Announcing M-BRANE #18 writers and TOC

M-Brane SF #18 will appear on July 1 with these fine new stories:

"Prototype" by Patty Jansen
"Lux Perpetua" by Joyce Chng
"Weekday" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
"The Ambi-Cognitive Man" by Mary E. Lowd
"Return to the Moon" by Rick Novy
"Lord of Heaven and Earth" by Jaym Gates

And a poem by Damon Lord titled "Cryo-Hell."


The new issue's writers are far-flung, with representatives from the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Singapore, and it is a majority-female group, which pleases me because the previous couple of issues had an extreme gender imbalance in the other direction. I don't apply any sort of gender quota when I select stories, but nor do I want to be one of those male sf editors who seem to always end up with all-male TOCs. I've been actively encouraging submissions from female writers or ones about female protagonists, and I am glad to notice more such items appearing in the in-box.

This month's authors include a couple of familiar names to M-Brane readers. Rick Novy has appeared in the zine many times previously, and he guest-edited our twelfth issue, released as a trade paperback titled Ergosphere. He is also editing a new anthology of near-future sf called 2020 Visions, which M-Brane Press will publish later this year. Patty Jansen, a recent Writers of the Future finalist, appeared in M-Brane last fall and she is also on the staff of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Silvia Moreno-Garcia appeared in our pages a few months ago, and this month offers a science fictional take on vampirism set, like her previous entry, in a future/alternate Mexico (a place that I have come to really like as a location for speculative fiction). Jaym Gates, my co-editor on Little Death of Crossed Genres, appears the first time in M-Brane SF (though she has two entries in the forthcoming The Aether Age). She and Joyce Chng lend a steampunkish flavor to this issue with their highly imaginative tales. Also new to M-Brane is Mary E. Lowd, offering a story about some unusual brothers and sisters on a distant world. Finally, while I don't believe I have published poetry in M-Brane SF before, I am presenting a science fictional poem by British writer and good friend of M-Brane Damon Lord.

M-BRANE #18 ToC late but forthcoming

I'm seriously late on announcing the contents of the July issue...because I haven't actually finalized it yet. The last few weeks have presented an unprecedented volume of submissions and it has been quite difficult to make some rather close decisions. But the issue will be on time and it will be excellent. Also, the July issue may be the last one that has its own print edition since I plan to go to a new quarterly plan (though monthly releases will still happen in the electronic versions). Occasionally, when I am at a loss for anything else to present, I dig up from the bowels of YouTube a "theme song" for the impending issue:

Probable change to print edition impending

In addition to some planned changes with the electronic editions of M-Brane SF and the upcoming online edition, I am considering a major change in the print edition. While the electronic forms will remain monthly, I may move to a quarterly schedule for the print version. The new quarterly version, as I envision it, would be an omnibus of three months of the electronic fiction content and possible some "premium" content not available elsewhere. It's possible that a less-frequent print version might draw more attention than the current monthly facsimile of the PDF version, and it would be possible for me to get it into more distribution channels that what I can with the ways it's been done so far. Also, a quarterly schedule for the print version might be more compatible with other M-Brane Press operations such as the  forthcoming stand-alone books still on the docket for this year and our new fantasy zine, Brandon Bell's Fantastique Unfettered, which we plan to launch in high style later this year.

New site!

As regular readers can see, I've started a make-over of the M-Brane site. This new M-Brane SF-dot-com site will eventually house online much of the content on the regular zine, though the PDF subscription option will continue to exist, as will a new epub version. A new M-Brane Press site (also under construction) will be the place to order these zine subscriptions, buy print editions of M-Brane SF and find news and order information for M-Brane Press books, current and forthcoming.

Cesar Torres reads from THE 12 BURNING WHEELS

Writer Cesar Torres posted this link which goes to an approximately twenty-minute video of him reading before a live audience a couple of stories from his collection The 12 Burning Wheels, published in February by M-Brane. While the audio quality is not perfect, it's entirely listenable, and I was absolutely thrilled to see and hear it. I am very proud to be the publisher of this fine little book, and this was the first time that I got to see someone do a public reading of something from my little press, and I was so happy for Cesar over the evidently positive reaction of his audience.  In case I have not said it enough in the past, Cesar Torres is brilliant writer. His work is beautiful, memorable and achingly good, and if I never have another notable success as a small press publisher, I will always be very happy that I had a hand in showing off his work to the world with The 12 Burning Wheels. The book is available in print from Amazon and in electronic formats from M-Brane (option 4 on that list).

M-BRANE #17 released today

The new issue went out moments ago with great new stories by Aaron Polson, Margaret Karmazin, Jason Sizemore, Edd Howarth, Charles Muir, Joe Jablonski and Lawrence Dagstine. It also contains some interesting news about M-Brane's exciting future, and I'll be posting more about that here on the blog within a few days.

The print version of the new issue is available in the Lulu store. Also, I updated the single-issue PDF order button on Page 2, but it only goes back as far as issue #9. A better storefront system is on the way soon, but in the meantime, if anyone wants a single issue predating #9, one can just order one of the later ones and specify in the Pay Pal note which one they really want.

New office, new color

Today Jeff and I repainted the room of our new home that I call alternately my office or my library, and which is the new M-Brane SF "World Headquarters." Previously it was, like most rooms in the place, a weird blueish gray that seemed to suck away all light and life. Gradually, Jeff has removed this color from the entire place, and today I assisted him with this room. It's a smaller room than the office in the old place, so all the book shelves don't fit into it, but there was plenty of room elsewhere in the place for some of them, and I think it's quite agreeably appointed and cozy now. These pics, taken a few minutes ago, show off my new room's lovely reddish glow:

I guess that's all I have to report right now!

