The Kickstarter for the next issue of Fireside is live! The goal this time is to raise $6,000 to publish Issue Two. 68% of that will go to the writers, ...
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“Snow Ninjas of the Himalayas” comic
The first three pages of “Snow Ninjas of the Himalays,” written by D.J. ...
“Emerald Lakes,” an Atlanta Burns story by Chuck Wendig
An excerpt from Fireside No. 1: The name is a lie; no ...
Kickstarter for Issue Two & Beyond
The Kickstarter for the next issue of Fireside is live!
The goal this time is to raise $6,000 to publish Issue Two. 68% of that will go to the writers, artists, and designers. The rest will cover production and Kickstarter costs.
We are also hoping to raise enough money to fund issues beyond Issue Two. For every $5,000 we raise above our goal, there will be a new eBook-only issue of Fireside. Every backer of this Kickstarter will receive every eBook issue funded in this campaign.
We have a full lineup for Issue Two, and most of the lineup for Issue Three. Issue Two will feature short stories by Stephen Blackmoore, Damien Walters Grintalis, Kat Howard, and Jake Kerr. It will also have a comic penciled and inked by Steven Walker and written by, well, me, Brian White, editor of Fireside. Frank Cvetkovic will letter the comic. Our cover artist is Galen Dara.
For Issue Three, we will have short stories by Daniel Abraham, Elizabeth Bear, and Mary Robinette Kowal. Our comic will be written by Rachel Deering. Artists are still in the works, and we are holding a short story slot for open submissions. We hope to begin accepting submissions for Issue Three and future issues sometime later this summer.
As for rewards, we have a ton of great stuff. In addition to the eBook and print editions of Issue Two (plus eBook copies of EVERY issue we fund in this Kickstarter), you can get autographed copies of the magazine; bookmarks and keychains; a print of the cover art; your name featured in one of the stories; your likeness featured in the comic or a piece of original art by Galen Dara; autographed final manuscripts of the stories; autographed pieces of the original art drawn by Galen and Steve Walker; and lifetime subscriptions to the magazine.
There is a lot more detail over on the Kickstarter. We hope you’ll join us!
Meet the writers and artists
Fireside’s number one aim is to publish great storytelling and art, and for that, we need great storytellers and artists. Here’s a little bit about each of the contributors we have signed up for Issues Two and Three:
Issue Two
Stephen Blackmoore is a writer of short stories, novels, and really pompous, pretentious essays. His latest book, the paranormal noir City of the Lost, is out through DAW books. You can catch his mad ramblings at stephenblackmoore.com or his writings about true crime in Los Angeles at L.A. Noir. Contrary to what you may have heard he does not have rabies. Anymore. Find him on Twitter @sblackmoore.
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Galen Dara is an illustrator who has worked with Edge Publishing, Dagan Books, Apex, Scapezine, Tales to Terrify, Peculiar Pages, Sunstone, and the LovecraftZine. She is on the staff of BookLifeNow, blogs for the Inkpunks, and writes the Art Nerd column at the Functional Nerds. When Galen is not working on a project you can find her on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, climbing mountains or hanging out with a loving assortment of human and animal companions. Find her online at galendara.com and on Twitter @galendara.
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Damien Walters Grintalis lives in Maryland with her husband, two former shelter cats, and two rescued pit bulls. She is an Assistant Editor of Electric Velocipede, a staff writer with BooklifeNow, and her debut novel, Ink, will be released in December 2012 by Samhain Horror. Find her online at dwgrintalis.blogspot.com and on Twitter @dwgrintalis.
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Kat Howard’s short fiction has appeared in a variety of places, including the anthology Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, Lightspeed, and Subterranean. She is also the content editor for Fantasy-Matters.com. She writes with a fencing foil by her desk and may well be in transit as you read this. Find her online at Strange Ink and on Twitter @KatWithSword..
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Jake Kerr began writing short fiction in 2010, after fifteen years as a music industry columnist and journalist. In 2011, Lightspeed published his debut story, The Old Equations, in its July issue. The story went on to be finalist for best novelette at the Nebula Awards. Kerr will return to the pages of Lightspeed this year with his story Requiem in the Key of Prose. A graduate of Kenyon College with degrees in English and Psychology, Kerr studied under writer-in-residence Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria. He is currently working on his first novel. Kerr lives in Dallas, Texas. Find him online at jakekerr.com and on Twitter @jakedfw.
