And here we are, at the end of Year 2. Thank you, again, to everyone who has made this possible, the Kickstarter backers, the new subscribers, the writers. Thank you to Galen Dara for the wonderful art that has brought every issue to life. Thank you to Pablo Defendini and Kirk Biglione for building our beautiful website. Thank you to our families and our friends. Thank you, most of all, to my wife, Lauren, without whose support, advice, and love Fireside wouldn’t be possible.
We’re going to take a month off to do a little work on the website, edit the stories we’re buying from our submissions period in June, and get Year 3 in shape. We’ll be back on Sept. 1, on a new schedule of publishing the first Monday of each month. Lilith Saintcrow’s serial is already written, and man, are we looking forward to getting started on that.
But! In the meantime, we have Issue 15, the finale of Year 2. Our short story is Sun Tea by M. Bennardo, the tale of a minor league pitcher who has brewed up a surefire path into stardom. In flash fiction, we have Megan Grey’s Missing, a haunting trip into a memory, and James Darrow’s Reversal, where a man gets a chance to fix his last, fatal mistake. And, in Part 12 of The Forever Endeavor, Chuck Wendig ties off fate’s threads for Dale, Walt, and even Dave …
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.