Good review for CROSSED GENRES 18 (Eastern theme)

Philippine Online Chronicle has an overall very nice review of the recent "Eastern" issue of Crossed Genres, which included my story "I Will Come Home." I consider valid the one criticism of my story--that it seems to end too abruptly "as though it were simply an introduction to a longer narrative." In fact, the world in which it is set was mined from a "future history" that has been percolating in the back of my brain, occasionally spilling out into lots of mostly unfinished stories, for quite a number of years.

If I were to ever write all the stories that comprise this world, they would span many centuries and this particular one would be set very early in chronology. There exists an outline and some written chapters of a novel that I started several years ago which details an epic struggle for control of Earth and Mars waged among some of the descendants of the characters in "I Will Come Home." Then, set much later is the story that's closest to actual completion, my oft-mentioned novel Shame, which deals with a dying, post-apocalyptic Earth and a powerful human-inhabited Mars that rose to dominance over human affairs sometime centuries after the events of "Novel 1." Then, set even later in time, is an extensively outlined but unfinished space adventure epic that my friend Pat and I were intending to collaborate upon but have let sit idle for many months now. That project was not originally conceived as being part of this larger world, but as I developed characters and situations for it, it started to make sense to link it. So if the new story seems like a set-up for a bigger story, then that is probably an effect of me having all this other stuff churning around in my head.

Weird Asimov dream

Of possible (though not probable) interest to M-Brane readers is a new post on my Live Journal where I describe a strange dream that I had about Isaac Asimov, and also recount the time when he sent me a note (in real life). In the dream, he looked much as he does in this picture.

Announcing M-BRANE #17 writers and TOC

I am excited about the upcoming issue of the zine. Here's the cover image and the table of contents for #17:

Edd Howarth: "The Moon Man"
Aaron Polson: "One-Tenth of One Percent"
Margaret Karmazin: "I'll Be Leaving"
Charles A. Muir: "Smoke Nurse"
Lawrence R. Dagstine: "The Girl Who Dreamt Portals"
Joe Jablonksi: "Tremoik"
Jason Sizemore: "For the Sake of Pleasing"

With the exception of Dagstine, who returns to M-Brane's pages with his charming Orphan-Annie-meets-sf tale, all these writers are new to this zine. Edd Howarth (who claims to have written his first short story in crayon on his mother's kitchen walls...at age twenty-one) leads the issue with his thoughtful and amusing "The Moon Man." Aaron Polson, whom I suspect is well-known to a lot of this zine's followers as a result of his many appearances elsewhere, offers a grim item inspired by the films of The Thing and the Campbell story, "Who Goes There?" upon which they were based. Prolific writer Margaret Karmazin delivers a sensitive tale about a marriage and a husband's strange secret. Inspired by dreams and legends of ghostly bedside visitors, Charles Muir's "Smoke Nurse" fascinates and chills. A cult on an alien world and its inevitably lethal trajectory is the subject of Joe Jablonski's "Tremoik."  Stoker Award-nominated writer and editor Jason Sizemore of Apex Publications concludes this issue with his spectacular sf adventure novelette "For the Sake of Pleasing." It contains, among other things, exploding heads.

Second-Person POV/ Theodore Sturgeon

On Twitter, most of the people I follow have some kind of interest in or involvement with fiction writing and publishing, but I have gradually weeded out of the stream nearly all of the literary agents that I was monitoring during the early months of my Twitter era because I grew bored with the endless tips and advice on how to write queries and also the constant lists of "bad" things writers shouldn't ever NEVAR! do with their prose. The former is simply not interesting to me since I am not in the business of writing queries currently, nor do I require them as an editor. The latter is actually pretty annoying because it's obvious to anyone who reads a lot and with discernment that much of the best stuff that's been written and published contains one kind or another of never-do-it, top-ten-mistakes-of-writers rules breakage. 

A few months ago, I noticed a mini-trend of agents and editors tweeting about the use of second-person point-of-view on their lists of things they hate and that they never want to see again. You know, it's that POV where you are sitting here typing on your MacBook. You are working on a post for the M-Brane blog, which you have been neglecting. You want to write about Theodore Sturgeon, but you have gotten sidetracked, digressing about agents and  POV. You wonder if you ought to instead being posting the ToC for issue #17 (your fellow editor and comrade Jason Sizemore will have a story in it!). Your cat Maus sits atop your desk and shrills at you. You wonder if he is out of food. [He was not out of food.]


Granted, second-person is the least common narrative mode in literature in English (though it's all-pervasive in song lyrics for some reason) and possibly the most difficult to use effectively and perhaps the easiest with which to annoy someone, but I really dig an effective use of it when a writer manages it. Last month I published a novelette by new writer Bob Labar called "Wake," which is told principally in second-person and which also employs several other unconventional methods. When I started reading it for the first time, I wondered if the point-of-view was going to be a "good" use of it or a "bad" use of it, but then when I got deeply enough into the story to understand what was going on, I decided it was maybe a borderline-brilliant choice of POV, one where the technique itself helped illuminate the main character's situation in a way that would have felt very different in third-person.


Then, just a few days ago, I read for the first time Theodore Sturgeon's fantastic short story "The Man Who Lost the Sea," also told largely in second-person. I read it in a paper book, called The Golden Helix, that's been in my collection (mostly unread) for years but fortunately it is also online, recently reprinted here by Strange Horizons (originally in F&SF). It's just spectacular all the way through and especially at the very end when one "gets" what's going on. The copy on my shelf includes a foreword by Sturgeon in which he describes that it came out of period of low productivity, then turned into a 21,000-word novella which he then chopped down to a 5000-word short which was then hailed as one of the best stories of 1959. As I read Sturgeon now, with the perspective of time and the evolution of the sf genre, it's even more obvious what a fine writer he was. He not only told compelling stories, he did it with great style and literary panache in an era where a lot of sf was still pretty crude. A lot of less-well-remembered sf writers in the 1950s could have told this same story, but not many could have told it as well. 


