tales and about the challenges that face the zine biz nowadays. Arkham Tales was a zine that I paid some attention to because it launched just shortly before M-Brane and used basically the same format, a PDF zine. Quality of content was always good, and a lot of the same writers that have appeared in my zine also appeared there. It was always nice-looking, too, which goes a long way with me. There are a lot of crappy-looking publications around, particularly within the website-only category. M-Brane is nothing too terribly special to look at, but it's not an affront to decent design either. Same for Arkham Tales. It's a decent zine and it's too bad that it's closing.

Some signal boost: Crossed Genres needs some word of mouth

Here's a link to a post at the Outer Alliance blog about the somewhat stressed situation for Bart Leib and Kay Holt's zine Crossed Genres. Please read it and consider helping them get the word out about what they do and buying some copies if you can. As a publisher in an almost identical situation (with an ambitious, awesome monthly zine, that is sadly underfunded), I feel both sympathy for and deep solidarity with Bart and Kay.

I did a Mind Meld

I enjoyed being able to participate in this week's "Mind Meld" segment at the SF Signal blog. The question was about what genre fiction we might select for a high school lit course, if limited to fiction published within the last ten years. The Mind Meld is regular reading for me anyway and I recommend everyone check it out. It was an interesting and not very easy question to answer because of the time frame. There is so much great writing going on in recent times that I feel we are in a new golden age of it, but it's hard to evaluate the lasting significance of some of the books that seem very important to me right now.

Outer Alliance makes statement on queer-unfriendly markets

I ran the ad for Crossed Genres the other day (see previous post) as a display of solidarity with its editor who encountered some trouble trying to buy ad space for it in another webzine, due to non-acceptance of The Gay over there. I wasn't at liberty to explain it before since it was still being decided within the Alliance whether there would be an Alliance response to it and what it would be, if so. After a lot of discussion and debate, The Outer Alliance has taken the position that it will let members know when it discovers a publisher that is specifically opposed to the values of the Alliance. Here is the statement on that, with a link to the whole story, if you are interested. This is also what set me off on writing this Region Between post (warning: explicit language/sexual content--unlike Bart's ad for Crossed Genres), which I did before I knew specifically who the unsympathetic publisher is. It is also the subject of this rather more measured and thoughtful new post from Brandon Bell.

I have to say that this is all rather painful to me personally, because I have known the publisher who disappointed us on this subject for a while via Twitter and have always gotten along well with him, even if we do clash on political issues from time to time. This isn't just politics for me, however. It is deeply personal. It's not like discussing a compromise on what kind of health care reform bill or energy plan or tax policy we ought to do adopt. I don't have any space for compromise on this issue. And this does not mean that I want there to be animosity and rancor. I do not. There's too much on Earth already, and I don't want to have it with people who could otherwise be friends. But I need to make it clear where I stand on this, and that I stand with the Outer Alliance on it.

CROSSED GENRES to have queer issue

The magazine Crossed Genres is calling for submissions for its 12th issue, which will have a LGBTQ theme. Writers should move quickly, since the deadline is 9/30 for an issue that will be published in November. Crossed Genres, edited by Bart Leib and Kay Holt, is a monthly sf/f zine that presents a theme each month for its writers. I was pleased to meet Bart and learn of this zine by way of the Outer Alliance.

Baen's UNIVERSE closing

The April 2010 issue will be the final issue of Jim Baen's Universe, according to a recent message from editor Eric Flint on their site. This is highly disappointing to me not just because it amounts to the business failure of a professional sf magazine, but also because this one was the big example to which I often pointed as the possible future of short fiction periodicals. People who have read my remarks on this in the past know well that I am convinced that there needs to be a business model for fiction mags where the readers pay something for content. I have based the existence of M-Brane on this conviction.

But, again, the model fails and the tiny sf-reading-world insists on free content. Let's compare Universe to another highly-regarded web-only, no-paper-version zine, Clarkesworld. The former has a paid subscription scheme--and not exactly cheap either. Plus they offered all kinds of ways to give still more money in various tiers of patronage. The latter, on the other hand, is entirely free. So Clarkesworld is much better, right? Because it's free? Well, it depends what you want out of a "magazine." If you were paying money for it, I suspect you'd be happier with Universe because it offers a LOT of content, like you would expect out of "real" magazine. Clarkesworld, while offering top-notch content, has relatively little of it and what is there is stuff that is in compliance with rigid word-count rules. Why would there be word-count limits on a web page? Maybe because they pay an impressively high word rate to writers with no readily apparent source of support for it save for donations. If you are an editor and have to spend four hundred bucks for a story with no one paying one thin dime to read it, then you are not going to be able to buy very many of those stories.

