Jul 7, 2012 | announcement

Issue 2 — WOW. ISSUE TWO.

by Brian J. White

Fireside is turning into a Real Thing. We’re so grateful to everyone who’s supported us this year as we’ve continued our crazy experiment in publishing great stories regardless of genre and in fair pay for creators.

I’m really pleased with Issue Two. It’s fulfilled one of my hopes for the magazine that each issue will be very different from the others. We open with Kat Howard’s The Heart of the Story, a lush exploration of a place where tales may well be born. Next is Jake Kerr’s Perspective, a near-future story in which we meet a reclusive, heartbroken father who doesn’t understand his son’s need to cover a city in graffiti. Next is our comic, An Honest Mistake, which I wrote and which artist Steve Walker and letterer Frank Cvetkovic brought to life. It looks at what could happen at the end of the world when everyone has watched too many end-of-the-world movies. Following that is a horror story, Damien Walters Grintalis’ Scarred, about a young woman trying to suppress a dark urge that she once indulged. And we close with Rhapsody in Blue Shift, a supernatural science-fiction story by Stephen Blackmoore, who is quite afraid this optimistic tale will ruin his street cred as a bloody-nosed pulp writer. And of course, there’s the incredible artwork by Galen Dara, who did the cover based on Kat’s story, as well as the interior illustrations with the other stories.

We hope you enjoy Issue Two. We’ll be back with a Kickstarter for Issue Three in September. For now, our plan is to keep preselling the issues through Kickstarter, along with offering the premium rewards, while we build up our subscriptions and single-copy sales. If you know anyone who you think would like Fireside, you can point them to firesidemag.com/getfireside, where eBook and PDF editions of Issues One and Two are for sale, along with subscriptions.

Thank you for reading.

© 2012 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.