Outer Alliance Spotlight #75: Remembering Joanna Russ and Congratulating Several Others May 6, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : announcements, events, news, Uncategorized , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #75. The Spotlight features news about (and sometimes interviews with) allies who are active in supporting and celebrating LGBTQI speculative fiction. This week we have a few news items for you.
This Sunday there will be a memorial Twitter chat in honor of Joanna Russ. To participate, just log into Twitter at 1400 (2pm) Eastern Daylight Time on the 8th of May, and follow the #FeministSF hashtag. Several OA members and other people who are interested in feminism and speculative work will be talking informally about Russ and other pertinent subjects.
Congratulations to OA founder Natania Barron, who became an associate member of SFWA this week! You can read recent story “Without a Light” in the first issue Fantastique Unfettered (which is open for submissions for issue #3 right now).
Sunny Moraine has a new short story in Strange Horizons this week. “The Thick Night” is story both dark and hopeful with an interesting F/F relationship.
Congratulations to Katharine Beutner, who won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction for her novel Alcestis! Here’s a writeup of that awards ceremony from Lambda Literary.
Next week is Outlantacon/Gaylaxicon! Several OA members will be attending this convention, which exists to celebrate queer speculative fiction, gaming, media, and fans. JoSelle Vanderhooft and Catherine Lundoff will be hosting a launch party for the print version of Hellebore and Rue. Steve Berman and JoSelle will be reading selections from the book, and we’re tentatively planning to have that serve as an OA meetup, too, so if you’re in that area, come hang out and talk awesome queer fiction with us!
That’s it for this week. If you’ve got thoughts on any of this, or news of your own, please let us know!
Outer Alliance Spotlight #71: Shweta Narayan and J. C. Runolfson April 8, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : announcements, interviews, links, news, publications, queer-friendly publishers, submissions , 5commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #71. The Spotlight features news about (and sometimes interviews with) allies who are active in supporting and celebrating LGBTQI speculative fiction. This week our guests are Shweta Narayan and J. C. Runolfson, co-editors of Stone Telling #4.
Before we get to our main dish, though, there are some news tidbits to share.
*The Jessica Verday situation has developed and drawn further comment from many people since OA Spotlight #70 went up two weeks ago. Charles A. Tan has a good summary at Bibliophile Stalker.
*This week marked the release of Malinda Lo‘s second YA fantasy novel, Huntress. Happy release week, Malinda! Huntress is set in the same world as Ash (a retelling of Cinderella with a lesbian protagonist), but several hundred years earlier. Malinda will be traveling with the Diversity in YA Fiction Tour in May, so you might want to check and see if she’ll be visiting your area.
*And, finally, Lauren McLaughlin and K. T. Holt weigh in on the proposal to cut federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Lauren explains why this is not actually about abortion, while Kay offers a Super Uterus t-shirt to anyone who wishes to make a fashion statement. All the profits from t-shirt sales go to Planned Parenthood.
And, on to our awesome interviewees!
Shweta Narayan is a writer and visual artist. She received the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship for the Clarion Writers Workshop in 2007, and is an active proponent of diversity in speculative fiction. Her stories and poems have appeared in Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, Clockwork Phoenix 3, Jabberwocky 5, and Apex, among other places. Her novelette, “Pisaach”, which appeared in The Beastly Bride, is currently up for the Nebula Award.
J. C. Runolfson is a poet, reviewer, and knitter. Her reviews have appeared in The Fix and Strange Horizons. Several of her poems have been Rhysling nominees, and she has new ones forthcoming in Goblin Fruit and Mythic Delirium.
Stone Telling is a quarterly poetry magazine published (and usually edited by) Rose Lemberg. Stone Telling welcomes queer content any time, but Shweta and Jules wanted to come talk about what kind of poems they’re especially hoping to see for Issue #4. They have a general guideline theme of inter- intersectional, international, interstitial, and the reading period for this issue is open until the 25th of May.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #61: Gender Identity & Expression Book Challenge December 31, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : announcements, interviews , 6commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #61. The Spotlight features news about (and sometimes interviews with) allies who are active in supporting and celebrating LGBTQI speculative fiction. This week our guest is Sally Sapphire, host of Bibrary.com and the 2011 Gender Identity & Expression Book Challenge.
Before we get started, I’d like to take a moment to recognize Sandra McDonald‘s Rainbow Award for Best Bisexual, Transgender and Lesbian Fantasy. I had this prickly sensation I was forgetting something important when I congratulated OA members on their wins in the second podcast episode, but I didn’t realize why that was until a few days after the podcast went live. So, congratulations, Sandra! Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories would be an excellent reading choice for the Gender Identity & Expression Book Challenge.