I have no idea how the free zines that also pay their writers survive, and it's none of my business. I do know, however, how Universe failed (not because of my great insight but because Flint explains it on their site). It all came down to inadequate reader support in the form of paid subscriptions. It seems very unfair, considering that the "Big Three" print digests which are not necessarily better zines than Universe, continue to somehow survive under the old dead model while the online free-for-all thrives on the other side, but right in the middle there seems to be no way to be viable as both paying and paid-for. I'm sad that Universe will go away next year just because it can't take in enough money. If M-Brane ever goes away, that will probably be the reason for it, too.

News and notes from M-BRANE 7

[The following is the complete text of my news/notes column from the upcoming M-Brane #7--the article by Carolyn Crow mentioned in the first item is NOT up yet on the blog, but will be within a day or two. I'll hyperlink some stuff in this blog post for convenience--I can't do that on paper, obviously, and it works so poorly in the PDF version of the zine that I have quit bothering to try. So this is meant to be a sort of online companion to this column in the regular versions of the zine.]

Some news and info:

Read Carolyn Crow’s article about Bruce Golden’s recent novel Evergreen. It’s on page 79, and is based on an interview that she did with Golden. I am also publishing it as a guest post on the M-Brane blog.

My ally in fighting the good fight for the future of short fiction magazines, Jason Sizemore of Apex Book Company (see the ad for some of their titles on page 5), has relaunched the excellent Apex magazine after a short hiatus. I am so happy that he is trying a pay-to-play concept for this new iteration. The Apex website now presents teaser portions of the fiction items which lead to prompts to purchase the issue in PDF form or in the new print version, via MagCloud’s print-on-demand service. To read my recent comments on the matter of monetizing short fiction, along with some reader comments on it, see the blog entry for July 24 [immediately below this one].

Open for submissions this month is the 8 Minutes contest, operated by D.D. Tannenbaum of the newly reconfigured Infinite Windows Press. You can find information via infinitewindowspress.com or 8minutes.info. I hope this contest is successful because it will result in a really cool anthology. Yours truly has made himself available as one of the early-round judges, and final judging will be done by the great Mike Resnick. In addition to cash prizes for the top stories, the twenty-five best entries will appear in the book. I know a lot of writers hate when they see a fee for a contest entry, but if you have a good story that fits the theme and can spring for the fee, please do so because all that money is going directly into paying out the prizes and defraying the publishing costs of the book.

Speaking of contests, our good friends at Brain Harvest are conducting their 2009 Mega Challenge contest (yeah, there’s a fee for this one, too, but also for a good and worthy purpose—like paying writers pro rates). They are challenging writers to use tired tropes and clichés from a list compiled by Strange Horizons and to make them work, to “untrope the tropes.” Winners will be chosen by celebrity guest judge Jeff Vandermeer (whom you can see in a photo on the Brain Harvest site wearing one of their hand-knitted mustaches).

As of this writing, I am all but done with story selections for the queer anthology. I am not ready to announce the full table of contents yet, but you can expect to see it soon on the blog. I’ll mention now that you can look forward to new stories by a few M-Brane alumni such as Abby Rustad, Brandon Bell and Derek J. Goodman [links to all their personal sites are in the M-Brane Writers Links list on the right hand side of this page]. I’ve also scored a couple of excellent reprints, stories first seen in some rather prestigious places. The cover art, which I have not seen yet, but am eagerly awaiting, is being created as I write this by Mari Kurisato whose portraits have become well-known among the genre-oriented Twitterati, so many of whom have enlisted her to create their avatars. If you’re on Twitter, you may have noticed that writers Jay Lake and Shannon Page have fine new public images, both created by Mari. As for the publication date on the antho, that remains to be seen. Selecting the content is the first major step, but there are a lot of other things to tend to before announcing the date. The goal, however, is to have it out not later than sometime in October, because I want to be able to plug it as a finished thing at Gaylacticon 2009 in Minneapolis, which happens in October. I won’t be at the con myself, but I’ve found a couple of nice volunteers to do some promo for me.

