Jan 7, 2015 | announcement

Issue 19 — From the Editor

by Brian J. White

Welcome to Issue 19 and the last days of 2014. It’s been warm here in Boston, but I can feel winter lurking just beyond the turn of the year. Our short story this month, Tuesdays With Molakesh the Destroyer, is set amid the snow and cold of a Minnesota winter, following the icy relationship between a teenager and her new neighbor, who just happens to be a demon. The story is a return to Fireside for Megan Grey, who had the flash story Missingin Issue 15. Galen Dara’s illustration for Tuesdays with Molakesh the Destroyer has immediately become one of my favorites.

In flash fiction, we have Brent Baldwin’s Who We Once Were, Who We Will Never Be, the tale of a woman struggling to fulfill the dream of her and her husband, increasingly on her own. And we have She Waits by Laurel Halbany, who takes us inside Medusa’s home and her farewell to a man she loves. And in Chapter Four of Lilith Saintcrow’s serial She Wolf and Cub, the arrival of Abby’s old handler, Sam, is only the herald of much bigger problems …

© 2015 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.