Sally Sapphire is a bisexual transgender gurl, who has spent 5 years maintaining the Bibrary, an index of LGBTQI books in a variety of genres. She also reviews LGBTQI books at the Bibrary Bookslut blog, and blogs about her personal experiences with gender identity at TGirl Revelations. When Sally isn’t busy reading or writing, she likes to go on long, solitary hikes, preferably in really cute hiking outfits.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #54: Introducing the Outer Alliance Podcast November 5, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : announcements, events, interviews, Outer Alliance Podcast , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #54. The Spotlight features news about (and sometimes interviews with) allies who are active in supporting and celebrating LGBTQI speculative fiction. This week we’re pleased to launch the Outer Alliance Podcast!
We’ll put up a new episode each month with news, events, interviews, listener feedback, and possibly even other forms of LGBTQI speculative fiction related audio goodness. You can subscribe to the podcast RSS feed here or use this link to subscribe with iTunes. You can also hit play on the embedded player in this post and listen to the podcast on the web, or visit the individual episode page to download this episode as an MP3 without subscribing.
Below are some links to sites and events mentioned in the first podcast episode.
For information about OutlantaCon, Gaylaxicon 2011, and this weekend’s Outlantacon game day, visit outlantacon.org.
Sara M. Harvey’s Dressed Just Write event will be held at the Two Roads Cafe in Lebanon, Tennessee on Saturday the 13th of November from 3:00-5:00. Her Spotlight interview is here.
OryCon 32 is also happening next weekend in Portland, Oregon, and OA member Craig Laurence Gidney will be in attendance along with some other awesome guests.
Hadley Rille Books is giving away a Kindle 3G. Register once for free, and get another entry each time you order (or pre-order) books like Aether Age: Helios.
Edward DeGruy is president of the Atlanta Outworlders, and a member of Starfleet International. He is the guest liason for Outlantacon, and consuite director for Chattacon. He also works Dragon*Con, and may be working MidSouthCon in 2011. His band has music for you at hyperdrivemusiconline.com.
If you have any ideas for great podcast material, or want to send feedback, let us know. Comment here, send a message via the Google group, or e-mail me directly. My address is julia@juliarios.com.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #47: Congratulations! (and some changes) September 10, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : announcements, links, news, publications, queer-friendly publishers , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #47. Traditionally, the Spotlight has featured an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. It’s been a year since the Spotlight started, though (I’ve missed a few weeks due to travel and so forth), and it’s time the Spotlight format changed a bit. We’ll still have interviews some weeks, but from now on the Spotlight will also be a news and notes column. There may be more exciting changes in the works, too, but I’m afraid I’m not going to say more about those just yet. For now, let’s get to the news!
First, congratulations to all the Hugo winners! Lots of awesome stuff up there, including plenty of things by LGBTQI friendly people. Congratulations, too, to all the nominees who didn’t end up taking home a rocket ship of their very own. It was a great crowd this year. Special thanks and congratulations to Cheryl Morgan, who provided live coverage of the awards (alongside podcast superstar, Mur Lafferty), and shared the Best Semiprozine win with Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace of Clarkesworld.
Second, Congratulations to Outer Alliance founder, Natania Barron, for a few things! Aside from being in on the groud floor of the new Geek Mom blog, our fearless leader has a story in the new Dark Futures anthology. She’s in great company as the anthology is full of stories by excellent writers, including two who’ve been interviewed here before: Sara Harvey and Michele Lee.
But that’s not all Natania’s been up to! She’s also agreed to take on editorial responsibilities (along with OA member, Jaym Gates) at Crossed Genres starting next year. Bart Leib and K.T. Holt will still be the publishers, but they’re handing over the editorial reins so that they can focus on putting together anthologies, and managing the Science In My Fiction site, which they started last March. The best part? Science In My Fiction will be publishing short stories each month, which means there’s yet another LGBTQI friendly SF market in the world (here are the submissions guidelines). Hurray!
Next is something not speculative fiction related, but noteworthy all the same: the fine folks at Lambda Literary have posted a call for submissions to a Mothers of Trans Children Project. This will be published by Cleis Press and edited by Rachel Pepper, co-author of The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.
And finally, here’s a thoughtful guest post about bisexuality and gender-bending in paranormal romance by Cecilia Tan on the GLBT Reading blog.