The reading period for M-Brane #12, guest-edited by Rick Novy, remains open until August 31. While I don’t doubt that we’ll end up with a great issue, I am a little dismayed at how slow the rate of new story submissions has been. Somehow it has fallen from an almost unmanageable volume in June (prompting me to go to form rejections) to a trickle in July. It is true that June followed a reading hiatus in May, and for #12 we are setting a specific reading period for that particular issue, which may mean that some writers are newly writing and revising stuff specifically for it and will be sending it along closer to the end of the reading window. Maybe summer is a slow time anyway—I don’t know, this being the first summer of M-Brane.

Though there hasn’t been a lot of fresh content added to it during the last couple of weeks, we are still percolating the “Shared World,” a new collaboratively created alternate-historical milieu which will be the setting for a future M-Brane project, possibly issue #13 or possibly a stand-alone special publication. Writers who wish to throw in on the creation stage of the world may join anytime on the blog. Just call up any post with “shared world” in its title from the archive and use the shared world label at the end of the post to pull together all the relevant info. We’re pretty well set on the general alternate history premise, but a lot more needs to be figured out yet before it’s ready for use as a fictional world.

My MINDING TOMORROW podcast included in SFBRP feed

Though I think my podcast review of Luke Burrage's novel Minding Tomorrow is quite nearly unlistenable, I was delighted the other day to learn that Luke included it in its entirety in a special episode of his Science Fiction Book Review Podcast. From what Luke told me about his download statistics, I suspect it was heard by many more people by way of Luke's site than mine. He also made sure to point out the existence of this blog and the M-Brane zine, which I appreciate of course.

I've found that a lot of the fun and gratification that comes from doing M-Brane comes from things like this where I get to collaborate with someone else in a way that results in some more audience members for everyone. In this case, Luke does a podcast that I knew about because he was a guest on the SFF Audio Podcast; then I learned from his podcast that he had written this novel; so I read it and reviewed it in audio form; and then he re-packaged that in his own podcast; and now I am directing people over to that. So, in the end, we all had some fun with it and more of my audience now knows about Luke, and more of his audience now knows about what we're doing over here, and it's a really nice thing.

New crit group

I have really fallen behind on almost every project in the last few days. I don't really understand why since I have had plenty of time. I keep starting something, setting it down, then starting something else, and so on. Anyway, over today and tomorrow, I will probably make some little posts here to try to get some M-BRANE-related business and other news and notes out in into the world.

Right now, I want to mention a new critique message board for writers that D.D. Tannenbaum has started. It's literally brand new, just set up yesterday, and I don't think it yet has many registered users, so maybe some more people will read this and join up. I have not myself participated in at all yet beyond registering, but evidently one can post stories on the message board and then other users can read them and offer critique. It should be fun and useful.

Matt Staggs: ENTER THE OCTOPUS

Make it an ongoing practice to visit Matt Staggs' blog Enter the Octopus. Matt is a lit publicist specializing in spec fic, and his site is loaded with a wealth of interesting stuff to read in terms of reviews, excerpts, recommendations, links to stuff you ought to know about, and all kinds of other fascinating things.

Currently available via his site is the first installment of his new podcast, consisting of an interview that he did with the charming Charles Tan, Filipino book-blogger and spec fic booster best known for his excellent Bibliophile Stalker blog (Charles is @charlesatan on Twitter--I would guess that nearly every reader of this blog who is also on Twitter probably follows him already). 

Matt and his blog are, for me, an excellent example of the usefulness of Twitter. I knew of Matt first via Twitter as @deepeight (his Twit-name, from the name of his publicity agency). Either he followed me and I followed him back or vice versa (don't remember), but I just knew of him for a while as this Twitter personality. Anyway, I quickly figured out that I liked him because he seemed to be (like me) a person who puts up with little hypocrisy, injustice or general douchebaggery, and who is also very tuned in to what's happening in the spec fic world. It was only much later that I learned that he was writing this awesome blog (which teaches me to be more prompt about actually looking at the websites of people I know via Twitter). So go check it out, and be sure to listen to the podcast with Charles Tan.

Novy MIRror #4 released, features Cat Rambo

This news is already a few days old and I'm running behind schedule. But in case you weren't already aware of it, the fourth installment of Rick Novy's video podcast Novy MIRror is online and can be watched at his website. 

The new installment features Rick's interview with spec fic writer and managing editor of Fantasy Magazine Cat Rambo (whose short story "Boyz and Girlz Come Out to Play" appeared in M-Brane #4 in May). For the writers among you, this interview is well worth listening to. Cat gives some great insights resulting from her persistence and success as a writer and her experience as an editor. In fact, it's so good (and Cat is so cool generally) that I am going to just go ahead and assign this episode as homework to everyone who comes upon this post. You will also find a link to Cat's site in the M-Brane writer's links list (down in the that right-hand column, three or four kilometers down). 

