Brian J. White's Blog, page 2

The artwork for the Year 3 Kickstarter

And here it is, the art that Galen Dara has created for our Year 3 Kickstarter, which is launching this Monday, March 3! Galen was inspired by the Celtic triple goddess Brigid, who was a patron of bards and poets. One of her symbols is fire, and her devotees call themselves flamekeepers. What a perfect fit with Fireside!

We’ll talk a bit more about the artwork during the Kickstarter, and it will be featuring prominently in our rewards.

See you all Monday!

The Year 3 author lineup!

We’re very excited about the writers we have signed up for Year 3! We are going to have another monthly serial, written by Lilith Saintcrow. Lilith’s serial will be following up on Maternal Type, her story in January’s issue (that story will be free during the Kickstarter in March).

We’ve also invited six short-story writers for Year 3, and we will have six slots open for submissions, along with all 24 flash fiction slots. And we’re hoping to add more short-story slots through stretch goals.

Our six invited writers are Stephen Blackmoore, Kima Jones, Daniel Jose Older, Andrea Phillips, Sofia Samatar, and Chuck Wendig. Stephen is planning on writing a story set in the world of his novel Dead Things, and Chuck is planning a Miriam Black story. We’ll have varied rewards from our invited writers, including  signed books, signed postcards, and tuckerizations (which is when they will use your name in their story).

Stephen Blackmoore is the author of the novels City of the Lost, Dead Things, Khan of Mars, and the upcoming Broken Souls. His short stories have appeared in the magazines Needle, Plots With Guns, Spinetingler, Thrilling Detective, and Shots as well as the anthologies Deadly Treats, Don’t Read This Book, and Uncage Me. He can be found online at stephenblackmoore.com and on Twitter at @sblackmoore.  He is a scintillating conversationalist and brutally handsome.

Kima Jones is a 2013 PEN USA Emerging Voices fellow in poetry, a Voices at VONA alum and 2012 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry. Kima has been published at The Rumpus and PANK among others. Kima lives in Los Angeles and is writing her first poetry collection, The Anatomy of Forgiveness. You can find her online at thenotoriouskima.com and on Twitter @kima_jones.

 

 

Daniel Jose Older is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and composer. Salsa Nocturna, Daniel’s ghost noir collection, was hailed as “striking and original” by Publishers Weekly. He’s co-editing the forthcoming anthology, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, and his urban fantasy novel The Half Resurrection Blues, the first of a trilogy, will be released by Penguin’s Roc imprint in January 2015. Daniel’s essays and short stories have appeared in The New Haven Review, Salon, Tor, PANK, Strange Horizons, and Apex. His music, ponderings, and ambulance adventures live at ghoststar.net and @djolder.

Andrea Phillips is a writer, game designer, and author of A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. Her current ongoing project is The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart, a serial pirate romp and treasure hunt. She’s also written for The Walk, an iOS fitness game; America 2049, a human rights Facebook game; and the alternate reality game Perplex City. She wins awards, does talks and stuff, and has beaten all of the levels on Candy Crush. All of them. You can find her online at deusexmachinatio.com and on Twitter @andrhia.

Lili Saintcrow was born in New Mexico (which probably explains everything, given the nuclear testing) and spent her childhood bouncing around the world as a military brat. She fell in love with writing in second grade and has done it obsessively ever since. She currently resides in the rainy Pacific Northwest with her children, dogs, cat, and assorted other strays, including a metric ton of books holding her house together. You can find her at lilithsaintcrow.com, on Twitter at @lilithsaintcrow, and on Facebook.

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria, winner of the 2014 Crawford Award. Her short fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in a number of places, including Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and Weird Fiction Review. She is nonfiction and poetry editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts. Visit her in California, or at sofiasamatar.com. She is also on Twitter @SofiaSamatar.

Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. He is the author of the novels Blackbirds, Mockingbird, The Blue Blazes, The Cormorant, and Under the Empyrean Sky. He is an alumni of the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab and is the co-author of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus. He lives in Pennsyltucky with wife, son, and two dopey dogs. You can find him on Twitter @ChuckWendig and at his website, terribleminds.com, where he frequently dispenses dubious and very-NSFW advice on writing, publishing, and life in general.