Sturgeon is one of probably too many great sf writers that I have not read enough of, and I've been trying to correct that deficit lately. As a kid, I knew his name because he wrote the teleplays for a couple of memorable episodes of the original Star Trek series, "Amok Time" (the one where Spock succumbs to the Vulcan seven-year mating cycle) and "Shore Leave" (where an idyllic planet produces physical manifestations of one's fantasies as a sort of amusement park). He wrote a third unproduced episode called "The Joy Machine" which was later adapted by James Gunn as a novel with the same title for Pocket's Star Trek line. In my childish Trek fan way, I would often sample books and stories by writers whose names I recognized from the Star Trek credits thinking that they must be great if they wrote that show. With Sturgeon, I tried and failed with Godbody, his last book, posthumously published the year of his death. At fourteen or fifteen years old, I wasn't an experienced and sophisticated enough reader to get that book. I found that I didn't like it. It bored and confused me and I gave up on it less than halfway in (and it's not very long). I did hang on to my book Science Fiction Book Club edition of it over the years, however, and went back at it as an adult and got a lot more out of it. 


But since that book was Sturgeon's last and had an odd feeling of being a coda to his career, I wanted to find some other stories that were more typical. What I discovered is that none of his work was "typical" but a lot of it was very daring and transgressive. The tres creepy short novel Some of Your Blood, for example, told in epistolary style like Dracula, lingers in the back of the mind long after it's been read. Sturgeon's contribution to Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" probably offends more readers than it delights, but it is exemplary of Sturgeon's way of putting questions to readers and pushing them along toward interesting possible answers. Now I am working my way through the stories in a couple of neglected collections that have been sitting here waiting for me for years, and am enjoying them very much. Has anyone reading this page read Sturgeon, and if so, did you like his work? Are there other writers of that period that you like that don't seem to get enough attention anymore?

Fan fiction?

I haven't been very looped in on the discussion, but evidently a debate has been happening in the interwebs over the value--or not--of fan fiction. 

Here's an item by George R.R. Martin in which he denounces the idea of fan fic and basically says writers are dumb to let fans play in their sandbox. He cites as examples the famous case of Marion Zimmer Bradley getting threatened with a lawsuit by a fan who was writing Darkover fiction that Bradley had read and encouraged after Bradley wanted to write a novel using a premise similar to something in this fan's story. He also talks about Lovecraft and how he died a pauper supposedly because he didn't protect his copyrights, while Edgar Rice Burroughs made himself a millionaire off his Tarzan and Barsoom properties.

Here's an item by Nick Mamatas rebutting Martin's piece and contending that the comparison between Lovecraft and Burroughs is invalid, and making the case that the only reason Lovecraft has a legacy and is so well known and highly regarded now is that he encouraged his fellow writers and fans to play with the Cthulhu Mythos which, in turn, helped keep Lovecraft's own work alive so many decades after his death. 

This is an item by Corinne Duyvis in which she ascribes a lot of value to fan fiction as a way for writers to practice the craft and get feedback from readers. 

And there are many other such posts around the world dealing with this general topic. What do M-Brane readers think about it? Does anyone who reads this blog or who has written for the magazine read or write any fan fiction, or have you in the past? I used to when I was a kid and had a lot of fun with it, and I think it may have had some of the benefits that Corinne describes. I even self-published a lot of it in my Star Trek fanzine under a variety of pseudonyms. My co-editor and I probably wrote ourselves over half of all the content that we ever published over 21 monthly issues, so we certainly got some practice at writing a lot of stuff. That's not to say that any of it was any good, but it was probably a useful exercise for a young kid nonetheless.

Move completed; New story published!

I'll indulge in some bragging about the appearance of my short story "I Will Come Home"  in this month's issue of Crossed Genres. My pride in this publication comes not from satisfaction with my own work, but from the fact that Crossed Genres is such a fine publication and the fact that I appear alongside such talented people. As I have mentioned here before, I rarely finish any fiction and haven't gone so far as to submit any for a long time until this story, so it feels great to be back at it.

In other news: Jeff and I successfully completed our move to St. Louis Thursday afternoon. TV and internet was blessedly restored to us yesterday evening, and we are very happy with the new place. We do still, however, have a great deal of unpacking and setting up to do. This image will give you an idea of the current condition of the new M-Brane SF office.

#16 RELEASED

M-Brane #16 PDF edition was distributed to subscribers this morning. The print version is available in the Lulu store. Thanks again to the writers for their great stories, and to the zine's many readers for their continued support. I will be mostly offline for the next couple of days as I relocate.

M-BRANE #16 COMING...this week sometime!

Sometime between tonight and Saturday May 1, I will release the terrific sixteenth issue of M-Brane SF. Sorry to be so indefinite about it, but I am now (finally) in the midst of the move back to STL and will need to fit in this project where I can. It's basically ready to go, just doing a bit more proofreading on it. It will feature amazing work by Glenn Gillette, Kay Holt, TJ McIntyre, Michael Andre-Driussi, Sean Eads and Bob Labar. In the meantime, here's a video to watch:

M-BRANE #16 contents announced

M-Brane #16 releases in a few days with an exciting and unusual assortment of stories. Here's the table of contents:


"Why Look Down?" by Glenn Lewis Gillette
"Pieces of You" by Kay T. Holt
"This Electronic Life" by T.J. McIntyre
"Passion in the Year 2090" by Sean Eads
"Mad Dogs of Mercury" by Michael Andre-Driussi
"Wake" by Bob Labar

Glenn Lewis Gillette is the author of this zine's first story ever, appearing last year on page one of M-Brane #1, while T.J. McIntyre appeared in M-Brane #3. Michael Andre-Driussi has appeared twice recently in M-Brane. New to our pages are Kay T. Holt, co-editor of Crossed Genres; Sean Eads, a reference librarian and writer from Colorado; and Bob Labar who makes his print debut with his unusual and experimental story.