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Steve Walker is a freelance comics artist having published with companies such as Image Comics, Random House Books — most notably the first two volumes in the graphic novel series The Sons of Liberty — and the upcoming The Battle of Blood And Ink, for Tor Books. When not pushing lead at his drawing table, Steve can be found teaching comics and sequential art at the Art Student’s League in Manhattan. He lives in Pennsylvania. Find him online at stevejwalkerstudio.blogspot.com and on Twitter @The_SteveWalker.
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Issue Three
Daniel Abraham is a nationally bestselling author of fourteen books and more than thirty short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. Find him online at the-expanse.com and on Twitter @abrahamhanover.
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Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the author of a number of science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories in the science fiction and fantasy genre, and has received two Hugo Awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (2005), a Sturgeon Award, a Locus Award, an Asimov’s Reader’s Choice award, a Spectrum Award, and an honorable mention for the Philip K. Dick Award. She lives in a drafty Victorian in Massachusetts with a giant, ridiculous dog. Find her online at elizabethbear.com and on Twitter @matociquala.
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Rachel Deering was born on October 10, 1983, in a small town in Northeastern Kentucky. Growing up in such a withdrawn region, far from the influence of popular culture and learned folk, she began to develop a twisted imagination, uniquely her own. Okay, so she had a little help from the meager selection of B-Grade horror flicks at the local “movie trailer.” Renting tapes from a creepy old man in a smoke-filled trailer should have been fuel enough for her nightmares, but her appetite for the macabre was insatiable. Now that she’s all grown up, she lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her wife and 5-pound chihuahua named Hazel. She works as a freelance writer and letterer for comics, and plays in a heavy metal band on the side. Find her on Twitter @racheldeering.
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Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor, 2010) and Glamour in Glass (Tor, 2012). In 2008 she received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2011, her short story For Want of a Nail won the Hugo Award for Short Story. Her work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. Her stories appear in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and several Year’s Best anthologies. She is the Vice President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Mary, a professional puppeteer, also performs as a voice actor, recording fiction for authors such as Elizabeth Bear, Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi. She lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters. Find her at maryrobinettekowal.com and on Twitter @MaryRobinette.
“Press Enter to Execute” is up for free on Wired
As a launch-day promotion, Wired.com’s Underwire blog is running Tobias’ story, Press Enter to Execute, for free today.
Fireside No. 1 ebooks up for sale now!
This is it! Publication day! Fireside No. 1 ebooks are up for sale on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Weightless Books, and directly from this site for $3.99. Subscriptions for one year (four issues) are also available for $8.
All sales of Fireside No. 1 will go toward publishing a second issue. We will almost certainly need to do a second Kickstarter drive to fund that, but the more we sell of No. 1, the lower we can set our goal for the Kickstarter.
Tell your friends! Tell your enemies! And thank you so very very very much!
Magazines are in the mail!!!
I just got back from the post office. The magazines are on their way to all our backers who chose them as a reward (with those who picked autographs making a detour to the authors’ homes first). Here are a few pictures of the magazines making their way into envelopes, with the help of my fabulous wife, Lauren:
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How to add Fireside to your Kindle, Nook, or iPad
If you have a Kindle, Nook, or iPad and bought a .mobi or an .epub copy of Fireside from Weightless Books or directly from me, and you usually only buy from the Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Apple, you are probably used to the files just showing up on your reader. Here are some instructions from Amazon, B&N, and Apple on how to add files to those readers:
Kindle (.mobi)
Send to Kindle software for PC
iPad (.epub)
Using iTunes to add ePub files to iBooks
Nook (.epub)
From Barnes and Noble FAQ (they don’t seem to have a dedicated page to link to):
For Nook Table, Nook Color, and Nook Simple Touch: “You can connect your NOOK to a computer (using the NOOK microUSB cable) to transfer personal files. Your NOOK will appear on your computer as a removable drive. Just click on the file on your computer, and copy it (drag-and-drop) to the appropriate NOOK folder. Need additional space for personal files? You may save your files to a microSD memory card.”
For Nook 1st Edition: “Accessible from the library icon on the Home menu, My Documents is a view of your personal digital content. Where you can put your personal files differs for the internal memory and a supplemental microSD card:For copying personal documents and files to your NOOK, connect your NOOK to your computer with the USB cable, and open the NOOK drive for the internal memory. Place your ePub, PDB, and PDF files in the folder My Documents, or in folders under that folder. Any hierarchy under My Documents is fine. Place your image files either in the My Wallpapers folder or in a sub-folder under the My Screensavers folder. And for audio files, place those files in the My Music folder on the NOOK drive. For a supplemental microSD card, place your files anywhere on the card, in any hierarchy. When viewed from your personal computer, the files retain this organization. Your NOOK does not move them. The My Documents part of your library is not a view of the files and folders, but of information about the files. It is a flat view; a list. The hierarchy is not reflected in the list.”
