M-Brane #20 ToC

I am ridiculously late in the month on announcing these details, but below is the table of the contents for the September issue of M-Brane SF, our twentieth.  But first, check out that awesome cover art. The great Mari Kurisato, who provided the double cover for Things We Are Not, created it (including the sweet rocket ship logo).    Though it will certainly embarrass her if I say this, I will do so anyway: Mari rulz!!

Here are the stories, about to be released from our brane:


Will Kaufman "Cooper and the Satellite"
Garrett Ashley "FAL 2020"
Natasha Simonova "The Scrying-Glass of Doctor Dee"
Michael Andre-Driussi "Hardboiled Proust"
Jennifer Brozek "Family Duty"
Colin P. Davies "The Booby-Trapped Boy"

As is fairly typical of an issue, this one features a mix of pro writers  and relative newcomers each of whom showed me something that made me say, "Oh yeah, that's just what I was looking for right now." As a package, the content this time is fairly wistful, sometimes frightful, sometimes funny, and altogether fascinating. It's a bit different in mood than the last issue, maybe not as out-and-out weird, but somehow very right for September. Of the authors, Kaufman, Ashley and Simonova are entirely new to me, and I am delighted to make their acquaintance. Each of them has delivered a remarkable and rather edgy story in their own unique ways.  I have published Andre-Driussi a couple of times previously and each time he offers a story very different than the one before it. Davies will be a familiar name to a lot of readers because he has been widely published for many years, though this will be his first appearance in M-Brane, with a very thoughtful tale. Brozek is well known in the small press world as a writer and an editor, and I am pleased to include her very dark story this month. Coincidentally, I am about to have a hand in publishing her twice: while this is her first appearance in M-Brane SF, she is also appearing any day now in Little Death of Crossed Genres #1 which I edited with Jaym Gates, forthcoming from Crossed Genres.

The new issue may be a day or two late. This has never happened before, but August afforded me many opportunities for difficulty as far as keeping up with my expanded List of Stuff to Do. It was a great month in many ways, but maybe a bit too great as far as the task list. But, you know, onward and upward.

"Sometimes life really does get in the way."

I've decided to aggregate here links to some of the blog posts that friends and fans of the late Jamie Eyberg have put up this week. I'm sure these aren't all of them (and people may leave more in the comments if they wish), just some that I have read since last night. My own words fail me in this situation. I can't quite figure out how to express what this loss means to me nor exactly why I feel it so strongly. One thing I am certain of, however, is that when people assert that life online isn't "real" life, that when they say that contacts with people by way of the internet and its social media is not "real" human interaction, those people could not be more wrong. It's different than face-to-face contact, but it's still real. Because I exchanged remarks with Jamie by way of Twitter quite frequently, I know that he liked to enjoy a beer, as do I. Sometimes, I knew that we were doing this "together" even though we were hundreds of miles apart and had never met in person. That I published him in M-Brane and got to know him casually by way of Twitter is different than if we had been "real" world friends, but it was certainly real to me. And the deep pain of loss that I feel now is certainly real. I'm sure the following people would agree:

Aaron Polson
Cate Gardner
Jeremy Kelly
T.J. McIntyre
Brian Keene
Andrea Allison
Gabriel Beyers
Barry Napier
Jeremy D. Brooks
Rebecca Nazar
Natalie L. Sin
Danielle Ferries
Kody Boye

The general profile of the names on that list give an indication of what a talented and creative person Jamie. He was always there for his fellow writers, popping in on their blogs or hailing them on Twitter with encouraging words. His own blog was regular stop on the web for so many of us. I've read his last post there (from which I took the title of this post) about twenty times, savoring its normalcy and wishing there could be another.

Kody's post contains information about a fundraiser that Library of the Living Dead Press is doing to raise some money for the memorial fund for Jamie's young children. The family requests that memorials be made to the Kennedy and Brendan Eyberg account at Iowa Savings Bank in Coon Rapids, IA.

Jamie Eyberg

I just heard the terrible news that writer Jamie Eyberg and his wife Ann have died in an accident where they were overcome by some kind of gas leak in a well at their home.

I never met Jamie in person, but I felt like I knew him well from our many conversations on Twitter. He was a very fine writer, and he will be missed by many, many people.

I had the privilege of publishing him once, his story "Winter Solstice" last year in M-Brane SF #8.  As a small kind of memorial to Jamie, I am making that issue available for free download here, and it will remain so permanently.

I am not yet aware of any kind of fund or charity being set up for their children, but if hear of something, I will pass that information along also.

A memorial guestbook for Jamie is located at this link.

