Apr 7, 2015 | announcement

Issue 22 — From the Editor

by Brian J. White

April is looking pretty darn good. The snow is finally melting here in Boston, Andrea Phillips’ Fireside novel Revision got a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, and we have a really great issue to share with you.

Our short story this month is Daniel José Older’s Stay, which swirls through the chaos of life, love, and a hospital ER, seen through the eyes of a ghost. In flash fiction, we’ve got Jen R Albert’s [Katabasis]((/issue22/chapter/katabasis/), which explores death at the intersection of myth and science, and Sunil Patel’s [Sally the Psychic Alligator]((/issue22/chapter/sally-the-psychic-alligator/), a funny story about a scientist and her psychic alligator. Probably psychic.

We’ve got Chapter Seven of Lilith Saintcrow’s She Wolf and Cub. Jess and Sam are back together again, but they don’t get much time to catch up…

And we also have the first three chapters of Revision, so you can meet Mira and some of the other characters before the book comes out May 5.

Our Patreon is up to $177 a month. When we hit $250 it’ll be enough to pay for our flash fiction each month. We’re hoping to get there this month, and beyond by the summer, so we can avoid doing another Kickstarter. Please check it out; there’s lots of perks, many of which get you art by our fabulous illustrator, Galen Dara.

Thanks, as always.

© 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.