The plan for Year 3

So things are starting to come together for our plan for Year 3. Spoiler alert: it’s a Kickstarter! The plan right now is to launch it the first week of March. We have have a very cool lineup of invited writers, an improved submissions policy, and a new strategy to expand Fireside’s reach into the world.

We were hoping to not have to go after the big lump of money again, and we have a path to a more ongoing fundraising model, but we need another year for it to come together.

That said, we are still looking to shake things up some next year. Here’s a look:

Free?

One thing we are considering is making Fireside’s website free. I am a big believer in paid content, but one thing I have found over the past 7 months with Fireside is that it is very hard to draw new people in when they have to pay up front. I’ve been hashing around ideas with people, and one idea keeps coming up: putting Fireside out there for free to draw in new readers, and then asking people who enjoy it to support it. There are a lot of ways to do this, and we’ll be experimenting with that during Year 3.

Fireside needs money, of course. The bulk of our budget goes to paying our writers, 12.5 cents a word. Giving the website away for free is risky, but we think a core group of people will enjoy our stories enough, and support our mission of fair pay for writers and artists enough, that they will want to help keep us going. The first step toward that is getting the Kickstarter funded.

Access to ebooks will continue to be available only to paying supporters, either through the Kickstarter or later through our website. We’re also planning some rewards that will make sure all our Kickstarter backers will get something no one else gets.

Submissions

As we were getting our feet under us, we decided to do single submission periods in which we snatched up a year’s worth of stories. Now that we have a handle on things, we want to start doing quarterly submissions periods, starting in June.

Stories

Our plan for Year 3 is similar to Year 2: each issue will have two pieces of flash fiction, a short story, and an episode of a serial. We do hope to expand that with at least one more short story a month once our finances are up to it.

We have a half-dozen invited short story writers lined up for Year 3, and we have a very cool serial coming. We’re still hammering out some details on that, but we’ll have an announcement soon.

We can say, however, that the wonderful Galen Dara will be returning as our illustrator in Year 3!

Issue 4 is now free!

If you’re new to Fireside, we’ve made Issue 4 free so you can get a taste of what we’re about. Issue 4 includes the first episode of Chuck Wendig’s serial “The Forever Endeavor,” a short story by Delilah S. Dawson, and flash fiction from Keffy R. M. Kehrli and Krystal Claxton.

We’d love to hear from you

Have any thoughts or suggestions or anything else about all this? We’d love to hear from you. You can shoot us an email at .

Issue 9 problem fixed

If you were not able to access Issue 9, try again. The problem should be corrected! Sorry about that!

Mini Subscription Drive! With Prizes!

Fireside is looking for a few good readers. 100 to be exact. We’re trying to boost our subscription base a bit, so we’re having a two-week Year 2 subscription drive. With prizes!

Fireside has a mission of publishing great storytelling without regard to genre, and of fair pay for writers and artists. A Year 2  subscription gets you 12 issues, each with at least three short stories and an episode of Chuck Wendig’s serial The Forever Endeavor, with artwork by Hugo-winner Galen Dara. You can read our full lineup of stories here. You can read the issues here on our website, or you can download a ebook — either .mobi (Kindle) or .epub (Nook, iPad, and most other e-readers). We’ve already published 4 issues in Year 2, so you get access to those right away!

The prizes

A bit more about how this will work: As soon as we hit 25, we will do the drawing for Chuck’s book and the e-reader. When we hit 50, we’ll do the drawing for Galen’s print (the winner will have a choice of anything she’s done so far for Year 2) and another e-reader. At 75, we give away yet another e-reader, and at 100 we give away the iPad. Anyone who subscribes for a full Year 2 during the drive is eligible for whatever prizes are available when they sign up, so the sooner you do, the more chances you have to win!

The drive will run from today until 11:59 p.m. Eastern time Sunday Dec. 15.

You can subscribe here. (A Year 2 subscription is $24, but it’s on sale for $18 through Wednesday.)

Year 2 subscription 25% off till Wednesday!