2020 VISIONS contents announced

Yesterday Rick Novy, editor of our forthcoming anthology of near-future science fiction 2020 Visions, announced the table of contents. I repeat the list here:

Mary Robinette Kowal – “Birthright”

Sheila Finch – “The Persistence of Butterflies”

Randy Henderson – “A Shelter for Living Things”

Jason S. Ridler – “Showing Light”

Ernest Hogan – “Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs”

David Lee Summers – “The Revelation of Thought”

Jeff Spock – “Teh Afterl1fe”

Emily Devenport – “If the Sun’s at Five O’Clock, It Must be Yellow Daisies”

Cat Rambo – “Therapy Buddha”

Jack Mangan – “Dead Rookies”

David Boop – “Organ Cloning While You Wait”

Spencer Ellsworth – “The Black Plague of Our Generation”

Gareth L. Powell – “The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns”

Alethea Kontis – “Pocket Full of Posey”

Alex Wilson – “Nervewrecking”

David Gerrold – “Time Capsule 2120: Actual Comments from Lunar Tourists”

I am very excited about these stories and about seeing all of these particular writers in a single table of contents. It's a terrific mix of pros, semi-pros and newcomers who all found something astounding to say about the world a decade hence. I let Rick read and select stories without nosing into his process at all, so seeing the resulting ToC for the first time was as pleasant a treat for  me as I think it will be to many readers. A couple of these writers I have published before in M-Brane SF (Cat Rambo and Jason Ridler), while Alex Wilson appeared in my GLBT anthology Things We Are Not last year. A couple of the names were altogether new to me, while I was familiar with the work of many of the others.  Rick plans to profile the authors on his site over the coming weeks, and the first of those profiles (of Mary Robinette Kowal) is up now.

Comments on vanity presses

Writers may be interested in this post over on my Live Journal about vanity publishers. It contains a link to an article on the Writer Beware blog about a fraud operation which evidently stole a bunch of money from writers. It seems to me that access to print-on-demand by nearly everyone should end these kinds of problems.

The "One Lovely Blog" Award

I am honored that this site was selected for the lovely One Lovely Blog Award by writer TJ McInytre, author of the Southern Fried Shorts flash fiction site (himself another recent recipient).  It's a fun way to spread word about cool sites and boost each others' signals. TJ's post about the award and his 14 other selectees for it can be found here on his Live Journal.

Book projects in motion this week

It looks like it's going to be a busy next few months around here. In addition to the regular monthly zine, I have coming very soon the first issue of Little Death that I am co-editing with Jaym Gates for Crossed Genres. Later, we have the launch of Fantastique Unfettered, our new fantasy quarterly, edited by Brandon Bell. Also, I will release the first of the new quarterly M-Brane print omnibus editions in October. And then, we have four books all due out before the end of the year, all of them with uncertain publication dates (but which are now becoming more certain).

I just heard from Eric T. Reynolds of Hadley Rille Books, our great collaborator and publisher for The Aether Age, that he has in hand the print proof for the advance reader copy of the book (which he describes as "beyond amazing"), and that reviewers should have those ARCs soon. And this means that we are very close to being able to finally announce the publication date and hopefully put up some kind of cool pre-order deal on it.

A couple days ago, Rick Novy completed story selection for 2020 Visions, our forthcoming anthology of very-near-future fiction. I cannot wait to announce the ToC for this one. Rick has put together a really great group of writers for this book. I am confident of publication by November 1, or at least not much later than that.

The fabled "M-Brane Double," my long-held dream of publishing a book reminiscent of the old Ace series of short novels published back-to-back in tete beche style, moves closer to reality. One of the two halves is still undergoing some work, but I think we might be able to manage a late September release on this one. The two authors, Alex Jeffers and Brandon Bell, have crafted drop-dead beautiful stories for this book, and I cannot wait to show them off in the fancy package that I have planned.

I hear from Mike Griffiths that he has been busily workshopping, revising and editing his Skinjumper, a full-blown novel-length realization of the milieu that he sketched out in a series of short stories last year. Full of body-swapping, gender-bending danger, this story should be great fun, and we will publish it before year's end.

Even if all the books are not out by November 1, I plan to have the hardest part of the work on all of them done by then because I intend to do NaNoWriMo again this year. I guess I'll sleep in December.

M-BRANE #19 released

The new issue has just been released to subscribers in PDF format. This issue, and subsequent ones, will not have a print edition. The contents of this issue and the next two, along with some bonus material, will form M-Brane SF Quarterly #1 in October, the first of the new quarterly print version. Links to subscribe to the monthly PDF or find back issues in PDF and print may be found at the M-Brane Press page. That site's "under construction" period continues, but it's functional.

Also, on the M-Brane Press page, I had been offering issue #17 from June as a free sample of the magazine, but I have replaced it with the new issue #19. Because of an appearance in #17 by the first-rights-reselling author mentioned a few days ago here and in many other places, I don't feel good about free distribution of it any longer despite how good its content was. I may produce a redaction of it, excising the non-original piece, and then repost the link to that issue.