Dhalgren on stage

I was astonished when I saw this review by Jo Walton of a stage play based on Samuel Delany's Dhalgren. I was dazzled by tbe very idea. I had that same feeling that I have while asleep in recurring dreams when I discover that there exist "lost episodes" original Star Trek. But evidently it's real, this on-stage reimagining of Delany's magnum opus, a play titled Bellona, Destroyer of Cities.


Dhalgren elicits a wide range of reactions. Writers that I admire almost as much as Delany, such as Ellison and Dick, said unflattering things about it, while others, like Sturgeon, heaped highest praise on it. It seems like a lot of people have started reading it and then given up on it. But I adore it. I don't know if I can say firmly that  it's the single greatest novel I have ever read, but it would certainly be in the top five. It's not just a stunning achievement of speculative fiction, it is a towering triumph of American literature penned by one of the most literate and subversive writers ever to write sf.

That book maintains a sort of garrison in my imagination and I am always waiting and looking for the next thing that will astonish and thrill as deeply as it did. It's a fairly fresh memory, since I read it for the first time in the fall of 2008 in several intense sessions, patience fraying when I had to break to go to work or to sleep, needing to get back to it ASAP. Frequently, when I am between books, I consider rereading it, but I refrain because I don't always need the reminder of how small and inept my own imagination and writing are in contrast. But when I made my attempt at NaNoWriMo last November, I used Dhalgren as a sort of cultural touchstone for my characters, and inserted as a plot detail a fictitious readers' discussion of the book on the Diane Rehm Show.

Now that there has been a play, I wonder if there could ever be a movie? It would probably suck, but it's still fun to imagine.

Another progress report

Though a period of extreme day-jobbery followed by a period of out-town-travel and a grueling search for our new home put me well behind on all projects, I can report happily that the M-Brane slush-pile is caught up through April 10. Stories have been booked for the May issue, and I will announce the TOC soon. It's a really good one! Also, just today, I completed a sort of rough advance reader copy of The Aether Age for the multi-media crew to look at, and we are getting very, very close to being able to turn the final product over to our publisher, Eric at Hadley Rille Books. That print-out that I'm holding in my hand is something like the way first page of each story will probably be formatted. That element at the top is a segment of a timeline highlighting the main "historical" event of the story along with a couple of events that are thought to have happened before and after. This is a very fancy project!

In other news, I recently actually finished a short story and submitted to a zine. And it was accepted. I'm not sure if I am supposed to talk about it yet because I don't think they have announced their TOC yet, but I am quite pleased about it. I have so many works-in-progress that never get done and I haven't subbed anything to anyone in a long time, so it was very encouraging experience to finally do so and get a great response.

Progress report

I can't believe I have not posted to this page since the release of M-Brane #15. I have a good excuse, however: we have been deep in the process of getting ourselves moved back to STL, and for most of the past week have been there working on finding a new home to rent. I'm happy to report success on that, and also on finding a decent new day job. We leave OKC by May 1.

To writers with submissions pending: I am sorry for my recent rather slow response times, but I intend to catch up within a few days. A few writers will be getting the exciting news that have had stories accepted for M-Brane #16. Yes, it's April 8 and I have not yet booked a single story for the May 1 issue. But I swear I will soon, and news of the next table of contents will show up right here in a few days.

M-BRANE #15 RELEASED!

This was just released to the PDF subscribers. The print version is live at the Lulu store. 

The April issue is marvelous.  Here's the table of contents:

Silvia Moreno-Garcia: "The Manticore"

Erica Hildebrand: "Aunt Eustace"

Kaolin Imago Fire: "Immersion"

Jason Heller: "The Prospect"

Deborah Walker: "Data Crabs"

Cate Gardner: "Treading the Regolith"

Prolific writer of strange fiction Cate Gardner is well known to readers from many venues, including a previous appearance in M-Brane (issue #3); Deborah Walker has appeared in M-Brane twice previously (issues #5 and #8), in our anthology Things We Are Not, and has stories forthcoming in  other venues later this year; Jason Heller appeared in M-Brane #6 and is a regular contributor to The Onion AV Club.  New to M-Brane's pages are Silvia Moreno-Garcia, publisher of Innsmouth Free Press; Erica Hildebrand, fiction writer and Odyssey graduate; and Kaolin Fire, well known to M-Brane readers as one of the editors of GUD Magazine.

AETHER AGE progress report

If anyone's interested, there's a new post at The Region Between with some my thoughts and reflections at this stage of editing The Aether Age. It contains links to the book's TOC on the AeA blog and links to some of the other creative folks who are working with us on it.

AETHER AGE announcement soon

Yesterday, we settled a few remaining details and finalized the table of contents for The Aether Age. We will be announcing it very soon at the Aether Age blog.

This is a bigger and more complex project than I had imagined it would be be when we started, and, because of the shared-world nature of the book, a lot different than compiling an anthology of unrelated short stories or even a themed collection. The stories selected for The Aether Age will comprise much more than a theme--they will open windows into an astonishing new world. This is going to be a very cool book.

Reminder: MACHINA pre-order deals

In case readers missed it earlier, I want to point out that we are still offering some excellent pre-order deals for Derek J. Goodman's Machina over there on the books info page. Pre-order purchases of either the print or ebook versions will include subscriptions to the electronic M-Brane until April 1. The price for the print book includes shipping.