Year Two of Fireside is on sale till next Wednesday! You get 12 issues of short stories, a serial by Chuck Wendig, and art by Galen Dara, including four issues you can read today!

Fireside has a mission of publishing great storytelling and fair pay for writers and artists. Subscribe today!

Help tell some “War Stories”

One of my friends, Andrew Liptak, has just launched a Kickstarter for “War Stories,” a modern military science fiction anthology. He’s editing it along with Jaym Gates, and it looks really good. The art is being done by Galen Dara, whose name sounds familiar for some reason …

Issue 6 is live! | Editor’s note

It’s October, and that means Halloween. This wasn’t exactly planned, but this month’s issue goes pretty well with the favorite holiday of every ghoul, sprite, and demon.

Our short story this month is full of costumes and masks, but not on trick or treaters. In Sell it Like Death, James McGee takes us inside the world of lower-tier pro wrestling, where there are lots of dreamers, especially Ryan “The Rage” Rollins. This story has really stuck with me since I bought it last year. I wouldn’t have guessed a wrestling story would grab me this way, but that’s one of the things I love about doing Fireside, the surprises I get outside the genres I usually have my head in. Galen Dara has done her usual fantastic job with the art for Sell it Like Death.

We have two very different pieces of supernatural flash fiction this month. In R.D. Sullivan’s Skinned Knees, a woman pieces together a life she never thought she’d have. And in Melissa Mead’s Downstairs, Upstairs, we get a workaday look at life in Hell.

And finally, there is Part Three of Chuck Wendig’s The Forever Endeavor. Dale is starting to get ideas…

—Brian White

A great start, and a winner for our contest!

We’ve had a great launch. People seem to be enjoying Issue 4 and our new site, and we’ve picked up a couple dozen new subscribers since last week.

If you are on Goodreads, Issue 4 has a page. We’d love to hear what you think.

And we have a winner for our contest among people who subscribed to Year Two during the first week: Callie LeFleur! Her Kobo Glo is winging its way toward her now.

Thanks so much everyone!

Year Two Lineup

I realize I have never actually posted the full lineup of stories we’ve bought for Year Two. Here’s the full list (in alphabetical, not publishing date, order). Galen Dara will be creating art for each issue.
Serial fiction

The Forever Endeavor (12 parts), by Chuck Wendig

Short stories

Sun Tea by M. Bennardo
Catch a Fallen Star by Jennifer Campbell-Hicks
Four Tons Too Late by Karina Cooper
Repossession by Jonas David
Love Song of the Lizard Boy by Delilah S. Dawson
The Gangs of Gnome Jersey by A.E. Decker
A Trick of the Night by Steven J. Dines
The Brutal and the Simple by Adam P. Knave
The Journal by Ken Liu
Sell it Like Death by James McGee
Rocket Ship Nirvana by Jason Ridler
Maternal Type by Lilith Saintcrow

Flash fiction

Carver by E.C. Ambrose
Vanilla by Martin Cahill
Shrugging off the Weight of the World by Dantzel Cherry
The Filigreed Cage by Krystal Claxton
Reversal by James Darrow
The Last Good Day by John F. Gardner
Sure I am Metaphysically Sinking into a More Terrifying Universe, but We All Have Our Things to Deal With by Sam Gorenstein
Missing by Megan Grey
Mice by Keffy R. M. Kehrli
Looking for Bad Guys by Jake Kerr
No So Super by Rob McMonigal
Downstairs, Upstairs by Melissa Mead
Ask the Cats by Stefon Mears
Listening to it Rain by Sandra M. Odell
Guard Post by Paul O’Donohoe
They Sent Runners Out by Sarah Pinsker
Reborn by Katie Pugh
Ex Astris by Lauren M. Roy
A Single, Stolen Night by Memory Scarlett
Silver Hill Hotel by David Alex Shepherd
Hope for Enthos by Addison Smith
The Last Job by Andrea Speed
Just a Couple Modifications by Kelly C. Stiles
Skinned Knees by R.D. Sullivan
First, Bite Just a Finger by Johann Thorsson
Elizabeth’s Pirate Army by Caroline M. Yoachim