Also, in other Rick Novy news, he is appearing in M-Brane once again in a day or two when #6 releases with his story "The Trouble With Truffles." As a special feature in that issue, Rick becomes the subject as I interview him, and I expect readers will find it quite interesting.

[The image is of Cat Rambo, in a screen capture, while I was watching the interview.]

Luke Burrage's sf podcast

Lately, I've been listening a lot to Luke Burrage talk about the books he's read on his Science Fiction Book Review Podcast. A professional juggler and writer who recently released (for free on his site) his short novel Minding Tomorrow, Luke has produced a series of fifty or sixty (so far) podcasts in which he comments on books. As he states in his intro to each installment, he works on no particular schedule with it. When he finishes a book, he reviews it and then reads another one. I discovered him recently when he was a guest on the SFF Audio Podcast. I pulled down from iTunes a couple weeks ago the entire run of his series and have been gradually working my way through them.

What Luke does with these podcasts makes me think a bit about the purpose and value of reviews, things that I often question. Generally, I am not that interested in hearing a negative review unless the subject matter really deserves it for some egregious excess. For example, a long time ago on this blog I went ahead and slammed Orson Scott Card's novel Empire. I did this because it is an objective fact that this book is a stinking heap of crap and that Card, author of the beautiful Ender's Game/Ender's Shadow diptych, should have been embarrassed to have let it out in public with his name on it. If he had not already built a reputation as a fine writer during the previous couple of decades, he would not be able to recover from the Empire fiasco. Also, I am more comfortable with taking a swipe at a Big Brand-Name Author when it's deserved than I would if it were a new, mid-level or non-pro writer. This standard holds for all things with me, in fact. As a former restaurant owner who received mixed reviews from the newspapers, I would never slam a small business person who is trying to do something new and not hurting anyone in the process. But I will go ahead and say that I detest big-box chain restaurants, and that I think Applebee's is the single worst restaurant on Earth. I'll also say that I hate 90 percent of fast food and that I think that McDonald's is a web of mucus that has enmeshed the planet. But if I can't say something nice about the family-owned joint in my neighborhood, then I'll say nothing at all.

Luke Burrage's reviews are frequently quite negative, even blisteringly so. Indeed, I wonder if I'd even listen to them if they were delivered not in his cute easy-on-the-ears British voice but rather with a harsh Okie twang. He also disagrees with me a lot: he hated Neuromancer, Fall of Hyperion, and Snow Crash. On the other hand, his criticisms are intelligent, well-reasoned and thoughtful, and he fits into my Good Reviewer standard of generally not assaulting weaklings: Gibson, Simmons and Stephenson (like Card, above) are giants, don't really need defenders, and if they did, then I'm sure that a lot of them would appear. He also, I must admit, made me think more seriously about the merits of a series of books that I read faithfully and generally accept without much thought: the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson Dune prequels and sequels. I have always considered them to be a different and lesser product than Frank Herbert's originals, but I have generally found them to be fun to read and happily accept each new candy-coated installment just like I did with new Star Wars movies and new Star Trek TV series (except Enterprise--never did like that one despite every effort at it). 

Luke reviews, in different installments of his show, Hunters of Dune (the first of two sequels to the elder Herbert's Chapterhouse Dune) and Paul of Dune (a recent story set in between the first two of the original novels). He hated both of them and didn't even finish reading them. He was particularly offended by the casual violence in the latter book. It is true that someone is being killed at any given moment in the story, usually for no good reason other than to get them out of the way and move on to the next scene. The bloodshed and high body count of these books is something that's never really bothered me. I don't necessarily object to cartoonish levels of violence and often find it to be pretty fun, even cathartic, in some situations. But Luke makes a good point in his commentary on this particular story: the over-the-top violence tars even the "heroes" of the story and makes it hard to like any of the characters at all. The heroes are at least as vicious as the villains. During his review, he says that he reached such a point of exhaustion with this that he decided that if another main character killed someone for no good reason, then he would put down the book and read it no further. That moment promptly happened when Gurney Halleck is given control of the planet Giedi Prime and behaves as badly as the Baron Harkonnen himself, going around garroting everyone as revenge for the trauma he suffered in the Harkonnen slave pits as a youth. The moral ambiguity of the characters in all these books, including Herbert's originals, is a central feature of the Dune universe...but Luke is right about this one, and this book really doesn't deserve as much credit as I gave it when I read it. It has made me think about my novel-in-progress, Shame, which has a lot of flawed characters, moral ambiguity and violence. I'm happy to say that I think I have avoided, without even having planned to avoid them, these kinds of pitfalls.

