{"id":22613,"date":"2014-03-05T07:00:19","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T12:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=22613"},"modified":"2014-03-05T07:00:19","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T12:00:19","slug":"and-now-a-message-from-a-cellar-dwelling-editor-i-keep-as-my-pet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2014\/03\/05\/and-now-a-message-from-a-cellar-dwelling-editor-i-keep-as-my-pet\/","title":{"rendered":"And Now, A Message From A Cellar-Dwelling Editor I Keep As My Pet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Oh. Oh thank god. He finally screwed up.<\/p>\n

Right, sorry. You don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on. My name is Brian White. I\u2019ve been locked in Chuck\u2019s cellar for the past two years. Usually he only lets me use an old eMachines laptop, but he broke it over Stephen Blackmoore\u2019s head in an author cage match last night. And now Chuck wants his collection of \u201cartsy\u201d nude selfies organized so he chained me up in front of his iMac and then went out to buy more coffee for me to grind.<\/p>\n

(What? Did you think he actually spends all that time making coffee with his Chemex? No. That\u2019s all me. The only thing Chuck pours is a torrent of abuse, kicks, and leftover hobo parts down the cellar stairs.)<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t have time to waste on my litany of pain. Chuck didn\u2019t log out of Terribleminds before he left. This is my only chance. I need your help.<\/p>\n

Not escaping. I have given up hope of that. But my one bright spot, the thing that keeps me going when Chuck makes me dance for the amusement of the secret cabal of Amazon executives, is my magazine,\u00a0Fireside<\/a><\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been cranking Fireside out for two years now. We\u2019re a fiction magazine, and we have two goals: publishing great storytelling regardless of genre, and fair pay for writers. We became a monthly subscription magazine in our second year, and now we are trying to get Year 3 of Fireside funded on Kickstarter<\/strong><\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Year 2 has been great. We’ve been running a serial that Chuck, uh … “suggested” I publish. We\u2019ve had tons of wonderful flash fiction and short stories. And amazing art by Hugo-winner Galen Dara. And we want to keep it going.<\/p>\n

If we fund Year 3, we\u2019re going to try out making the website free. We\u2019re going to do more short stories and flash fiction, and we\u2019ll have a serial by Lilith Saintcrow. I\u2019ve gotten my hands on a Miriam Black short story that Chuck left on his desktop that we\u2019ll publish, along with stories by Blackmoore, Kima Jones, Daniel Jose Older, Andrea Phillips, and Sofia Samatar. And we\u2019ll also be accepting submissions of both short stories and flash ficition, on a quarterly basis starting in June.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re making the website free, but as I said, we pay our writers fairly (12.5 cents a word<\/strong>), so we need your help. Please check out the Kickstarter. (Linky linky<\/strong><\/span><\/a>.) You\u2019ll be making a lot of writers happy, and you\u2019ll be helping me survive the next time Chuck gets out the wiffle ball bat.<\/p>\n

Oh god. I have to go. B-dub\u2019s toy cocktail shaker is glowing blue. Chuck is almost back.<\/p>\n

Thank you.<\/p>\n

EDIT:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chuck here.<\/p>\n

You can all relax — Brian’s in the cellar and I’ve turned off all Internet access for the time being. I’ve switched out his “in-bucket” and his “out-bucket” as punishment.<\/p>\n

I’ve been keeping him in the cellar for the three years that Fireside has been running, actually. It’s not a sex thing, really — mostly he got accidentally locked down there when I asked him to head downstairs and get some beer from the cellar fridge, but then he tripped and knocked himself out and was threatening, “Oh, I’m going to sue you for leaving that dead hobo down here for me to trip over,” and I was like, “Oh,\u00a0no you’re not<\/em>,” and then I chained him to the water heater and made him listen to old Ace of Base albums — which is a\u00a0very good album<\/em>, I’ll have you know. But then it got kind of boring, so I was like, “Why don’t you start a magazine where you pay the authors well above the standard professional rate and also, why doesn’t each iteration of the magazine\u00a0feature me in some very important way<\/em>,” and then I hit him a bunch with the bat and then had him dust-wrestle the UPS guy I had down there at the time (don’t worry, that guy’s been in Bri-Bri’s food bucket for a good while now). Brian agreed to start Fireside.<\/p>\n

And here we are, Year Three.<\/p>\n

Each time it’s been successful on Kickstarter, but always at the last minute — and this year, I’d love to see it go a little further, a little faster. Just so we can give Brian\u00a0something nice<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Anyway. Go. Check it out<\/strong><\/span><\/a>. I will be writing a new Miriam Black short story for it, so, there’s that. (And Fireside Year Two<\/strong><\/span><\/a> has me writing a serialized sci-fi story about a box that takes you ten minutes back in time — “The Forever Endeavor.” Get it? Get it, huh? No?)<\/p>\n

So, check out the Kickstarter<\/strong><\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unless you’d like to join Brian in the cellar?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oh. Oh thank god. He finally screwed up. Right, sorry. You don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on. My name is Brian White. I\u2019ve been locked in Chuck\u2019s cellar for the past two years. Usually he only lets me use an old eMachines laptop, but he broke it over Stephen Blackmoore\u2019s head in an author cage match […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22613","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-5SJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22613"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22618,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22613\/revisions\/22618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}