kaleidotrope

I’ve got issues — 7 in fact!

Wondering about the contents of Kaleidotrope #7? Then wonder no more…

Fiction
“Remember” by Lindsey Duncan
“Albatross Ghosts” by Joanne Anderton
“How Antkind Lost its Soul” by Bill Ward
“The Beekeepers” by J. Alan Pierce
“Fortune” by Alberto Chimal
“The Vigilant” by Jason Hinchcliffe
“Please Share My Umbrella” by Jean Huets
“The Clay Men” by C.L. Holland
“Lock and Key” by Alyssa Fowers
“Chamberlain McLaverty” by Sean Ruane
“Duma of the Valley Kifaru” by A. Kiwi Courters
“Intuo” by Dale Carothers
“What Bear Skull Holder Taught Me” by Jeffrey Meyer
“To Put Away Childish Things” by Aaron A. Polson
“Star Over Babylon” by John Walters
“Horseshoe” by Stacy Sinclair Poetry
“Marbles” by David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Two Poems by klipshutz
“My Friend, the Sculptor” by Terrie Leigh Relf
“Sligo” by Oritsegbemi Emmanuel Jakpa
“Flickering She” by Berrien C. Henderson
“Cower” by Aurelio Rico Lopez III
“Speaking to Socrates” by Rhian Waller
“Nostalgia” by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff

With cover art by Kurt Kirchmeier, and short comic art by Erica Hildebrand and Tom Powers & Amanda Banaszewski. That’s 70+ pages of great writing and art, coming October 2009!

Friday various

  • It’s the obvious joke, but you couldn’t pay me to watch Fox News. I’m dubious about the efficacy of any pay wall, much less one proposed by Rupert Murdoch. Heck, I was disturbed enough to learn that Bill O’Reilly was the recent Career Day Keynoter at my old high school. (He’s also an alum.) [via]
  • Aw man. First Farrago’s Wainscot and now Jim Baen’s Universe. Sometimes, it can seem like not a day without another short fiction marketplace closing. Honestly, the main thing that keeps Kaleidotrope running (beyond my own enjoyment at putting it together) is me turning a blind eye to exactly how much each issue costs me. (It’s a couple hundred dollars, let’s say that. And that’s even though I pay my writers next to nothing.) Sad to see these two markets close.
  • Still, here’s some good news: Scott Westerfeld’s terrific YA novel Uglies is now available as a free e-book. And non-US readers needn’t worry: though publisher asks for a US zipcode, as Westerfeld says, that’s really just five numbers.
  • Generally, I like Richard Corliss (or have never really seen any reason to dislike him, in the few times I’ve run across his work), but he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about in his criticism of Netflix.
  • And finally, although I can’t be at Worldcon, John Scalzi explains the Hugos.

Tuesday various

  • Is the future of Twitter in code? Orangeman? [via]
  • Though I don’t like it, I’m not diametrically opposed to five-day-only mail delivery. But I’d be screwed if the post office shut down all services on Saturday. That’s the only chance I get to check my post office box, and usually my only chance to mail anything like issues of Kaleidotrope. (Act now if you want a copy then?!) [via]
  • Ah literary ice creams… If only.
  • Homeless Offered Free Airfare To Leave NYC. I’m not really sure what to think about this. On the one hand, it’s an effort to reunite the homeless — many of whom I’m sure are teenage runaways — with family members, who may be better equiped to care for them. On the other hand, it’s shipping the homeless problem out of state to save some money and make them somebody else’s problem.
  • But on a somewhat happier note… It’s not often you read the phrase “aerospace engineer turned composer,” but I enjoyed reading about these failed London musicals [via]:

    A common complaint in the reviews for Too Close to the Sun is that the show doesn’t even fall into the so-bad-it’s-good category – that rarefied realm which made Gone With the Wind and Imagine This instant classics of a sort. Crucial to such flops is a sense of failed grand ambitions, which is why the burning of Atlanta in the first was as hilariously inept as the evocation of life in the Warsaw ghetto in the second. To enter the annals of true awfulness, you need to stake a greater claim on the imagination than was ever going to be proffered by a chamber musical about the waning hours of an American novelist. It would have still been a hard sell on the West End if Elton John had written it. (That, by the way, is not a suggestion.)

Sorry, we’re closed

Earlier today, I did something I’ve been putting off for awhile: I closed Kaleidotrope to submissions.

More importantly, I did the rough calculations that suggested I pretty much had to do this. Already, I’d been telling future contributors that I couldn’t guarantee when their work would appear, that I was pretty full-up on acceptances at the moment, and that it could be as late as late 2010 before their submissions saw print. That’s a long time to wait if you’re a writer, and it didn’t seem fair to expect it of anyone.

So, starting tomorrow, the zine is temporarily closed. I still have several submissions awaiting replies in my in-box, but after that I won’t be accepting submissions for several months, or longer. I’ll instead be busying myself with putting together the next two or three issues with what I’ve already accepted. I regret all the great writing I’ll need to pass up in the interim, but I think this will be good for both the zine and my sanity. (I won’t mind an in-box that doesn’t need near-constant pruning, for instance.)

And who knows? When I open back up, I think I’d like to start offering my contributors just a little more money…

Happy thoughts (4)

Some things that made me happy this weekend, in no particular order:

  • The stunning weather. It’s since grown a little colder, but we had beautiful spring weather all weekend long.
  • Dinner and good conversation with friends on Saturday night. I got a fortune cookie fortune that said, “You look pretty.” And the restaurant was very kind to recalculate our bill when we asked to pay separately.
  • I mailed out 50+ packages, with some 80-90 copies of Kaleidotrope. Easily one the more time consuming and least fun parts of running the zine, it was made a lot easier by not having to wait in line at the post office and friendly postal workers. (To be nice, I split the mailings between two local post offices.) There are still reviewer copies to go, but current subscribers and contributors should all be getting their copies soon.
  • The two movies I saw this weekend.
  • My mother is feeling a lot better. Some family came to visit with her on Saturday, and she’s been a lot more up and about recently. Luckily the weather was nice enough for her to go outside briefly over the weekend.

I’m not sure if I’m going to keep doing this meme. On the one hand, I see the benefit of actively looking at the things that make you happy in a given day; I think there’s something to be gained from that kind of introspection. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to devote entire blog posts to it. We’ll see.