I have Luke's own book sitting on my computer desktop right now, awaiting reading, and I am looking forward to finding out what this reviewer does as a writer, and maybe I'll report back on it once it's read. But only if I like it.

Audio

I have really been enjoying sf genre podcasts lately, both fiction like is found at Dunesteef and Clonepod and a number of other audiozines, and also commentary/conversation things SFF Audio Podcast and the author interviews at Agony Column. Even though I am very often writing or editing or reading while I am listening, and so don't pay enough attention to what I am hearing most of the time, I still really enjoy the format. And it's great when I'm cooking dinner because I can pay better attention to it then. Anyway, I think that M-Brane needs to get into the audio business somehow, but I haven't really devised a plan yet. Two obstacles present themselves: 1) I can't, at this time, spend any more money than I already do to acquire stories for publication in the zine, so I think I would be looking for content that I can use for free or perhaps induce some writers to let their items be presented both in print and in audio without them necessarily getting additional compensation for it beyond some more exposure for their work; and 2) I'd need some volunteer labor to do some reading aloud for it because I wouldn't dream of thinking that my own voice would be passable for a recording of, say, a four thousand-word short story.

It wouldn't need to be a lot of content all the time either. I don't envision doing the equivalent of a whole M-Brane issue or anything that involved, but maybe just a single story every week or two. It could also include some commentary from the writer and maybe the reader (if those are different people) and maybe me. Maybe a story from a yet-to-be-published issue of the zine could be put up in audio form as a teaser. I've been debating with myself for weeks, if not months already, if there is really even any kind of screaming need for more M-Brane products in the world. Well, I believe that there is!

Collective Fallout and the Delfino Prize

I wish to give some attention to Collective Fallout, a print journal of queer-oriented speculative fiction edited by by Eric Crapo, who teaches poetry and playwriting (and directs the library) at Chester College of New England. Pictured to the left is the cover of their first issue from January. The next issue is due in July.

Collective Fallout is also sponsoring a writing contest, the Delfino Prize, so named in memory of Christopher Delfino, a writer who passed away at too young an age earlier this year. Click here for rules and details for the contest. The winner and finalists will be published in the 2010 editions of Collective Fallout.

New Goodman story at The Dunesteef!

Writer Derek J. Goodman ("Northern Girls With the Way They Kiss," M-Brane #4, "Rental Property," forthcoming in #6), has his new story, "In Absence of Mind Wiping Thingies,"  live right now in The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine. There are a bunch of cool audio fiction sites nowadays, and Dunesteef is one of the coolest. It stands to reason that I would think so since it appears that its editors and I have at least a fair amount in common as far as the kinds of stories we like. In addition to Derek, I have heard that M-Brane #2 alum Abby "Merc" Rustad ("Unpermitted") has something going up there shortly.  Also, I noticed that S.C. Hayden ("End Day," M-Brane #3) and Joshua Scribner ("Conductors," M-Brane #1, "Tortured Spirit," #5 forthcoming) have been published there as well.

I really need to somehow make more time to actually listen to and pay attention to more audio fiction: I am constantly playing some of it, but get too distracted by trying to write or edit or blog or email or Tweet at the same time and I miss most of the story.  I need to treat myself to some uninterrupted periods of kicking back and just listening. Dunesteef and all "my" cool writers with stories there are inspiring me to do exactly that.

8 MINUTES anthology/contest

If anyone has still not visited writer D.D. Tannenbaum's sector of the interwebs, you need to catch up now for Dan has a fine new project in the works: 8 Minutes, a speculative fiction anthology, the stories for which will be the winners and runners-up of a contest. Click here for general info and click on the "Contest Rules" link for specific details and submission info. I really dig the theme of this antho: "Something has happened to the sun. In 8 minutes, everything changes!" This is the stuff of a really great book. The possibilities are endless. I've been daydreaming about it off and on all day. 

Also, I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: Dan also recently launched Infinite Windows, a genre fiction webzine. Lately it's had some interesting content, including a story by Elliot Richard Dorfman who will also appear in M-Brane #5.