Jan 7, 2017 | announcement

Issue 39: January 2017

by Brian J. White

And this is it! The end of Year 4 of Fireside, and the edge of the start of something new.

This is the last time we’ll be publishing our stories in a traditional “issue” format — online at least. We’re going to start publishing one story a week on a redesigned firesidefiction.com. We’ll still be collecting each month’s stories in an ebook for our Patreon backers.

(Speaking of which, if you’re a subscriber directly through our website and would like to keep getting Fireside ebooks, sign up for our Patreon. Our new site is moving to a platform that doesn’t support our ebook store, and we’re discontinuing direct subsctiptions.)

The new site launches on February 21. We’re really excited about our plans, and hope that you’ll love them.

For now, on to Issue 39!

We open with a weird little trip into a lava pit that is populated by a god, a lizard, and a mysterious visitor: Alexis A. Hunter’s God Talk: Advice From A Deity in Distress. Next up is the first in a series of clever, wonderful short pieces by Nino Cipri: It Happened To Me: My Doppleganger Stole My Credit Card Info, and then My Life. And our short story for the month… man I’ve been sitting on this one for a while and I’m so excited to bring it to Fireside’s readers. It’s Black Like Them, a searing piece that looks at what might happen if white people could live in black skin for just a day or two — and if some of them couldn’t go back. It comes from Troy L. Wiggins, who is also one of the editors of Fiyah, a literary magazine of black speculative fiction that launched earlier this month. It’s an amazing publication and is well worth your time and your dollars.

Thanks for reading! And we’ll see you again in a few weeks.

© 2017 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.