Issue 1 — 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, 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.

© 2012 A. A. McNamara

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