Oct 7, 2014 | announcement

Issue 16 — From the Editor

by Brian J. White

And now, finally, Year 3 has begun! We have a completely redesigned, free website. (Thanks so much to Pablo Defendini for his beautiful work.) We have a variety of ways for people to support us as we work to move away from Kickstarting to a more sustainable model. We are opening up again to submissions in a few days. And, of course, we have Issue 16 to kick off Year 3.

Our short story this month is Testimony by Jennifer Mason-Black. This one’s a gut-twister, set in a future that has passed a very sick little girl by while she lay frozen, awaiting a cure. In flash fiction, we have The Work by Alexandre Stone, a race against time as the walls come down, and The Cutting Yield by Hillary Jacques, a story about food and family in a shattered future.

And we kick off our serial by Lilith Saintcrow: She Wolf and Cub. This month’s issue features a prologue, which readers may recognize as the story Maternal Type from Issue 9, as well as Chapter One.

Thanks so much to all our readers and our supporters. And tell your friends and fellow readers they can now read Fireside for free!

© 2014 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.