One week to launch day!
Blog subscribers probably saw a flurry of slightly wonky posts yesterday as I put up the story excerpts and intro from Issue No. 1 of Fireside. If you got something weird, I encourage you to check it out now because I have it all straightened out. Excerpts from all four stories and the first three pages of the comic are available.
We are just one week away from going on sale! All of the Kickstarter backers received their electronic copies today, and I am supposed to be receiving the print magazines in the mail tomorrow. I hope to have those mostly sent out by the end of the week or Monday at the latest.
Meanwhile, if you didn’t get in on the Kickstarter, the magazine will be on sale in electronic editions next week from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Weightless Books, and direct from this website. Only Weightless Books is allowing me to do preorders, so if you want to order Issue No. 1 now or get a one-year subscription (at a 50% discount), you can go here. It is available in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (Nook and most other readers), and PDF (which I have been recommending for iPads and other tablets, as it looks really great on those).
Issue One
This is the editor’s note from the first issue of Fireside.
WELCOME TO THE FIRST ISSUE of Fireside. I am still amazed and thrilled that we pulled this off. Back in October, a stew of ideas in the back of my brain congealed into a crazy idea. I want to make a fiction magazine. I wanted to publish short stories and comics, with a focus on good storytelling without regard to genre. And I wanted to pay the writers as well as I could. And thanks to Kickstarter, to a great team of writers and artists and designers, and to all the crazy love and support and generosity of everyone
who helped in the past few months, the magazine is real.
And it’s not just real. It’s really good. The first story, To the Moon by Ken Liu, follows the struggles of a young lawyer and the stories we tell ourselves to validate our illusions. Next is Chuck Wendig’s Emerald Lakes, a prequel to his Atlanta Burns novella Shotgun Gravy. In our story, Atlanta is dealing out more justice with a mix of brains and blood. Our comic, Snow Ninjas of the Himalayas, written by Adam P. Knave and D.J. Kirkbride, drawn by Michael Lee Harris, and lettered by Frank Cvetkovic, is a story about why some secrets are best left unrevealed. Then we have Christie Yant’s Temperance, a story about a drunk, an intolerant town, and a mysterious woman. And we close with Press Enter to Execute by Tobias Buckell, a near-future sci-fi thriller set in a world where someone is finally doing something about all that spam in our inboxes.
Enjoy! And from everyone involved in putting out Fireside, thank you for reading.
“To the Moon” by Ken Liu
An excerpt from Fireside No. 1:
Long ago, when you were just a baby, we went to the Moon.
Summer nights in Beijing were brutal: hot, muggy, the air thick as the puddles left on the road after a shower, covered in iridescent patches of gasoline. We felt like dumplings being steamed, slowly, inside the room we were renting.
There was nowhere to go. Outside, the sidewalk was filled with the droning of air conditioners from neighbors who had them and the cackling of TVs at full volume from neighbors who hadn’t. Add your crying to the mix, and it was enough to drive anyone crazy. I would carry you out on my shoulders, back in, and then out again, begging you to sleep.
One night, I returned home after another day of fruitless petitioning at the Palace of Mandarins, having gotten no closer to avenging your mother. You sensed my anger and despair and cried heartily in sympathy. The world seemed so oppressive and dark that I wanted to join you, join the sound and the fury that filled the mad world.
Then the Moon passed low overhead, ripe, golden, round, like a shaobing fresh out of the oven. And I tied you to my back with one of the scarves your mother left behind, and began to climb the pagoda tree by the side of the road that somehow survived all the construction and reconstruction, all the road-widening and demolition, all the pollution and apathy.
The climb was long and arduous. The Moon seemed close from the ground but it kept on receding as we progressed up the tree. We had to climb through clouds, through flocks of wild starlings and sparrows, through wind and rain that threatened to tear us from the tree, until finally, we were at the very tip of the tallest swaying branch, and then, just as the Moon passed right overhead, I reached up and hoisted us onto it.
It was wonderful on the Moon: cool air, clean skies, as quiet as a library. You stopped crying as soon as we landed, looking around with your eyes wide open like when we first got to Beijing and you saw all those cars for the first time.
