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!

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.)

• One last money push for Maine is fundraising for the “No on 1″ message to defend Maine’s same-sex marriage law. The Bangor Daily News reports in Money fueling battle over gay marriage that “No on 1 tops $4M, Yes at $2.6M” – and that “No” has has 22,000 donors, as opposed to about 700 for “Yes”.
• Scholastic Censors Myracle’s ‘Luv Ya Bunches’ from Book Fairs due to language and homosexual content (it remains available in their book clubs). If you live in the US or are willing to fake a zip code, you can sign a petition to ask Scholastic to stop censoring gay-friendly books.

Newly published

• Lacuna: A Journal of Historical Fiction premiers with a table of contents that includes two stories with queer elements.
• Things We Are Not, an anthology of queer science fiction, has been published by M-Brane SF.
• And as reported here earlier, Hayden Thorne’s The Twilight Gods (on the publisher’s site and on Amazon) “is a retelling of Native American folktale called ‘The Girl Who Married a Ghost,’ set in Victorian England, it’s an alternative perspective on a gay teen’s coming-out process”.

If you come across any links to share for next week’s linkdump, please post them to the Outer Alliance forum or bookmark them on delicious or diigo with tag “outeralliancelinks“.