That’s it for this week. If you have any Spotlight-worthy notes, news, links, etc., please let us know in the comments, on the OA google group, or by telling me on Twitter. You can address me directly, or use the Twitter tag #oaspotlight to let me know what’s new. I look forward to hearing from you!
Outer Alliance Meetup at Readercon July 9, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : announcements, events , add a commentNo Spotlight this week as I am busy attending Readercon in Burlington, MA. Please say hello if you see me! I’m a short white woman with long purple hair.
And the exciting thing: we’re having an Outer Alliance meetup on Sunday at 12:30. Come to the Marriott lobby and meet some of your fellow allies!
Help Celebrate Pride Month With The Outer Alliance! June 28, 2010
Posted by Natania in : announcements, events, news, Outer Alliance Pride Day, The Outer Alliance , 1 comment so farPride Month may be drawing to a close, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to make a statement! The Outer Alliance is hoping you will join us in celebrating Pride Month via your personal or organization’s blog. We’ve come up with a few suggestions for ways you can show your pride.
Press Pride – Do you have a favorite press that consistently wows you with queer content? Highlight the presses that have made a difference in your life, and link to some of the books that have been particularly inspiring. Don’t forget to let your readers know how to support the press and purchase those publications. You can do a review, an interview, or just a note of thanks.
Personal Pride – Have you experienced something amazing during the process of writing or reading? Did a particular character teach you a lesson? Have you come to any personal realizations through characterization or in the process of writing a novel? Tell us about your experiences with queer fiction; provide an excerpt or a personal story.
Pride in the Process – Write a few lines of queer flash fiction. Post it on your blog as a living acknowledgment of your pride in the genre.
Whatever you choose to do, when you post, let us know by tracking back here or linking on our Google Group. At the end of the week we’ll link back to all the posts!
Keep in mind the Mission Statement of the Outer Alliance, too:
As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.
Happy Pride Month, everyone!
Announcing the Science in My Fiction short story contest! March 22, 2010
Posted by bartleib in : announcements, events, publications , add a commentOuter Alliance members Bart Leib and Kay Holt, founders of Crossed Genres and Science in My Fiction, have announced the Science in My Fiction short story contest!
“Here’s how it works: Authors write a science fiction or fantasy short story which is inspired by a scientific discovery or innovation made or announced within the past year. It can’t be peripherally added: the science must be integral to the story. Writers must include a link to a relevant article or study of the applied science when they submit their stories.”
A panel of 6 amazing judges will vote on the finalists. Two of the six judges (Nicola Griffith and Cat Rambo) are members of Outer Alliance.
There’s $400 of cash prizes to be won, plus subscriptions, books, etc.
Please visit the contest page, read the entry guidelines, see who the judges are, and read about our Kickstarter drive to put the winning stories in print!
Then, enter your story! The contest will be open for entries from April 1 through June 30. Winners will be announced on July 21.
Show us there’s still room for real Science in fiction! Huge thanks to everyone who helped us make the contest happen!
Crossed Genres: Will you play ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ with me? November 19, 2009
Posted by bartleib in : announcements, news, queer-friendly publishers , add a comment(Originally posted by Kay Holt in her Livejournal.)
Crossed Genres is in trouble. It’s not ‘end of the world’ trouble, but it’s building to that.
Bart and I have been paying for it out of pocket for a year and in that time, the magazine has taken in less than 35% of what we paid into it. And that’s not including the value of our labor because we don’t pay ourselves for running Crossed Genres. ‘Pay the contributors first,’ is one of our foundational principles. And you know what? Our contributors are grateful. They’ve bought more copies of the magazine than everyone else combined. Which is a great sign of the relationships we’re building with our writers and artists, but a very bad omen for the business as a whole.
We’re not looking to get rich off CG. Someday we’d like to be able to pay our contributors pro rates, but even at the very respectable pace we’re growing, we’re years away from that. Frankly, if CG doesn’t start growing like an irradiated lizard, it will never reach that point. Because if Crossed Genres doesn’t start breaking even soon, we’ll have to shut it down.
Crossed Genres is the best thing Bart and I have built together, besides our son, and we’re not done with it yet. As I said, we’d like to start paying pro rates. We’d like to have daily Flash Fiction and a weekly webcomic in the subscribers’ area of our site. We’d like to start a quarterly magazine on the side; one that’s just for our adult readers, if you know what I mean. Someday, we’d even like to have a game developed for Crossed Genres.
Ambition, we’ve got. Momentum is what we need.
