Outer Alliance Spotlight #45: Retro Spec August 27, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, publications, queer-friendly publishers , 1 comment so farWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #45. Each week the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guests this week are Karen Romanko, CD Covington, and Leonard Richardson, the editor and two of the contributors to Retro Spec: Tales of Fantasy and Nostalgia from the 20th Century.
Karen Romanko is a poet and fantasy writer, who loves the sun of Los Angeles and Malibu. She edited the speculative fiction webzine, Raven Electrick for several years, and has edited two previous anthologies, Sporty Spec and Cinema Spec. Her poetry and fiction and have appeared in many places including Strange Horizons and Ideomancer.
CD Covington is a fantasy and science fiction writer who also enjoys tai chi, crochet, and European football (she is particularly interested in the German Bundesliga). She maintains a twitter feed in addition to her blog. “U* Alexanderplatz (1989)” is her first publication.
Leonard Richardson is a writer and computer programmer. His programming books, RESTful Web Services and The Ruby Cookbook were published by O’Reilly, and his story, “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs” appeared in Strange Horizons. Together with his wife, Sumana Harihareswara, he edited the anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments in 2009.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #39: Rose Lemberg June 18, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, queer-friendly publishers , 2commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #39. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Rose Lemberg, editor of the new LGBTQI friendly poetry zine, Stone Telling.
Rose grew up with a jumble of native and semi native languages including Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. She began writing poetry and fiction in English as an adult after pursuing a Ph.D. in Linguistics at UC Berkeley. Her poetry has appeared in many places including Abyss & Apex (which published last year’s Rhysling nominated “Odysseus on the War Train”) and Goblin Fruit (which published this year’s Rhysling nominated “Godfather Death”), and her short fiction has appeared in G.U.D., Strange Horizons, and Fantasy Magazine.
Stone Telling is Rose’s newest project, an online magazine devoted to literary speculative poetry. The title is the name of a character from a story by Ursula K. Le Guin, and the first issue will feature a previously unpublished poem by Le Guin. The first reading period opened on the 14th of June, and will close on the 14th of August.
Rose is on LiveJournal and Twitter, and also maintains a Stone Telling LiveJournal community. She is currently a professor at a large research University in the Midwest.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #24: Djibril Alayad March 5, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, queer-friendly publishers, submissions , 1 comment so farWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #24. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Djibril Alayad, editor of The Future Fire.
Djibril has always assumed that explorations of sexual difference were key to science fiction, so The Future Fire has welcomed queer fiction since it began in 2004. The most recent issue has a feminist theme, and Djibril is currently reading for a queer themed issue, which should be out soon. In addition to the magazine, The Future Fire also has a reviews blog, which focuses on reviews for small press publications.
Djibril has lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic, and is currently based in London, UK. He is a formally trained historian with a collection of animal skulls. He maintains a Twitter feed as @thefuturefire.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #18: Kyell Gold January 22, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : events, interviews, queer-friendly publishers , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #18. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is furry author, Kyell Gold.
Kyell has won several Ursa Major Awards for his work, and recently won two Rainbow Awards for his novel, Out of Position. His latest book, Shadow of the Father, is being released this weekend at Further ConFusion in San Jose, California. Another novella, Bridges, will be released next month at Furry Fiesta in Dallas, Texas, where Kyell will appear as the Writing Guest of Honor. Bridges is part of a new project called Cupcakes, which Kyell is launching along with some other furry authors.
Kyell has been active in furry fandom and queer speculative fiction for ten years. In addition to his fiction, he also co-produces (with K.M. Hirosaki) a furry podcast called Unsheathed. When he’s not writing and podcasting, you might find him at cons, or campaigning for gay rights in his current home state of California. He lives in the San Francisco bay are with his partner, Kit Silver.
Kyell blogs on LiveJournal as kyellgold, and maintains a personal website at www.kyellgold.com.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #13: Shaun Duke December 11, 2009
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, queer-friendly publishers , 1 comment so farWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #13. Each Friday the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is reviewer and editor, Shaun Duke.
Shaun is a straight ally with a gay mom, who believes that people of all orientations should be able to tell the stories they want to tell. He reviews and discusses speculative fiction on his blog, The World in the Satin Bag, and he is the co-owner of the Young Writers Online forum and workshop website. He recently released the first issue of Survival By Storytelling, an online magazine that publishes young writers.
Though originally from the West Coast of the United States, Shaun currently lives in Gainesville, Florida with nine leopard geckos. He is working towards an MA in English at the University of Florida, specializing in science fiction, post-colonialism, and fantasy.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #10: Chris Fletcher November 20, 2009
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, publications, queer-friendly publishers , 1 comment so farWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #10. Each Friday the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Chris Fletcher, editor of M-Brane SF.
Chris and his longtime partner Jeff moved from St. Louis, Missouri to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 2007, after the restaurant they’d run together failed financially. Chris took that failure as an opportunity to reboot his creative writing side, and in February of 2009, started the magazine, M-Brane SF.
As one of the very first people to join The Outer Alliance, Chris has been an active Outer Alliance blogger and advocate from the start. In addition to M-Brane SF, he also recently edited an anthology of queer speculative fiction called Things We Are Not, which contains several stories by other Outer Alliance members. On the horizon, slated for a June 2010 release is another anthology to be published by Hadley Rille Books called The Aether Age, which Chris is co-editing with Outer Alliance member, Brandon Bell.
Chris keeps a personal blog at mbranesf.livejournal.com and is active on Twitter as mbranesf. He has two cats names Maus and Jack.
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.)
Outer Alliance Spotlight #8: Bart Leib and K.T. Holt November 6, 2009
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, publications, queer-friendly publishers , 1 comment so farWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #8. Each Friday the Spotlight features an ally (or two!) who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. This week we’re celebrating November’s special LGBTQ themed anniversary issue of Crossed Genres with the editors, Bart Leib and K.T. Holt.
K.T. (Kay) and Bart are married, and both of them are bisexual. They started Crossed Genres together in 2008, and decided in the first couple of months that they wanted to do an extra large LGBTQ themed issue for the magazine’s first anniversary. The idea for Crossed Genres, which features stories that combine SF/F and another genre, grew out of Bart’s Genre Challenge community. Genre Challenge (which prompts members to write in a new genre each month) is still going, but has a new moderator now that Crossed Genres has taken off.
Kay’s love of speculative fiction runs deep. She wrote her first story (about a talking dolphin and his pet boy) at the age of six, and later got into college because of an essay on worldbuilding. Bart started writing poetry when he was in 8th grade, and took up prose fiction the next year. His non-fiction piece, “The Successful Hero’s List”, appeared in the April 2009 issue of Fantasy Magazine.
Bart and Kay live in Somerville, Massachusetts with their 3-year-old son, Bastian, and two cats named Romeo and Scout. In addition to writing and editing, both Kay and Bart take a keen interest in science. Kay works a day job in medical research administration, and is appalled at how little money brilliant researchers make. Bart’s particular scientific area of interest is sustainability, and people who use minimal resources to do amazing things. Kay and Bart encourage anyone with an interest in the future to blog about their favorite science news stories, and to fund research if possible.
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!”
Steve Berman podcast interview October 27, 2009
Posted by mbranesf in : interviews, queer-friendly publishers , add a commentVisit Fan Boys of the Universe and listen to this interview with Alliance member Steve Berman of Lethe Press. Subjects discussed in this entertaining podcast include gay speculative fiction, vampires and Steve’s magazine Icarus.