Intermission: Weird Fiction Quarterly
Becoming a book publisher was not on my 2023 Bingo card.
Hey there - I’m still around, if a bit quiet this year. Due to a VERY busy work year, I’ve been AWOL from here as I’ve had my hands full all year after a bout of COVID last December, then a chance encounter with flu and pneumonia wrecked my schedule back in May. I’ll complain about all of that in a proper Note in the future. (Or not, because who cares?)
I’m breaking my silence today to let you all know that in addition to my day job, I also picked up a side project earlier this year by taking over the publication duties of Weird Fiction Quarterly from my pal Russell Smeaton with some other folks. (Nora, Sarah, Scott, and Shayne - you all are rock stars!) Over the past year, I’ve had a crash course in typesetting, literary contracts, Amazon’s KDP platform, and a bunch of other stuff.
The results have been worthwhile. We now have a quarterly publication chugging along where we have a stable of 40 to 50 writers contributing 500-word flash fiction pieces to us set in the weird fiction genre. I set up a proper LLC and am working to turn this into a sustainable business in its own right, returning weird fiction publishing BACK to Chicago.
For the holiday season, we’re making a big push for our upcoming hardcover omnibus that will become available within the next two weeks that collects all of the stories from the past year into a nice deluxe edition we’re calling Weird Fiction Quarterly, Volume 1. This will include over 150 pieces of flash fiction based around our five themes this year: winter, spring, summer, fall, and Halloween. (The last edition was double-sized with two themes for our writers to tackle.)
As part of ginning up interest in the hardcover, we’re currently running an event called The 13 Days of Weird Flash and have already dropped two stories - one by Melanie Crew from our most recent outing, and today’s from Robert J. Sodaro from the first book that dropped roughly a year ago. I went ahead and set up a full Ghost site for the project, so if you’re interested in weird fiction, short stories, or independent publishing, head on over and sign up for our (normally) low-volume mailing list. (If you’re reading this, it’s pretty much the same deal as how this site works.)
Thanks again for reading, and I’ll be back here soon with my annual review of 2023’s British holiday ads, CMDRs!
