Anyone interested in reviewing books for Kaleidotrope? Obviously we'd have to discuss the specifics, and I'd likely have some specific books in mind, but any interest?

This is very cool. Small Beer Press has announced that what was easily one of my favorite short story collections of recent years, Maureen F. McHugh's Mothers & Other Monsters, is now available for free online under a Creative Commons license. So if you've never read any of McHugh's stories -- Ursula K. Le Guin rightly calls her "one of our best and bravest imaginative writers" -- now is your chance. As SBP notes, "The paper edition is much nicer, although not free."

They have also made available Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link's wonderful first collection and John Kessel's The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, which I regret I've not yet read.

I'm starting to get some feedback on the most recent issue of Kaleidotrope, and I think contributor Bill Ward's comments might be my favorite so far:

I’ve just read through my contributor’s copy of the fourth issue of Kaleidotrope and the magazine continues to impress. There’s a healthy dose of surreal scifi and cross-genre slipstream shorts between the covers, and a variety of poetry and prose poems. But it’s the quirky humor of Fred Coppersmith that really comes through in his magazine and makes it different than a lot of other small press cross-genre ‘zines, which take themselves far too seriously. Kaleidotrope, with its eclectic stories and articles (the standout here is a history of the ‘fembot’ in popular culture) and weird little vignettes like faux horoscopes and ironic photography, is a magazine that isn’t scared to have some fun.

Bill's fun short story, "The Three Wishes of Miles Vander," appears in the issue, on sale now.

The fourth issue of Kaleidotrope is finally at the printer, and with luck copies will start flowing out within the week. So that seems like as good a time as any to finally reveal the full table of contents.

Fiction
"Molting" by Andrew Howard
"Word Count: Negative 1" by Ashley Arnold
"The Three Wishes of Miles Vander" by Bill Ward
"Premature" by Mark Rich
"Paradise" by Adam Lowe
"White Sheets" by Mike Driver
"Rome (a Metrophilia)" by Brendan Connell
"Half-Sneeze Johnny" by Kurt Kirchmeier
"My Cthulhu Story" (a comic) by G.W. Thomas
"Furrier" by Flavian Mark Lupinetti
"She’s a Hearth" by Paul Abbamondi
"The Life and Times of a Hungry World, Told Briefly" by Alex Dally MacFarlane
"The Transparency" by Michael Obilade

Poetry
"Househunting on Mars" by Bonita Kale
"Praise for What I Don’t Know" by Thomas Zimmerman
"Cracked Shells" by Beth Langford
"Spring in the Lab" by Alyce Wilson
"Farm School" by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff
"A Manual For Good Housekeeping in the Age of Global Warming" by Miranda Gaw
"Ivanikha" by Dana Koster
Two Poems by Franz K. Baskett
"Worldviews on a Desert Trail" by Jason Huskey
"Towards the Afterlife" by Aurelio Rico Lopez III

Plus!

"Who Goes There," Betty Ragan's interview with Marc Schuster and Tom Powers
"The Rise of the Fembots: A Brief Introduction to Female Android Sexuality in Film" by Eric Borer

Artwork from Remi Treuer, Rod Walker, and Lisa Willis -- and assorted other fun! I hope you'll consider picking up a copy. For just $4 ($6.50 international), it's a steal -- and all that money goes directly back to my contributors, keeping them happy and fed!

And, amazingly enough, two years of this hasn't quite deterred me yet! I'm accepting submissions for issue #5.

Congratulations to Kaleidotrope contributor Marge Simon (#1, assorted artwork) on her Stoker Award win!

Congratulations to Kaleidotrope contributor Tracie McBride ("Contact," April 2007) for her win as Best New Talent in this year's Sir Julius Vogel Awards. The awards are given out each year at the New Zealand National Science Fiction Convention. Congratulations again to Tracie!

The Science Fiction Poetry Association recently announced the nominees for the 2008 Rhysling Award. While sadly no poems directly from Kaleidotrope were nominated, I'm very happy to see a number of past contributors to the zine listed -- specifically Bruce Boston, Lyn C.A. Gardner, Marge Simon, Rachel Swirsky, Kristine Ong Muslim, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff. I'm looking forward to attending this year's Readercon, where the winners will be announced.

More congratulations are in order. Stephen Graham Jones, whose story "Pistil, Stamen, Bloom" appears in the third issue of Kaleidotrope, has sold a new short story collection, The Ones That Almost Got Away to Prime Books!

