May 7, 2016 | announcement

Issue 33 — May 2016

by Brian J. White

Hello!

It’s been a busy month at Fireside. We took story submissions all last month, and got a record number, closing in on 2,000 while I am writing this a few days before this issue comes out. We’re sifting through those stories with guest editor Daniel José Older and will have a whole new crop of stories for the second half of Year 4.

June is going to be a skip month, for two reasons. One, we need a little time to regroup. And two, this will finally allow the Fireside Year to line up with the calendar year, so Year 5 will start in January. (Patreon backers will not be charged in June.)

But you’re here for stories! And this month we have five fantastic ones for you.

We open with Caroline Yoachim’s third story in Fireside, a nanobot piece called An Army of Bees. It’s a gut-wrencher. Next is a gorgeous little cyberpunk story, Minerva Zimmerman’s Sparrow. R.L. Thull follows with The Forever Girl, about a little girl who never grows up, and her mother who does. Our fourth story is Mari Ness’ The Middle Child’s Practical Guide to Surviving a Fairy Tale, which is funny, smart, and exactly as advertised. It’s got another Galen Dara illustration. And we close with If X is a Real Number by Sofie Bird, aboard a starship that is in a lot of trouble.

Thank you for reading, and for your support.

© 2016 Brian J. White

About the author

Brian started Fireside Fiction Company in 2012 as an experiment in crowdfunding and paying speculative fiction writers well above the accepted professional rate at the time. It worked! Thanks, have a great day!

Brian has been informed he has to write more in his bio. Fine! Brian took that experiment through five Kickstarters (and did not die!) and into a subscription model. During his tenure, Fireside published 150 stories, five novels, and one novella, and also published the first #BlackSpecFic report, which examined the massive under-representation of Black short-story writers in the field, prompting conversation, reflection, and change in the speculative fiction community. It remains one of the most important things he has worked on in his adult life. Brian was a 2017 World Fantasy Award finalist in the Special Award, Non-Professional category for Fireside, and Fireside has been nominated for multiple Hugo Awards.

Facing the burnout that is all too common among people who work at small presses, Brian stepped down as editor and publisher in 2017 to regroup and recharge mentally. He returned as interim editorial director in 2020 and resumed full ownership of the company in June 2021 with a great team you can read about below.

In the wider world, Brian is a former journalist who worked as an editor at The Courier-Journal in Louisville from 2006–2010 and at the Boston Globe from 2010–2018, where he was part of the staff that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in 2014 for the newspaper’s coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2014. He still lives around Boston, where he works as an editor for a private company and takes photographs, paints miniatures, and spends time with his amazing wife and various cats.