M-BRANE #15 PREVIEW

The April issue will charm, stun, dazzle and blow the minds of M-Brane readers. Here's the table of contents:

Silvia Moreno-Garcia: "The Manticore"

Erica Hildebrand: "Aunt Eustace"

Kaolin Imago Fire: "Immersion"

Jason Heller: "The Prospect"

Deborah Walker: "Data Crabs"

Cate Gardner: "Treading the Regolith"

Prolific writer of strange fiction Cate Gardner is well known to readers from many venues, including a previous appearance in M-Brane (issue #3); Deborah Walker has appeared in M-Brane twice previously (issues #5 and #8), in our anthology Things We Are Not, and has stories forthcoming in  other venues later this year; Jason Heller appeared in M-Brane #6 and is a regular contributor to The Onion AV Club.  New to M-Brane's pages are Silvia Moreno-Garcia, publisher of Innsmouth Free Press; Erica Hildebrand, fiction writer and Odyssey graduate; and Kaolin Fire, well known to M-Brane readers as one of the editors of GUD Magazine.

A little bit of well-earned recognition

I was delighted to see that M-Brane SF rated a couple of mentions in this Tangent Online list of reading recommendations for short fiction published in 2009. Cheers to Sue Lange ("Zara Gets Laid") and Edward W. Robertson ("Steve Kendrick's Disease"), both in issue #5, June 2009. A few months ago, we did get a quite favorable review of that overall issue from Tangent. I believe that's the only issue of our eleven last year that was seen by a Tangent reviewer, so it makes me wonder if we might have received a couple more nods if more stories had been reviewed. I should probably make a better effort to get these issues in front of more reviewers. In any case, getting these mentions for M-Brane and a couple of my writers gave me a nice feeling of legitimacy, a sense that I have, in fact, made some good decisions with the zine.  The second year, already about to see its third issue, is going to be even better. My decision to decrease somewhat the number of stories per month is actually making it easier rather than harder to put together some really solid monthly collections, and I think we will see a lot of M-Brane stories and writers showing up on a lot of lists in another year's time.

Sue Lange also appeared in M-Brane #9 with "The Kangaroo War" (there's a link in the right-hand column to get #9 for free), and Ed Robertson will appear soon in The Aether Age.

New anthology forthcoming from M-BRANE SF: 2020 VISIONS edited by Rick Novy

Read this post at Rick Novy's blog.  He will be editing an anthology of very-near-future sf titled 2020 Visions (as in the year 2020), which I will be publishing. We do not have a publication date set yet, but we are definitely planning to get it out in 2010, a mere ten years before the time period of these visions of 2020. It's a cool concept in that most of us will presumably (hopefully) still be alive in 2020, and it will be fun to look back and see if any of the writers foretold anything about the near future.

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.

Length

Charlie Stross posted an interesting entry today wherein he reviews the history of the length of sf novels and how length has evolved through a series of things not to do with writing, such as distribution channels and printing/binding methods. As examples, he explains why his Accelerando was made to fit into a few score fewer pages in its US edition versus its UK edition, and why his Merchant Princes series consists of more volumes than he had originally envisioned. It's interesting reading if that's the sort of thing that's your bag.

He speculates that if ebooks become the major sales channel, this could aid in a revival of fiction formats that have been eclipsed by what we see as the "regular"-length novel, such as the novella, the Dickensian serial and the "gigantic shoebox-sized monster." This interests me because I, too, have been thinking that a revival of the novella in particular would be fun as a development for sf. I don't know if there's a lot of future for it in print, but I am trying a couple of projects this year (they'll be in ebook formats as well): Derek J. Goodman's Machina (pre-order info on the books page) which is a 236-page trade paperback short fiction collection with just four stories in it, one of them a nearly-30K novella. The next will be the first (and hopefully not the only) "Double." The two stories that will comprise the first one are, by word count, novellas rather than novels, and that was the case with plenty of stories in the old Ace series, too. Future volumes may have longer stories, but I will probably cap them at perhaps 50K. This is a decent yet reasonably short chunk of reading, a nice length for a lot of sf stories. It offers more to delve into than a short story but without being an epic. Not that I don't like a big, long epic just fine, but I think there's room for mid-range material, and if the new methods and the smaller publishers (like me) make possible getting more of it published, then I think that's probably a good thing for the genre.

The Dream Journal

I don't know how many people who look at this blog also ever read my Live Journal (The Region Between)--I seem to have cultivated a couple different followings that overlap a little bit but not completely. That's okay, and that's why I started the LJ in the first place, to keep some my non-M-Brane business off of this page so that it wouldn't annoy people. But I thought I'd mention here to writers in particular, that I recently started a fun (to me) project of using the LJ to take notes on weird dreams that I have. I think I've mentioned before that images and narratives from dreams frequently stick with me and inspire fiction. Nearly everything that I have attempted to write in recent memory has had its origin in a dream.

A lot of people say that they never remember dreams, or at least seldom recall any detail. I think, however,  that one can cultivate the habit of remembering them. For me, the ones I recall best generally happen in that period of sleep not long before I am about to wake up for the day or in the early part of sleep (like when I doze for an hour on the couch and things that I am hearing on the TV weave their way into REM state). What I usually do upon awakening is simply think about it for a minute, just review whatever I can remember as immediately as possible upon awakening, and generally the main points stick in memory. And even if the narrative sense of the dream is lost, sometimes images and scenery will linger, and those can be interesting in themselves.

I've often seen the recommendation that one keep a notepad next to the bed to take notes on dreams, or even speak some observations into a recording device right away upon awakening. In my case, the former would never work (I can't handwrite anything for crap--not even a brief note), and the latter would certainly annoy my partner. Indeed, he has little patience for it when I try to tell him about a dream under any circumstances...because he thinks they are intensely boring. So instead of boring him, I will try the patience of my LJ followers. One can peek in on my dream journal using the dream journal tag. There are only four such entries so far, and they probably are fairly dull. But sfnal geekiness surfaces constantly, which suggests that my subconscious is wonderfully marinated in it.

"Humans as individuals don't scale well."

