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Posts Tagged ‘kickstarter’

One Kickstarter ends; another begins!

As I post this, there are just twenty-three hours to go on the Kickstarter for Shapers of Worlds II, including a short story from yours truly. It’s reached its funding goal, but there are still plenty of prizes left, including signed copies of The Mask of Mirrors (all the ARCs of The Liar’s Knot have been claimed) and some ready-to-hang acrylic prints of my black-and-white photos:

black and white photos for the Shapers of Worlds II Kickstarter

And though I’m not personally involved with it, I’d like to bring The Deadlands to your attention: a Kickstarter for a new magazine, helmed by E. Catherine Tobler, the former editor of the much-missed Shimmer. (I also happen to be friends with the poetry editor, Sonya Taaffe, and the art director, Cory Skerry.) I find it hilarious that one of the backer rewards you can choose is a fake obituary detailing the peculiar manner in which you died . . . anyway, this one is running for a while, but some of the limited rewards have already sold out, so back now rather than later!

Two Kickstarters

I’ve mentioned both of these on Twitter, but since that medium is so ephemeral, it’s easy to miss things:

Both Apex Magazine and Uncanny Magazine are running Kickstarters right now. Both of them are award-winning publications, with lots of stories winding up on shortlists or nabbing the honors. Apex was on hiatus for a little over a year, but is now starting up again, which is really great news for the short fiction field. Their Kickstarter has been running longer and they’ve hit their main goal already; they’re almost to the stretch goal that will mean the entire next year of issues is fully funded. (After that there are a few more stretch goals for things like an indigenous and native creators special issue and an international creators special issue.) Uncanny’s Kickstarter just launched and is aimed at funding the whole year in one go; their stretch goals are for original cover art, paying a small stipend to staff, and increasing the pay rate for nonfiction essays. If you’re able to back one or both, that would be really amazing — I know there are so many things that need money right now, and for many people that’s in short supply, but these magazines are both vital parts of this corner of publishing. And both Apex and Uncanny have a lot of fiction online for you to check out, if you want a taste of what they do!

Kaiju, Tuckerization, and tornadoes

Strange Horizons is running a prize drawing as a fundraiser for the magazine. Enter for a chance to be Tuckerized in the book I’m writing right now, the sequel to the Memoirs of Lady Trent! Given the nature of this book, the most likely prospect is that you’ll wind up being some kind of expert on the Draconean language or other such nerdy topic, but there are a few other possibilities as well.

The Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II anthology is nearly halfway to goal. If you missed it before, this anthology will feature a short story from me based on the micro-setting I wrote for the Mecha vs. Monsters expansion for the Tiny Frontiers RPG, which took that concept and smashed it full-speed into the idea of high school science competitions. The story is one of the most gonzo things I’ve ever written, and you can help it become a published reality!

This is a very long article, but very worth reading if you want to get a sense of how terrifying tornadoes can be. I’m lucky that I never experienced one, despite living in Dallas for eighteen years; I did experience huddling in the back hall of our house, waiting to find out if we’d lose that particular game of meteorological Russian roulette.

(Juxtaposing that with the previous item: gonzo as my story is, it doesn’t come close to approximating the sheer destructive force of a tornado. But it’s also meant to be a moderately funny story, and there’s nothing funny about annihilation on that scale.)

Finally, not so much an item as a teaser for something upcoming: stay tuned to this space for some exciting news on February 6th!

This short story GOES UP TO ELEVEN

I recently finished my first short story of the year, which doesn’t yet have a title I am satisfied with, but which is destined for publication in Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II, once the Kickstarter behind that link successfully funds. (It’s a quarter of the way there after one day, so odds are good.)

Drafting the story was interesting, because it’s been a while since I wrote something where my constant reminder to myself was GO BIGGER. In some ways “The Şiret Mask” last year, I suppose, but that was more caper-style ridiculousness. When it comes to sheer world-wrecking destruction, I think I have to go all the way back to In Ashes Lie, with its Great Fire and the battle between Prigurd and the Dragon in St. Paul’s Cathedral. But when the theme of your antho is kaiju, well, sheer world-wrecking destruction is very nearly an entry requirement.

(“Very nearly” because you could probably write a really interesting story about kaiju not trashing cities — something much quieter and more personal — and in fact I hope somebody in the lineup for this anthology does so. But that story is not my story.)

As for my story: it’s riffing off the microsetting I wrote for Tiny Frontiers: Mecha and Monsters, which was called “The Grand Prize,” and is basically what happens when somebody hands me the prompt “kaiju and mecha” and my brain immediately pairs that with high school science fairs. The short story takes place at the Twentieth Annual Metzger-Patel Genius Prize tournament, and that’s all I’ll say right now — except to remind you that if you want to read a story about teenaged robotics and bioengineering competitions gone massively overboard, you should back the Kickstarter today!

Three things for the Halloween season

Pseudopod (Escape Artists’ horror-themed short fiction podcast) is running a Kickstarter to raise the funds to pay their narrators. I am not wholly a disinterested party in this, as I’ve narrated for them several times (without pay); but I will say that I wholeheartedly support the notion that the people who read you the stories in a podcast deserve to be paid for their work. They already compensate their authors well, so this is the next step, and I applaud them for taking it.

