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Outer Alliance Spotlight #11: Rose Fox and Josh Jasper November 27, 2009

Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 2comments

Welcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #11. Each Friday the Spotlight features an ally (or team) who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guests this week are the Genreville blogging duo, Rose Fox and Josh Jasper.

Rose has been reviewing books for Publishers Weekly since 2002, and became the speculative fiction reviews editor in 2007. She has reviewed books in several other venues including Strange Horizons, Lambda Book Report, and ChiZine. She is also the Dissociative Editor for The Annals of Improbable Research.

Josh is the director of marketing for Fantasy Magazine. He’s been active in the speculative fiction fandom community since 1990, and has been formally contributing to Genreville since September 1, 2009. One of his first posts explored different portrayals of queerness in speculative fiction in honor of Outer Alliance Pride Day.

Rose and Josh live in New York. They keep personal blogs at rosefox.livejournal.com and sinboy.livejournal.com, and also maintain a twitter feed for Genreville at twitter.com/genreville. (more…)

Outer Alliance Spotlight #10: Chris Fletcher November 20, 2009

Posted by juliarios in : interviews, publications, queer-friendly publishers , 1 comment so far

Welcome 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.

(more…)

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.)

Levenson sells new novel November 16, 2009

Posted by mbranesf in : publications , add a comment

Alliance member Barton Paul Levenson reports that his science fiction novel, Max and Me, has just been accepted by Lyrical Press, to appear in 2010 or 2011.  Bisexual protagonist Gunnar “Gunner” Dahlquist, a veteran of Beast War III, runs a freelance spaceship out of 1 Ceres.  His roommate is a bioengineered Beast, the small black cat, Max.  Max has human-level intelligence and talks–and swears like a sailor.  When the mysterious Natasha Kartseva tries to hire Gunner’s Rockside Hopper, she is publicly murdered–and Gunner framed for her death.  On the run from Belt law enforcement, Gunner and Max are also pursued by two secretive groups.  One of these wants to capture Max.  One wants to kill him.

Outer Alliance Spotlight #9: Lauren McLaughlin November 13, 2009

Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 2comments

Welcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #9. 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 YA author Lauren McLaughlin.

Lauren is a feminist, and strongly pro-choice. She supports equality for women and LGBTQI people, and is especially interested in promoting the acceptance of gender queer teens. As a straight ally, Lauren is personally committed to making the world safe and lovely for people of all orientations, and her work reflects this. Her first novel, Cycler, is about a girl who turns into a boy for four days each month. Lauren uses this premise to explore what gender means, raising at least as many questions as she answers.

Lauren started out in the film industry, working her way up from production assistant to line producer and screenwriter, and eventually to helping Mike Paseornek open a New York production and development office for Cinepix Films (which later became Lions Gate Entertainment). She began writing prose full time in 2000. Cycler came out in 2008, followed by a sequel, (Re)Cycler in August of 2009. A third (unrelated) novel is on the horizon, but doesn’t have a formal release date yet. Though Lauren is not working full time in the film industry anymore, she has written a screenplay for Cycler, which will be produced by Don Murphy.

Cycler has a facebook page, and a YouTube trailer. (Re)Cycler has been nominated as a Rainbow Book for 2009 through the Rainbow Project. Lauren blogs on her personal site, and posts to Twitter under the name LaurenMcWoof.

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Linkdump #6 – Gay literature and TV November 10, 2009

Posted by zeborah in : links , add a comment

Miscellaneous
Chris/M-Brane SF comments on the Maine/gay marriage situation and on those who opposed the Matt Shepard law.

A recent conference in New Zealand brought together leaders and youth from sexual minority communities across the Pacific; the article touches on Fa’afafine in Samoa and New Zealand.

On gay literature
Michael Stevens writes about the change in how important gay literature has been to him: “Now there are hundreds of books, by many different authors available. And yet I feel little compunction to follow the latest trends in gay fiction or poetry. It just doesn’t seem to matter to me any longer. Yet once it was central to me discovering who I was and how to negotiate the world.” and “By reading I learnt what it was to be a gay man.”

On LiveJournal community 50books_poc are three recent reviews of LGBT-focused writing:

And GLBT Fantasy Fiction Resources “provides an opportunity for readers to express their thoughts regarding fantasy and sci-fi with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered protagonists through book reviews, essays, and reading lists in a non-commercial environment”.

Gay characters on TV
In the Bay Area Reporter, “Going, going, gone!: the case of the missing LGBT characters” looks at the dearth of gay characters on US television. [Though personally I'm disappointed that they describe Thirteen on House as "previously queer" and "now heterosexual" when the show itself has made it clear that she is and always has been bisexual and just happens to be dating a guy at present. The show does plenty else wrong, but - at least as far as I've seen - it doesn't deny her bisexuality.] An interview with writer/director Alan Ball discusses directions for gay characters (both existing ones and new ones) in season 3 of True Blood.

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“.

Outer Alliance Spotlight #8: Bart Leib and K.T. Holt November 6, 2009

Posted by juliarios in : interviews, publications, queer-friendly publishers , add a comment

Welcome 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.

(more…)

Some recent members’ publications November 5, 2009

Posted by mbranesf in : publications , 2comments

Members report a few recent publications:

Maria Lima’s essay, “Another Roadside Attraction: The Role of the Trickster in Supernatural” is featured as this week’s free essay at SmartPopbooks:  http://www.smartpopbooks.com/essay/full/96

Brandon Bell’s short story “Found Objects,” which he describes as a “zombie Texan King Lear apocalypse” appears in the webzine Nossa Morte.

Alex Jeffers’ novelette “Jannicke’s Cat” appears in M-Brane SF #10.


Linkdump #5 – a smorgasbord of good news November 2, 2009

Posted by zeborah in : Uncategorized, links , add a comment

Last few days: The Vote No on 1 website lists a whole lot of ways anyone in the US can help defend the marriage equality law in Maine.

President Obama has added gay, lesbian, transgender and disabled people to those protected by US hate crimes law; other promises about gay rights remain in progress or outstanding.

Religious settler comes to aid of gay Palestinian: a young Palestinian man who lives with his partner in Israel visited his parents in West Bank and was subsequently not allowed back into Israel. For fear of his life he couldn’t return to his own village, but a religious Jewish settler agreed to shelter him in his settlement.

Crash director Paul Haggis quits Church of Scientology after 35 years as a member, in protest against its opposition to gay marriage.

Crossed Genres has released their LGBTQ issue (Issue #12)

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“.

New zine: SURVIVAL BY STORYTELLING November 1, 2009

Posted by mbranesf in : announcements, queer-friendly publishers , add a comment

We 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!”