Demands on my time--which have grown in recent months--make it so that I have not been reading some of my favorite blogs as often as I would like. One that I try to make a few minutes for, however, is "Tychoish: Dialectical Futurism," a very thoughtful series of essays on a far-ranging series of topics that together indicate the configuration of the vast intellect of multi-talented Sam Kleinman (aka Tycho Garen). I'd like to point everyone to this post, "Conceptualizing Scale." It gets right at a source of frequent anxiety for me, namely a nagging sensation of being underwater or out of the loop with information that I suspect I need or with projects that I think I should be giving some more time. Each of the items on his list makes a lot of sense to me, and it strikes me that there is a tremendously useful congruence between his forth and sixth points: "ignore everything you can possibly stand to" and "use technology and media to build relationships rather than accumulate information." It's all good stuff to consider for people like me who try to be publishers and fiction writers in the world as it is with its endless web content and social media opportunities. 

Pre-order Goodman's MACHINA!

"We so rarely give thought to the machines that surround us, but just because we ignore them does not mean they don't have stories to tell. Monolithic factory machines might just hide a divine presence, robots from a forgotten war lay in wait in the sewers for a time when they can rise again, creatures of steel and steam patrol the skies, and a metal giant made for destruction learns emotions from a teenage boy. In these four tales, Derek J. Goodman shows us just what mysteries the mechanical world may hold."

In a few weeks, M-Brane SF will publish Derek J. Goodman's collection of sf novelettes and novellas Machina. The book starts with the spectacular "Dea Ex Machina," which has been adapted as an opera for an upcoming production by the Crucible in Oakland California, and also includes the amazing steampunk novella "The Twister Sisters"; the loving homage to 1980's-era sci-fi and teen movies "Those Were the Days," and the stunning manga-influenced boy/machine love story "As Wide as the Sky, and Twice as Explosive."

Mark Streshinsky, the librettist and director of Machine, the opera based on Derek's story, provides an introduction to the collection. The cover art is by Dan Galli.

The book will become available in print and as an ebook from Amazon on April 1, but we are offering several direct-from-M-Brane pre-order deals starting immediately. These will also appear on the books page.

1) Buy Machina in print (trade paperback) for $12.95 (shipping included!). Get a complimentary one-year subscription to the PDF edition of M-Brane SF!

2) Buy the electronic version of Machina in either PDF, .prc(mobi), or .epub formats for $4.95. Get a complementary one-year subscription to the PDF edition of M-Brane SF!

Select format

PDF MOBI (.prc) EPUB

3) Buy Machina together with Cesar Torres' The 12 Burning Wheels (both in trade paperback) for only $14.95! Or with Ergosphere, ten stunning stories from the pages of M-Brane SF, for $15.95! Shipping included, as well as a complimentary one-year subscription to the PDF edition of M-Brane SF!

Choose an option...

MACHINA/12 BW $14.95 MACHINA/ ERGOSPHERE $15.95

For Duotrope users...

If you're a writer and use Duotrope to find and follow markets for your stories, writer Glenn Gillette has a new app that you may be interested in. He says:
Diligent writers working markets ask, "1. What's changed since I last looked? 2. How do I skip a market I've already decided about?" Duotrope's RSS feed helps with #1 (as far as I know, the only market clearing house that does), but not #2.   I've written a desktop app that 1) reads Duotrope's RSS feed since the last time I ran it, 2) looks in my existing buckets for each market mentioned, 3) pops up a dismissal when it finds it already labeled, or 4) lets me work new ones (look at Duotrope's web-page & make a decision). I use these buckets: not pay enough, closed or cancelled, no story matches, and follow-up. Is anybody else interested in using this desktop app, called "siftMarkets", as a free download?  If you're interested, Glenn may be be contacted here.

M-BRANE #14 RELEASED; comments on e-books and the print edition

A few days early, I have released the PDF edition of the March issue. Also, a print version is available here.

This issue is grade-A super-fine. With new stories from Cat Rambo, Rick Novy, Derek J. Goodman, and Michael Andre-Driussi, it will amaze and delight. We also have first-rate entries from Michael C. Lea and Scott H. Andrews, as well as the fine sf debut of Ben Phenicie. Subscriptions to M-Brane and single copies of the issue #14 PDF can be ordered here.

As with the last issue, #13, there is not yet a mobi or other non-PDF ebook format ready to go. Long story short: I am suspending at least temporarily most of my involvement with the Kindle store save for some current and upcoming book titles. This is due to a couple of annoying facts about the Kindle store, and I'm also trying to not wear out my friend Dan Tannenbaum with constant requests for help with ebook formatting. But I am in the process right now of reworking the ebook format situation for M-Brane and will have news of that shortly. I'm still learning how to do it, but I believe I will soon have the in-house ability to generate epub-formatted books and then render those into other formats as well. When that process is mastered, I will be able to offer electronic subscriptions to M-Brane in more formats than just the PDF, including getting it available for the Kindle again (though possibly not sold through Amazon...we'll see).

I've gotten a couple of queries in recent months about the likelihood of there ever being a print subscription to M-Brane rather than having to buy it issue-by-issue as it has been so far. The problem with that is that there is no "print run" as such. There aren't copies sitting around here or anywhere waiting for buyers. I offer it by way of a print-on-demand service, and those per-copy prices that one sees there are literally as cheap as they can get doing it that way (I think my royalty on #14 is maybe fifty cents). I may switch fully over to a different service in the next few months, and that will probably bring the per copy cost down. But still, it's never going to get much cheaper than 5 or 6 bucks/copy...PLUS shipping. If I believed that there were even a handful of people that actually want to spend something like a hundred dollars or more per year to get M-Brane in print, I'd consider setting it up. But I don't think there is even one person who wants to do that. But let me know if I'm mistaken!

