Talk Wordy to Me

The magazine has reached its funding goal!

I’ve been completely absorbed with the Kickstarter for the new magazine I am trying to start over the past month. We have until Friday at midnight to hit our goal of $6,500, and are 68% there. I wanted to sum up what we are trying to do with Fireside magazine for those who are new to it. (Or for those who already have pledged but want a summary to share with friends who might be interested.)

What is Fireside?

• It is a multi-genre fiction and comics magazine.
• This Kickstarter is raising funds for the first issue, which will include four short stories  (by Tobias Buckell, Ken Liu, Chuck Wendig, and Christie Yant) ,  a comic (by D.J. Kirkbride and Adam P. Knave), and cover art by Amy Houser.
• It is available in electronic and print formats. The print version will only be available as a Kickstarter reward.
• It is also designed to pay creative people at a rate that allows them to make a living being creative. The current rate considered to be professional for genre short stories is 5 cents a word, or $200 for a 4,000-word story, which is the upper word limit for this magazine. Given the amount of time that can go into a short story, $200 isn’t very much. Fireside writers will be paid 12.5 cents a word, or $500 for a 4,000-word story.

What is this Kickstarter you speak of?

• It is a fundraising platform for creative projects.
• Project creators set a fundraising goal and a time period, then launch the Kickstarter. Backers (that’s you) pledge an amount and choose a reward that falls under that pledge amount.
• The creator only gets the money (and the backers only get charged) if the project reaches its goal by the deadline (in this case at the end of the night Friday). Otherwise no money changes hands.
• Backers can pledge as much as they want and choose any reward as long as the pledge meets that reward’s requirement. (For instance, you can pledge $10 even if all you want is the $2 reward.)

$6,500 seems like a lot of money. What is that going toward?

• 57 percent is budgeted to pay the writers, artists, and other freelancers collaborating on the magazine.
• 28 percent will cover printing and shipping costs.
• 10 percent goes to Kickstarter and Amazon for processing the payments.
• And the remaining 5 percent is to cover miscellaneous costs or to maybe even turn a little profit.

So as of 10 a.m. today, the Kickstarter had raised $403, which is a little over 6% of the goal for the magazine I am trying to start. Thanks to everyone who contributed so far! I am stoked! We had a $100 pledge for one of the slots to have a character in the magazine named after the backer, which is great! There are still three more slots available for that.

But I am here to talk about the challenge. I’d like to hit $750 (11.5%) by tomorrow at noon, which will be the end of the first 48 hours of the Kickstarter. So if we hit that goal, since this is a project about stories, I’ll write up the story of my misadventure with a weapon in Philadelphia’s City Hall, and I’ll post it on the updates page on the Kickstarter. It’s a pretty good story. And it is true. Most of my good ones are. It’s a hazard of working in journalism. If this goes well, I have plenty of others I can use for future challenges!

If you want to pledge you can do so here.

Thanks again to our first backers, and to everyone for reading!

I have been hinting on Twitter for the past month that I was working on a sekrit project (Urban Dictionary defines sekrit as “extremely confidential”) and today I can finally reveal what it is.

I am starting a fiction magazine called Fireside. It will cross genres, with an emphasis on storytelling, and I need help to get the first issue off the ground. I’m doing a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter, which collects pledges and offers rewards in return. I won’t go into detail here, as that is all available on the Kickstarter page and on the magazine’s website, firesidemag.com. I’ll be tweeting about it @FiresideMag.

Thanks, and sorry for all the neglect here. I have been chin-deep in putting this together since before Halloween.

One of my Twitter pals, Erin Zulkoski (@e_zulko) had a series of tweets last night that touched on something that happened to me recently that has been bothering me:

I saw a older man eating by himself in the hospital cafeteria today and I couldn't help but stare at him. Why was he there? And alone?—
Erin Zulkoski (@e_zulko) November 16, 2011

My heart broke for him. I wanted to go over and sit with him, or just offer him a kind smile.—
Erin Zulkoski (@e_zulko) November 16, 2011

But I didn't do either. I just watched him a few more seconds. That's our problem: we watch and do nothing.—
Erin Zulkoski (@e_zulko) November 16, 2011

She’s right about that. I was stopped in a McDonald’s on my way home from work on Saturday, to pick up a McFlurry for Lauren. It was late, about 11:30, and there weren’t many people in the restaurant, working or eating. I was loitering at the counter, waiting for the burger I had ordered for myself, and there were two high school age kids also waiting. When the woman minding the counter went over to check those green on black 1980s monitors they have to keep track of the orders, one of the kid’s hands darted over the counter and came back with a drink cup, not quite magician quick, but close. Then he strolled over to the drink machine and filled up a soda, and began sipping it furtively behind the glass divider.