The Moon people were beautiful and polite. The women wore dresses that flowed and shimmered like water, and the men walked in shoes that gleamed and shone like the paint on new cars. Everyone spoke like they were poets from the Tang Dynasty. In teahouses made of green jade and white nephrite, they drank tea brewed from dew and whispered and laughed at each other’s wit. They ate cakes flavored with sweet osmanthus, prepared by the goddess Chang’e herself. Even the walls felt cool to the touch, and you could see why they didn’t need anything as unrefined as air conditioning.
But they were also haughty. They didn’t want us to be there, poor peasants from the countryside. They thought we didn’t belong. We were loud and made the place dirty.
“Why don’t you go home?” they asked.
So we had to find ways to trick them.
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SALLY RUSH SMILED, uneasily, at her client.
The Chinese man across the coffee shop table was in his forties: short and wiry frame, blue dress shirt wrinkled and faded from too many washes, shoes scuffed beyond hope. His unkempt hair was turning white in patches, and he didn’t bother shaving off the straggly wisps on his upper lips and chin. The coffee on the table remained black and untouched while he drank tea from a thermos. Wenchao Zhang looked like he had just gotten off the boat, but the way he appraised her was cool, calm, calculated.
Sally looked into his dark brown eyes and expressionless face — she didn’t want to sound racist, but — she found him inscrutable.
His daughter, a girl of about six, sat next to him. Sally smiled at her, and the child smiled back, her eyes wide open with curiosity. In contrast to the father’s impenetrable face, Sally thought she could read every thought that went through the girl’s head.
She held out her hand but Wenchao ignored it, continuing to scrutinize her.
Maybe he doesn’t know English well, she thought. She turned to the girl.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Sally. I’ll be helping you and your dad. I’m your lawyer.”
“Hello,” the girl said. And she blushed so that Sally knew she thought Sally was pretty. “You can call me Vinnie.”
Sally decided that the girl with the American name also had American eyes.
“How will you help?” Vinnie asked.
Sally considered this. “My job is to help people tell stories. If I do a good enough job, you win.”
Vinnie nodded, smiling.
Then the father spoke. “Did you read my story?” His accent was heavy, but she had no trouble understanding him. He spoke carefully and calmly, with no hint of desperation.
“Yes,” Sally said. His story had shocked her, outraged her, and she found herself slightly disappointed that he didn’t seem more, well, heroic, didn’t carry the signs of his suffering more visibly. She wanted to save him, this courageous little Chinese man who had given up so much for his faith, for freedom.
“You’re very brave,” she added.
“Have you done this much?” he asked.
“No.” She blushed.
Sally had been a good student in a great law school, and she picked Widmar Eaton Lafever & Tuck out of a dozen law firms — all of them offering her equally unbelievable salaries — because she liked the senior woman associate who had interviewed her and made Widmar sound so wonderful (except that the associate had already quit — “for personal reasons” — by the time Sally started in September, so maybe that wasn’t such a great way to pick a firm).
“Then how do you know my story will work?” he asked.
“I —” she was stuck. This wasn’t going at all the way she had envisioned it. “Your facts match the statutory definition of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership …” Her voice trailed off. The legal phrases sounded abstract, inadequate to the task.
Actually being a lawyer, Sally found, was very different from being a law student. She had been so good at teasing apart hypothetical fact patterns, marshaling them into intricate legal arguments, bolstering them with high-minded principle and policy, and dressing them up in dazzling rhetorical flourishes, but she was completely unprepared for the realities of commercial litigation.
“Ah,” Wenchao said. And Sally understood his tone perfectly. “That is why you’re free.”
There were no neat fact patterns at Widmar Eaton. It was her job to assemble facts out of warehouses full of boxes of paper produced by corporations intent on drowning each other with legal bills. She found that she was utterly unqualified to do her job.
To train her and to make her feel better about her meaningless drudgery, the firm assigned her to pro bono asylum cases. She was supposed to practice on these refugees, who could not sue her firm for malpractice, until she learned enough so that she wouldn’t mess up on the firm’s real clients.
Sally was furious with herself. She was supposed to be confident, in charge, the one guiding him.
“Tell me about yourself.” His voice softened.
“Excuse me?”
“My dad likes stories,” Vinnie said.
“Tell me the story of how you became a lawyer,” Wenchao said. “So I can see how good you’ll be at helping me tell my story.”
To read the rest of “To the Moon,” subscribe or buy Issue No. 1.
