Aug 7, 2013 | announcement

Issue 4 — Welcome to Year Two

by Brian J. White

It’s been a long ride to today, but here we are, starting our yearlong experiment in publishing a monthly magazine, full of great fiction with fair pay for our creators. Thanks to everyone who has helped us get to this point, most especially to all of our Kickstarter backers. You didn’t let us fade away, and we can’t say how grateful we are to be here.

And so, Issue 4! (We published three issues in 2012.) We have two pieces of flash fiction: a slice of backyard magic from Keffy R.M. Kehrli in Mice, and The Filigreed Cage by Krystal Claxton, a science fiction story about the price of a comfortable life. Our short story is Delilah S. Dawson’s Love Song of the Lizard Boy, set in her Blud universe, following Eblic, who as it turns out is not quite the lazy bugger that everyone seems to think he is. And then we have the first episode of Chuck Wendig’s serial, The Forever Endeavor. I won’t spoil anything. Just read it. It’s going to be a hell of a ride. And finally, Year Two artist Galen Dara has produced two gorgeous images for Issue 4; you can see them on Delilah and Chuck’s stories.

Thanks for reading, and if you enjoy your time with us, please tell your friends.

© 2013 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.