David McGillveray, whose story "The Sirens of Tinwa" appeared in the first issue of Kaleidotrope, writes to say:

[M]y first collection, "Celeraine", has just been published by Sam's Dot Publishing in trade paperback. It consists of three brand new long short stories and features dead civilisations, planetary minds, jailbreaks, out-of-control vegetation, generation ships and mind altering alien hallucinogens!

Check it out!

Meanwhile, Daniel Ausema has added his two "Living Stump" stories ("First Peeling" and "Stump Courtship," from the second and third issues, respectively) to Anthology Builder, where you can create your own personalized story collections and help support some great writers!

Any Kaleidotrope readers or contributors attending this year's Readercon?

There's a mixed but overall positive featured review of Kaleidotrope's third issue at SF Site. Rich Horton notes that there is "plenty of nice stuff -- I think the groundwork has been laid for more significant future work."

Can someone explain this? The nomination deadline for the annual Pushcart Prize is December 1. However, if Amazon.com is to be believed, the book with this year's selections will be available on December 10. That seems like an awfully unlikely turn-around time to me, suggesting that the final table of contents was set long before the nomination deadline. In fact, Amazon is already listing the book as in stock. I don't see how a nomination that reached Pushcart on December 1 has any shot at making the final cut, quite frankly.

Which is something I wish I'd known when I made my own six nominations last month.

Any Kaleidotrope contributors/readers attending the World Fantasy Convention next year?

Attending any other conventions in 2008 or '09?

So the current issue of Lady Churchill's is hot of the press, and it looks really neat. My copy arrived just today -- well, actually, it may have arrived earlier this week, but I almost never get down to the old PO box except on the weekends -- and I'm eager to dive into it. What's more, I'm pleased to see that Aunt Gwenda answered my question (which was actually just a riff on "Jon"'s question before it) in her advice column. If you want to see what I asked, and what other pearls of wisdom she has to share, you'll have to pick up a copy yourself.

James Van Pelt has some really interesting thoughts on what it means to be a professional writer:

The one part of a writer's career that she can't control is the very part that opens the door into the "professional" ranks, which is selling the work. The writer writes the best she can, finds the most appropriate markets, then sends the work out. What happens after that is beyond her control. But she can control everything else. Being professional is about a lot more than making money.

"I'm not the kind of man who tends to socialize
I seem to lean on old familiar ways..." - Paul Simon

I've been toying with the idea of attending next year's World Fantasy Convention in Calgary (just as I toyed with the idea of attending last year's in Austin and this year's in Saratoga). A lot of what I've read online makes it sound like great fun. Of course, it also makes it sound a lot more like a reunion, something better suited to past attendees and World Fantasy Award nominees. It's not as if there's a sign on the door that reads, "Newbies not welcome," but still, I've been thinking it might be better to start with something different, and smaller -- like maybe Readercon in July, for instance.

(I'm also slowly trying to put together a trip to Los Angeles with friends for next fall, so that could eat into my already limited vacation time and disposable income.)

And then I read something like this, and I think: he's never attended before, and he had fun... So I don't know.

How many months does it take to get a passport?

Well now...



Clearly, the smartest people out there read Kaleidotrope!

Quiz via Electric Velocipede

Between now and November 30, Apex Digest is holding a subscription drive, with the goal of increasing subscribers and, therefore, increasing the amount they can pay contributors. More power to them. Apex publishes some really interesting dark science fiction and horror a few times a year, and it's great to see them trying to spread more of the love around to the authors.

Kaleidotrope offers only a token payment at the moment, so I can definitely understand the desire to break into being a professional, or even semi-professional, market. If I could afford to pay my contributors more, believe me, I would. (It's questionable whether I can actually afford that token payment in the long run.)

So check it out. Anyone who buys or renews a subcription between now and the end of the month will be entered into a drawing to win Apex for life and a new mug.

I used to be part of a collaborative writing blog. I'm thinking about possibly reviving it. This would be completely independent of Kaleidotrope, but I'd be curious if anyone reading this would be interested.

I was in Maryland this past weekend, visiting my sister, while meanwhile, back in New York, the World Fantasy Awards were being held. I'm happy to learn that M. Rickert's Map of Dreams and Jeffrey Ford's "Botch Town" both won, for best collection and novella respectively. I finished reading both this weekend, as it happens. Ford's novella is reminiscent in some ways of the best of Bradbury -- I'm thinking Dandelion Wine or Something Wicked This Way Comes here -- while Rickert's stories definitely have the feel of dreams to them. Reading the novella from which her collection takes its name, I was a little reminded of Kevin Brockmeier's excellent novel, The Truth About Celia, and I think it would make an excellent companion piece to that.

Congratulations to all the winners and nominees!