12 BURNING WHEELS Release Day! And listen to the author's playlist!

Today is the official publication date for Cesar Torres' The 12 Burning Wheels. Order info is on the books page and on this page a couple posts down. We are extending all the pre-order deals indefinitely. Cesar has placed a fun extra on his site: his music playlist, 12 songs to accompany to the stories. So go check that out, too. If you would rather buy it from Amazon than avail yourself of one of my direct offers (maybe you're buying other stuff on Amazon anyway), the print version is available there, but there has been a delay with Kindle version going live (we have it here, however, as well as an .epub edition). I won't rain on this great day by complaining about Amazon, however, so I will save my gripes about dealing with Kindle store for another time. The image is of the author and his fine book. Get a copy now!

12 BURNING WHEELS "PRE-ORDER" DEALS EXTENDED

Cesar Torres' The 12 Burning Wheels releases officially tomorrow. I am extending indefinitely the pre-order specials. Details are on the books page and on this page a couple posts down. Also, there was evidently some kind of glitch with one of the Pay Pal links last night, but it all appears to be in good order now.

Writers links updated

I've been neglecting updates to the list of M-Brane writers links (located on the right hand side of the page, a few meters down). So I just added a whole bunch of people to it. If you are a writer who has been published or is scheduled to be published in M-Brane and have a web presence and wish to have a link to it, and do not see your name here, let me know by email at mbranesf at gmail or here in comments, and I will add you. Writers are listed alphabetically by first name. Also, if you are listed there, you might check to see if your link is still going to the right place. Sometimes people change their locations and I may not be aware of it.

12 BURNING WHEELS about to go live in all formats

UPDATED 5/5/2010:
To order The 12 Burning Wheels, go to Amazon to order it in print, or click here to order electronic versions directly from M-Brane (scroll down to section "3" of that post). These links supersede the ones posted below in the original version of this post.
__________

I'm reposting here all the order specials for The 12 Burning Wheels, which releases officially on 12/22. I have updated it with e-book options. While we are making this available on Amazon for the Kindle, I'd really rather prefer that e-book buyers get it directly from M-Brane. Why? So that Cesar can actually earn some royalties and so that M-Brane can get some kind of cut from the sale. Our royalties from Amazon on Kindle books is very small and it may never happen that we get paid, because they hold back a rather large amount  before paying us. But it will be there in a couple days if one does wish to go that route. I'll update later with the Amazon links for the print version when those go live, too (we do not have the same issue with the print edition and Amazon as we do with the Kindle edition, by the way. They are handled in a totally different way by Amazon as far as paying royalties for some unknown reason). 

[UPDATED 2/20 with E-BOOK OPTIONS--see paragraph 4 below]

Writer of weird and spectacular fiction Cesar Torres has created an astounding 12-item cycle of stories that he calls The 12 Burning Wheels, and somehow it has happened that I have the great privilege of bring these stories into print under a single cover. This beautiful book's official publication date is February 22, but I am offering some pre-order specials on it starting immediately:

1) The print edition of The 12 Burning Wheels will sell for on Amazon for $7.99 plus shipping, but order it now from M-Brane SF for only $7.99, shipping included. Purchase includes a free subscription to the PDF edition of M-Brane SF.

2) Buy the print editions of The 12 Burning Wheels and the queer anthology Things We Are Not (TWAN) for only $18.99, shipping included. This is a serious deal, since TWAN by itself sells for almost that. This option, too, includes a free subscription to the M-Brane PDF.

3) Buy The 12 Burning Wheels and the print edition of Ergosphere (aka M-Brane #12, edited by Rick Novy) for only $15.99.  The M-Brane subscription is included with this option as well.

These offers will likely expire before the publication date for The 12 Burning Wheels, so act soon.  Here is the Pay Pal link for them (a drop-down menu accommodates the three options). One does not need a Pay Pal account to use Pay Pal: one may use credit and debit cards, and checks by way of their e-check system.

Choose an option... Choose an option... 12 BURNING WHEELS $7.99 12 WHEELS/ TWAN $18.99 12 WHEELS/ ERGOSPHERE $15.99

4) This book is also available in these electronic formats: .prc/MOBI (readable on the Kindle), PDF (readable and printable on a computer and many other devices), and EPUB (readable on most devices, including the Nook). Purchase of these formats also includes a complimentary subscription to the PDF edition of M-Brane SF. Here is the Pay Pal link for them (a drop-down menu accommodates the three options). Only $3.99!

Select format

PDF  MOBI (.prc)  EPUB

M-BRANE 14 cover and TOC

The fourteenth issue, due out March 1, is a must-not-miss collection of astounding stories. Writers include frequent M-Brane contributors Rick Novy and Derek J. Goodman, each with fascinating new offerings. Cat Rambo and Michael Andre-Driussi make spectacular second appearances in these pages, while Ben Phenicie appears with his first published story. M-Brane first-timers include a couple of my fellow editors: Scott H. Andrews runs the well-regarded fantasy zine Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Michael C. Lea recently edited the acclaimed superhero fiction anthology POW!erful Tales.

Here's the table of contents:

Cat Rambo "Fire on the Water's Heart"

Michael Andre-Driussi  "I, Mombot"

Derek J. Goodman "Have You Seen Me?"

Scott H. Andrews "Picking up the Spin"

Michael C. Lea "GPS"

Ben Phenicie "The Estate of Muishi Konimuri"

Rick Novy "Throwing a Haymaker"

About the queer zombie affair

I've been sorting through this foofaraw over Library of the Living Dead Press dropping plans to publish a GLBT-themed anthology of zombie stories. Evidently such a book was in the works, then it was cancelled and early word on it was from its editor indicating that a homophobic backlash from writers of other LLDP titles was the cause of it. Later, the publisher himself, who says that he is a big supporter of the queer community, put up what struck me as an honest if rather lame explanation that he became concerned the project would upset people. I learned of it from the Outer Alliance, and have been clicking through some web pages trying to glean more info. Charles Tan has on his page a compilation of most of the relevant info in the form of links to posts by Jim Hines and Lee Thomas and others, if you are interested in looking further into it. But here are my off-the-cuff thoughts on it, in no particular order:

1) How weird that a homophobic backlash against a FUCKING HORROR ANTHOLOGY would A) exist, and B) actually make a publisher change his mind about doing it.  So is this really how it went down? I published the ultra-queer Things We Are Not a few months ago with nary a backlash, nor did it ever cross my mind that there was even a potential for one. Nor would I have cared either. It makes me wonder if I have lost the respect of writers who have written for M-Brane by doing gay shit like TWAN. If so, they haven't told me about it. And if they did, I'd tell them to piss off straight away.

