Feb 7, 2015 | announcement

Issue 20 — From the Editor

by Brian J. White

Issue 20. Wow we’ve done 20 of these things? That’s amazing. Fireside has been such a wonderful experience. Bringing stories into the world is a great feeling. Thanks to everyone who has helped us make that happen.

So! Issue 20! Our first short story this month (that’s right, two!) is To Fall, and Pause, and Fall by Lisa Nohealani Morton. It’s a wrenching science fiction story about rebirth, risk, and our sense of self. Our second story is also our first-ever reprint: A Silly Love Story by Nino Cipri, a beautiful little tale of love, identity, and a poltergeist. I first read this a few years ago in Daily Science Fiction, and it’s really stuck with me. I’m thrilled to share it with Fireside’s readers.

In flash fiction, we have Thord D. Hedengren’s My Name is Ronald by the Way, a diary of dying country, and Laura Lovic-Lindsay’s Shoelace, a tale of a little old lady who’s more than a bit worrisome.

And we have Chapter Five of Lilith Saintcrow’s She Wolf and Cub, which finds Abby and Geoff alone in the Waste with just their fourpads and the songs in Geoff’s head…

© 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.