Jan 7, 2016 | announcement

Issue 29 — From the Editor

by Brian J. White

And we’re back!

Sorry about disappearing for two months; we had a bunch of stuff to sort out, but we’re in good shape now.

We released the second book of Minerva Zimmerman’s snarky 80s vampire trilogy in December: Cruel Summer is now available in most ebook stores! We also announced that we’ll be releasing a story collection by Malon Edwards late this year. It will be built around the world of his Year 3 Fireside story, If Wishes Were Obfuscation Codes.

On to Issue 29! We have two flash pieces this month: Human Resources by Erica L. Satifka, which takes us inside a twisted world of haves and have-nots, and Gold Farmer’s Daughter by Aidan Doyle, where we invite you to be a guest at a wedding inside a MMORPG. Hope you brought your sword!

We also have two short stories this month. First up is A. K. Snyder’s All That Holds Me Together, an exploration of loss, grief, and tattoos. And there is Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s This is Not a Wardrobe Door, where two worlds have been severed, and with them, a lot of friendships.

Thanks as always for supporting Fireside!

© 2016 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.