2) Some people posting about this out on the interwebs seem to be assuming that Library of the Living Dead Press is a much bigger operation than it is. I've caught remarks here and there suggesting that some people observing this situation think that there is some kind of major money or Big Name Authors or some kind of shadowy interests working the levers of power under the direction of an Old Boys Network. Well, I don't know much about this press, have never communicated with its publisher, but I can assure you that none of this is true. LLDP is a small operation. So any kind of embargo on their books, as has been suggested in some web chatter, is not going to Stick It To The Man in any kind of serious way.

3) I saw some comments on one of the LJ posts about this topic where some of the commenters were slamming Library of the Living Dead for using print-on-demand through Create Space to print its books, and suggesting that this in itself somehow means that this publisher is a lousy piece of shit. Let me disabuse everyone of that antiquated notion right now: print-on-demand is a totally legitimate way, and the only sensible way, for a small publisher to produce physical copies of books like a gay zombie anthology which (let's just face it, folks) almost no one was going to buy anyway. It makes it possible for some really cool projects to get out there in book form which would be impossible if the publisher had to front tons of money for an old-style print run. While the book may not make a lot of money if it doesn't sell well, it won't lose a whole bunch for a small publisher either. So let me say this in another way, just to make sure that I am making myself absolutely clear: a small publisher using a print-on-demand service is not the same thing as a vanity press nor the same thing as an individual author self-publishing a sloppy  unedited book. So poo-pooing print-on-demand is dumb and real old media. It's the method I use for the print edition of M-Brane and for my book projects, none of which would have ever existed without it.

4) And since I think the market for queer zombie fiction is scaled quite well for print-on-demand, I will be happy to look at submissions of such stories for M-Brane SF if they are sfnal somehow.

Delany interviewed on Dragon Page

As I mentioned a few days ago, I've been reading Samuel Delany's About Writing which includes a few interviews with him. I was thinking about trying to hunt up some interviews with him online and, almost as the thought formed, someone Tweeted the link to this interview with him, a segment of the "Cover to Cover" podcast series on the Dragon Page.

During the discussion, Delany talks about his new novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders which forthcoming later this year (huzzah!). Wikipedia has an article about it. He says that he is trying with this novel to straddle a space between literary fiction, science fiction and pornography. That's exactly the sort of thing I'm looking forward to reading soon.

Order page for books started/ Thoughts about "Doubles"

I cobbled together another page today in an attempt to get the far-flung information about our stand-alone books in one place. It's under construction, and I will eventually need something designed more like a proper "store," but this will do for now. The highlight right now is the pre-order information for Cesar Torres' The 12 Burning Wheels, due out later this month. It also contains the info for Ergosphere and Things We Are Not. News about Machina and Aether Age is not there yet, but will come soon. Machina will, in fact, be going up for pre-order sometime around 3/1.

Recent Twitter chatter suggests that I may be thinking about a future book or books designed in in the manner of the old Ace Doubles. As you probably recall, those were books containing two short novels, each with their own front covers and designed in such a manner that the two stories were presented back to back and upside down in relation to one another. You'd finish one story, then turn the book over and open the "back" cover and start reading the other story. Ace stopped this format back in the early 1970s, but more recently Vintage put out an edition of Samuel Delany's Babel-17 and Empire Star in a similar style. The author had always wanted those two items to appear together as one of the Ace series, but it never happened.  When I prepare a book for print-on-demand, the entire interior of the thing needs to be a single document, so to do two stories together in that tete-beche style, one of the two stories needs to be laid out upside down and start on the last page of the book and proceed from there toward the middle of it. Making a page go upside down was eluding me and my software for a long time. But it seems that I may have figured out a way. So, who knows, maybe there will be an "M-Brane Double" forthcoming!

New stuff on the book shelf

As a sort of Christmas gift to myself, I recently ordered a few new books that needed to have been on my shelves all along and which were conspicuous in their absence.  Shiny new copies, y'all, not even from the used shop. Currently, I am browsing through Samuel R. Delany's book of essays, interviews and letters About Writing. While I haven't read all of it yet and have been skipping around in it, I have been finding it very thought provoking. Aside from being one of the great spec fic authors, Delany is an English professor and this book occasionally takes me back to my days as an English major and the kind of reading that I did a lot more of back then, but it's generally a lot livelier than some of that was.

Also from Delany, I got this nice "deluxe edition" of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. This novel I have read a couple times before but was lacking a copy in the permanent collection. I first read it when I was a teenager and I know I didn't fully appreciate it back then. I got it from the library just last year and was blown away by it. This is an awesome, star-spanning sf novel of many worlds and civilizations and races. If anyone ever wants to know what I think is a great sf novel, then this is a good one to which to point.

I also scored these collections by Jack Vance and James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon). Most of the content of these I have encountered elsewhere before, but my own shelves were sadly missing these authors. Indeed, there is a sad and shameful paucity of Tiptree titles in print currently. She wasn't necessarily the most prolific writer ever, but she has a lot more out there than this one single title. But if there's only to be one, then this is probably the one to have. The Vance book collects the four Dying Earth books under one cover, and I am looking forward to returning to that soon.

I had also planned to get, at long last, my own copy of another long-time favorite, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination.  It's a classic and a really special, spectacular book and it appears to be entirely out of print! Crazy!