Sep 7, 2012 | announcement

Issue 4 — This One Was a Squeaker

by Brian J. White

We raised $3,000 on the final day of the Kickstarter, including $2,000 in the last hour and $1,000 in the last 10 minutes! We are so grateful to all of our backers. You wouldn’t let us fail, and so we were able to bring you this terrific issue.

We open with Elizabeth Bear’s Form and Void, a story about a difficult friendship tested at the fringe of human exploration. Next is Remaker, Remaker by Lucas J.W. Johnson, a look at obsession through a steampunk lens and set in a Roman Empire that never died. After that is our haunting comic, Famine’s Shadow, written by Rachel Deering and illustrated by Christine Larsen. Daniel Abraham follows with John Fisher, a story about a man, his wary stepdaughter, and an imaginary friend. And we close with Mary Robinette Kowal’s The White Phoenix Feather: A tale of cuisine and ninjas. I don’t think you need any more enticement to read than that subtitle, do you?

As we’ve been working on Issue Three, we’ve also been working on a plan for how to fund and publish Fireside in a longer-term, more sustainable way. We hope to have that together by the end of the year; keep an eye on firesidefiction.comfor details.

Thank you, as always, 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.