Apr 1, 2016 | announcement

Issue 32 — April 2016

by Brian J. White

For the first time in a long time, none of the stories this month are flash fiction! Don’t worry, we still love tiny stories and will have a lot more of them.

It also seems to be fairy tale month here at Fireside!

We open this month with Jordan Taylor’s Red as Blood, White as Snow, Black as Ebony. She takes us into a Snow White story that has gone a bit rotten. Next up, Jennifer Campbell-Hicks returns to Fireside with The Memory Who Became a Girl, a science-fiction story about a girl who keeps getting forgotten. And we close with another Fireside alum, A.E. Decker, whose Forever Now whisks us to a magical mall to follow another lost girl.

Fireside opened to submissions again on April 1! We’ll be open to stories of up to 5,000 words through April 30, and we’re really excited to have Daniel José Older on board as a guest editor! You can find guidelines and submission instructions at firesidefiction.com/submissions.

Thanks, as always, for your support, and for reading 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.