Besides being a writer, Ken Liu is also a translator, programmer, and lawyer. His fiction has appeared in F&SF, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston. He and his wife are collaborating on their first novel. Find him online at kenliu.name or on Twitter @kyliu99.
“Temperance” by Christie Yant
An excerpt from Fireside No. 1:
It wasn’t the worst bender of Anthony Cardno’s life, but it was the first that he had ended in a cemetery, vomiting into an open grave. His head throbbed; his mouth tasted of dust and sickness. He didn’t recall how he came to be here; he remembered the wagon that had carried him away from Santa Lydia where he had quickly worn out his welcome, but he didn’t know which direction it had taken him, and couldn’t guess where he might be now. As long as it wasn’t San Francisco, he’d probably be all right.
His flask lay out of reach, at the bottom of the freshly dug hole. He tried to roll over and rise, but his stomach rebelled, leaving Anthony to pray his usual prayer on mornings like these: Never again, O Lord, if only you’ll make it stop. But the Almighty had heard it all before, and Anthony’s stomach evicted its contents right into the grave. There was a ringing in his ears, and it wasn’t until the heaving stopped and he could breathe again that he heard the voices, angry and dismayed, and saw the rest of the scene before him: the grim marble markers that stretched out in rows all around him; polished leather shoes and long black skirts; the shaggy hooves of horses and the narrow wheels of a hearse wagon; and the shocked faces of the recently bereaved.
He tried to get to his feet but vertigo and drink still had him, and he tumbled over the side. He felt a rib crack as he landed hard at the bottom of the grave.
“I apologize,” Anthony said, the words coming out slow and muddy. “I apologize for disturbing your peace.” He retrieved his flask and did his best to rub the sick off it before tucking it back inside his coat.
“Get him the hell out of there.” The man who spoke stood out of view, but two young men — twins, by the look of them, with sun-faded hair, rolled sleeves, and ruddy, smirking faces — each reached a hand down and hauled him painfully over the side.
“What town is this?” he asked, and spit the sour bile that still lingered in his throat. “What day?” Those assembled stood in affronted silence.
A man stepped forward, stately and well-dressed in black hat and overcoat, a white flower in his lapel. An important man, by the look of him, but with a meanness in his eyes that reminded Anthony of his father.
“The wrong place, on the wrong day.” Anthony detected the familiar note of escalation in the air.
“I’ll just be on my way, then.” Anthony took several careful, uneven steps toward the track that led down the hill and toward the gates that he could just see beyond.
“Not just yet.” The man nodded at the pair who had pulled Anthony from the grave, and they moved in with swift menace. Each twin seized an arm and together they dragged him along, past the women who gasped and whispered behind their gloved hands, and out to the road where a row of buggies waited to carry the grieving home.
“Right there’s fine.” The boys dropped Anthony to the ground. “Stand up.” Anthony climbed unsteadily to his feet. The man stepped up to him and stood too close. “You stink of drink.”
“I meant no harm, sir.”
“My sister’s children will remember this day for the rest of their lives. So will I.”
And then he was caught again, held by the beastly twins while this man felt through his coat and searched his pockets, scattering his few belongings in the dirt. He had a moment of real fear when the man tossed his watch, and his attempt to pull away and go after it was rewarded by a sharp punch to the gut. The search continued until the man found what he was looking for.
The man pulled Anthony’s flask out of his inside pocket and held it up for all to see; then he pulled the stopper and poured the precious contents out into the dirt.
“I’m the mayor of this town, and I don’t want to know you. Get your things, and get the hell out of my sight.”
The mayor and his cohorts turned their backs on Anthony and started back toward the grave site. Anthony collected his things — pocket watch and watchmaker’s tools, unharmed; flask, empty; coins and notes, gathered and accounted for, despite the tremor in his hands.
“You asked what town this is,” the mayor called back over his shoulder. “You’re in Temperance. You might not care to linger.”
To read the rest of “Temperance”, subscribe or buy Issue No. 1.
Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer and habitual volunteer. She has been an Assistant Editor for Lightspeed Magazine, occasional narrator for StarShipSofa, audio book reviewer for Audible.com, and remains a co-blogger at Inkpunks.com, a website for aspiring and newly-pro writers. Her fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, and Armored. She lives in a former Temperance colony on the central coast of California, where she sometimes gets to watch rocket launches with her two amazing daughters, her husband, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Find her online at inkhaven.net or on Twitter @inkhaven.
I am Kickstarting the next issues of my short fiction and comics magazine, Fireside. We have two goals, to publish great storytelling regardless of genre, and to pay our writers and artists well.
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