By every measure except sales, Crossed Genres has had a successful first year. The magazine has surpassed every other goal we set for 2009. We’ve also put a lot more work into it than we originally intended, but that happens when you love what you do. But we can’t do everything on our own.
Crossed Genres needs you. Yes, all of you.
There’s a little game we used to play in college called ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’. Most of you recognize that game as the Hollywood adaptation of the original idea that any two strangers on Earth are only separated from each other by at most six other relationships (each relationship is a degree of separation). In the game, movie trivia buffs challenge each other to link other actors to Kevin Bacon in as few degrees as possible. Bruce Willis was in Pulp Fiction with Uma Thurman, who was in Henry & June with Fred Ward, who was in Tremors with Kevin Bacon. Voila! From Bruce Willis to Kevin Bacon in only two degrees.
Some of you have already figured out where I’m going with this, and that’s fine. Use that head start to go tell Bruce Willis that Crossed Genres exists. Or Patrick Stewart, or Peter Jackson, or Lucy Lawless, or Neil Patrick Harris. Go tell Kevin Bacon, for goodness sake! He might like the magazine, and he might tell someone else that he likes it. And since he’s Kevin Bacon, the whole world might hear about CG as a result.
Yes, friends of Crossed Genres, I want you to play ‘Six Degrees’ with me. In a way, it’s just a grown-up version of the playground classic, ‘Post Office’. You tell everyone you know that Crossed Genres is great and affordable, and you tell them to pass it on. They tell everyone they know about CG and tell them to pass is on. And so on, and before you know it, the Crossed Genres website crashes because Neil Gaiman absentmindedly mentions it to his 1.3 million Twitter followers (purple monkey dishwasher).
That highly desirable problem is called a ‘NeilWebFail’, and for the record, if only 1/100th of 1% (~one out of every 8,700) of his followers preordered the Crossed Genres Anthology, we would reach our minimum goal overnight.
The internet is practically built for memes like this.
I can hear you thinking to yourself, “But I don’t know anyone famous.” Me neither. I think of all my friends as rockstars, but I know that most of you have friends like me; people who are too busy barely getting by to actually accomplish anything very far-reaching. That’s okay. In the long run, we’re all still just a few degrees away from Kevin Bacon (and my mom once met Bruce Willis in a sporting goods store).
Before you start telling me that it’s tacky to beg for celebrity endorsement, be assured that’s not what I’m doing. If you know a celebrity, of course I want you to tell them about Crossed Genres. But I really want you to tell everybody you know about CG. It’s called word of mouth advertising, and it’s three or four times as effective as the flashy stuff you see all over the internet and plastered across every marketable flat surface in the real world.
Your help could mean the difference between Crossed Genres celebrating a second anniversary or disappearing within the next year.
Will you play ‘Six Degrees’ with me?
(Reposted with permission.)
New zine: SURVIVAL BY STORYTELLING November 1, 2009
Posted by mbranesf in : announcements, queer-friendly publishers , add a commentWe received this report today from Alliance member Shaun Duke about a new magazine for younger writers:
“I thought it would be a good idea to let you all know about the
release of the first issue of the magazine I have been working on.
It’s called Survival By Storytelling. Our announcement for the
release, with all the info on where it’s being sold, about our being
non-profit, and what we print (fiction and poetry by writers 25 years
old or younger, with some commissioned pieces by published authors)
can be found here: http://sbsmag.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/survival-by-storytelling-issue-one-is-up-for-sale/
“Spread the word, if you like. We also may have review copies
available if you have a review blog or a magazine with a review column
or something. Preferably digital, because we are non-profit, but I
will have a handful of hard copies in a week or so.
“The reason I bring this up is that, while our first issue doesn’t, as
far as I know, contain fiction by or about LGBT authors/issues, our
magazine is very open to LGBT authors/issues. The only thing we
explicitly don’t take are erotica and works with excessive levels of
gore or foul language (cursing is fine, as long as it has a purpose).
We will be opening submissions again soon, depending on how well the
first issue does, but I wanted you all to know about it, in case any
of you are young enough to submit. Our submission guidelines are
here: http://sbsmag.wordpress.com/guidelines/
“For us, a good story is a good story. So, just to clarify, when we
say we are open to things like science fiction or, as I’m saying here,
LGBT fiction, we mean it! (I’m personally an SF fan, but the magazine
is open to all genres specifically because the parent group, Young
Writers Online, isn’t SF specific, so, I have to play nice).
“Thanks for your time and hopefully I’ll see some fiction from Outer
Alliance members in the near future!”