Magazine stuff
I've been sadly remiss in talking about what's been up at Strange Horizons lately.
A couple weeks ago, we had M. C. A. Hogarth's "Money for Sorrow, Made Joy." It reminds me in several ways of Eleanor Arnason's hwarhath stories, though very different in most ways. There are several things I like about it, particularly what it does with gender (I'm delighted that we've started receiving interesting stories that deal with gender issues lately). But one of the things that I like most about it is that it feels like a story that comes from the culture the story's set in. I first encountered that idea, I think, with M. J. Engh's Wheel of the Winds; I didn't like the book much at all, but someone on Usenet (I think) said what they liked about it was that it seemed like the kind of book that would be written in the culture it described. I've seen it done with varying degrees of success since then; for me, that approach is quite successful in "Money for Sorrow." The story doesn't quite conform to standard human Western-European narrative structure, and in this case that's one of the things I like about it.
Last week, there was H. Courreges LeBlanc's "Fiddler," also featuring a fabulous illustration by Shelton Bryant. The reviews of this story have been pretty consistent: almost everyone's been saying, more or less, "I'm not sure I get it, but I adore the language." And yes, the writing here is gorgeous. A review of one of our recent stories at Tangent called us SH fiction editors "notorious style monkeys"; we cannot but plead guilty to such a charge. (Susan wants to start a band called the Notorious Style Monkeys. I've been occasionally signing mail as "Notorious Style Monkey J.")
And this week is part 1 of another 2-parter. We wouldn't normally run two 2-part stories only a few weeks apart, but this was the obviously right time to run this particular story: "Carol for Mixed Voices," by Madeleine Rose Reardon Dimond, who also wrote last year's SH holiday story, "War of the Lights." This new one is as funny as last year's, but also very serious in some ways. I don't normally draw comparisons between our authors and big-name authors, but here I am doing it twice in one entry: this one manages to capture some of the flavor and power of Connie Willis's stories while avoiding being in any way derivative. Also, it manages to be very timely without feeling gimmicky. Go read it. Or wait a week and read both parts at once, if you prefer.
The schedule for the next few months is finally falling into place; soon, I'll be contacting authors whose stories we've accepted and letting them know what the new schedule is. But tonight, I gotta go read some more submissions (the last of the batch that arrived at the end of November).
Oh, but I should say one more thing: the magazine's having a fundraising drive. (Everyone does know that SH is a nonprofit with an all-volunteer staff, yes?) We're more interested in getting broad support than deep support at this point; we'd be at least as happy with a bunch of small donations as with a few large ones. I have a deep reluctance to ask people for money, and I know a lot of my friends honestly can't afford to make a $10 donation or even a $5 donation. If you're in that situation, I hope you'll read the magazine anyway; that's what we're there for. But if you can afford a donation of whatever size, by all means send it on in. (Go to the site's main page and click the big thermometer thingy in the left-hand frameset, or go directly to the donors page.) You can send money by way of PayPal if you're signed up with them (makes things awfully convenient); if you're not, we also take checks. If you're going to be doing gift-shopping at Amazon, you can also help the magazine by following links from our bookstore; we get a percentage of the purchase price on anything you buy after doing that. Not a large percentage, but like I said, we like small donations.
(I'm torn about how to phrase such requests. On the one hand, I want to make clear that the magazine is not in danger of going under; the mere fact that we're an online magazine makes people assume we're as doomed as doomed can be, and we're just not. We've been going strong for 15 months now, publishing new material every week, and we expect to continue for some time to come. On the other hand, I don't want readers to get complacent; our funding currently comes from a couple of large donors, which in the long run isn't such a great idea. We'd love to build a broad base of community support. We're not going to require you to pay, as some online magazines have started doing lately, but if even half of everyone who reads the magazine gave us $10, we'd be very happy.)