Also, don’t forget that you only have until the end of this month to purchase prints from my Autumn and Halloween galleries:

Paired photos of a single autumn leaf and an angel on a cross

You can get them in practically any medium (paper, acrylic, metal, canvas, glass, wood) and any size, or a digital license for use as book covers etc.

Finally, I’m over at Unbound Worlds talking about the most influential book I’ve ever read. You have to know the book in question or the things it’s based on to understand why it’s Halloween-themed, but trust me, it is.

May I call to your attention . . . .

First of all, my friend Mike Underwood’s Genrenauts Kickstarter campaign is already nearly funded, because I’ve been crazy busy in the last week and a half (house-buying drama; turned out okay, thank god), but you’ve still got eighteen days left to back it. This is the “Season One” collection of Genrenauts, comprising six novellas (two already published, four to come), plus a bunch of extras. If you’re not familiar with the series, it involves a group of highly-trained agents parachuting into alternate realities governed by the laws of different genres, seeking to right imbalances that threaten the stability of our own world. Basically, catnip for anybody who likes thinking about and playing around with the tropes of narrative — which of course is why Mike started writing them, and why you all should read them!

Second, I’ve put up two items for auction via Con or Bust, a nonprofit that helps fans of color attend conventions they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. The first is a signed hardcover of In the Labyrinth of Drakes, and the second is a 9-CD edition of the audiobook for A Natural History of Dragons, narrated by the amazing Kate Reading. It’s for a good cause, so please, bid high!

Explore a Tiny Frontier!

This one is for all the RPG fans out there. Gallant Knight Games are Kickstarting Tiny Frontiers — an authorized SFnal port of the Tiny Dungeons system.

Why do I bring this up? Because I’ll be contributing a micro-setting to Tiny Frontiers — a place and a situation, with a few hooks for plots you could run in it. I’m still in the process of writing that up, but as a teaser, I’ll give you two words: alien. god.

The Kickstarter has five days to go, with several stretch goals of various types: funding goals, social media goals, and so forth. My setting will be included in the core book, regardless of whether those goals are reached, but there are plenty of other goodies to be had! So if this kind of thing sounds fun, do head on over and take a look. It may be tiny, but it’s a giant pile of fun. 🙂

CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 5 Kickstarter is nearly there . . . .

We’re down to the last couple of days, and CP5 is within striking distance of its goal. This is the anthology series that previously brought you “A Mask of Flesh,” “Once a Goddess,” “The Gospel of Nachash,” and “What Still Abides” — along with, of course, a host of stories from other writers, ranging from newcomers to Tanith Lee.

There’s an AMA underway on Reddit, where you can (as the name indicates) ask editor Mike Allen anything. Check that out, check out the Kickstarter, and let’s get this over the line!

Clockwork Phoenix 5!

Clockwork Phoenix, the anthology series edited by Mike Allen, is back for a fifth round. Kickstarter page is here.

I have a particularly fond relationship with this series, because I’m one of two authors (Tanith Lee being the other) who has had a story in every volume so far. Previous installments have included “A Mask of Flesh,” “Once a Goddess,” “The Gospel of Nachash,” and “What Still Abides.” Mike is the guy who will buy a fake book of the Bible from me, complete with King James-era prose; he bought a piece written entirely in Anglish. Clockwork Phoenix is where I can cut loose stylistically, or explore weird philosophical concepts in story form. I know what I want to write for this volume — in fact, I’ve started writing it already — but of course the anthology needs to happen before I can sell anything to it.

So go forth and Kickstart! The CP books have been great so far, with a wide range of really weird and beautiful stories, and I’d love to see the series continue.

Sonya Taaffe now has a Patreon

Sonya Taaffe (sovay on LiveJournal) has just set up a Patreon to back her film reviews.

If you don’t understand why I’m signal-boosting this, you probably haven’t been reading her reviews. She writes beautifully about film, primarily with an eye toward the performances of the actors: she has a knack I envy, of describing characterization and behavior in a concise, vivid fashion, and showing how characterization is revealed in behavior. She also has wide-ranging tastes; while a good deal of her blogging is about classic or forgotten films from decades ago, she isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a snob. Here is her review of Thor, and here is The Avengers. Both, as you might expect, pay particular attention to Loki:

Marvel can do whatever it likes with gods I don’t have a personal stake in, but I expected to be bleeding from the ears from the reconfigured family relationships alone. Instead I wanted much, much more of him. I love how he has a habit of appearing in mirrors, how you can almost never tell what is calculation and what he really feels; how, black-haired, blue-eyed, feverishly pale, he’s a callback to the icy dark of Jötunheim, but the dusk-blue that burns up through his skin at its touch, hel-blár, is the one mask he never knew he was wearing. He has a thin-skinned, transparent look about him, a raw edge under glass. It makes him an effective deceiver: he looks as though you should be able to read him with one level stare, which will only show you what you want to see. And it makes him vulnerable: the incredible, child’s desolation in his face as he lets go of everything that has been his life and falls into Ginnungagap like a collapsing star. Like a good trickster, he is never a single, quantifiable thing. All of his scenes are exactly as they should be.

Or here she is about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the ten minutes of really great movie buried in the middle of an extremely mediocre one.

I love her film-blogging enough that I sent her a complimentary DVD of Seven Souls in Skull Castle, just because I want to know what she might have to say about it. (And by the way, if you want to see that movie for yourself, you can now buy your very own copy.)

So if you want to see more of that, consider supporting her Patreon. More lovely film-blogging for everybody!