I stood there, watching this. I wanted to go Dirty Harry on the guy. I wanted to kick him in the nuts. I wanted to smack the drink out of his hand.

I wanted to at least say something.

I didn’t. I rationalized. Well, they’re both bigger than me. And they’re obviously assholes. I don’t want to get beaten up over a $1 Coke. Yeah.

It all happened so fast, his friend didn’t even notice right away. When he saw his friend sipping the stolen Coke, he said something I couldn’t hear, but I knew he was asking where the drink came from his friend said he’d grabbed it from behind the counter. So the friend goes over, and he obviously hasn’t done this before (he’s definitely the sidekick in this clown show) and looks around clumsily, then leeeaaaans over the counter looking for the drink cups. He was making his friend look like fucking Houdini.

Great, I think. This moron is going to get caught, and I won’t have to do anything.

Of course he doesn’t. He finally tracks down the cups and fumbles one out just before the cashier turns back around, smiling, with their food bags.

I agonized some more, and rationalized some more, and then my burger came, and I left.

Maybe speaking up wasn’t worth the potential trouble. But I couldn’t help thinking, on what seemed like a long drive the rest of the way home, that if I couldn’t stand up to petty shit like that, because it is easier, more comfortable, less risky, then what the fuck would I do when the stakes, and the risks, were higher?

It didn’t matter that it was something small. I was a coward.

I never want to feel that way again.

One of my very best friends, Nina Hoffman, wrote a really moving piece for her newspaper, Philadelphia Weekly, about her husband’s survival of and struggles with being sexually abused as a child, and about how terrible it is that the main story in the Penn State idiocy hasn’t been about sexual abuse. “I’m heartbroken,” she says.

Lauren and I made ice cream sundaes at home a few weeks ago, and we wondered about the origins of the word. It turns out it’s one of those ones that does not have a definitive etymology. From the OED:

The name is generally explained as an alteration of Sunday , either because the dish originally included leftover ice-cream sold cheaply on Monday, or because it was at first sold only on Sunday, having, according to some accounts, been devised to circumvent Sunday legislation. The alteration of the spelling is sometimes said to be out of deference to religious people’s feelings about the word Sunday. For several accounts see H. L. Mencken, The American Language Suppl. I. (1945), pp. 376–7.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a copy online of Mencken’s explanations. The theory about Sunday legislation seems to come from a place that banned ice cream sodas, prompting someone to offer the treat without the banned soda.

Early yesterday morning, Boston police arrested 141 people taking part in the Occupy Boston movement after they refused to leave a park downtown. As there has been in other cities where arrests have occurred, the protesters were outraged that they would be arrested while engaging in civil disobedience.

On the one hand I can see how people who are new to mass protests and civil disobedience would be surprised the first time arrests occur. But on the other hand, it shows a lack of understanding of the history of such movements.

This has resulted in some comments that seem really out of touch with the reality of confronting both the government and corporations. This one, from today’s Globe, really highlighted that:

“I think it’s disgusting that Menino said civil disobedience won’t be tolerated,’’ said Andrew Farkas, 29, of Cambridge, who held up a sign that read “Civil disobedience made this country.’’ People here are just going to resort to more drastic actions. And it’s possible that things could turn violent.’’

(Menino is Tom Menino, Boston’s mayor.)

To threaten violence over arrests during a civil disobedience action is really stupid. Civil disobedience means breaking the law. When you engage in civil disobedience, you expect to be arrested. That’s actually the point.

Martin Luther King Jr. spent countless days in prison for engaging in civil disobedience, and he never once threatened violence. The arrests draw attention to your cause, and force a confrontation with those in power. King talks about this in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which he wrote after being arrested for civil disobedience:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

If you believe in your cause, and you’re going to engage in civil disobedience, then you have to be prepared to be arrested for it. It’s a tool. And it works. Today’s Globe had two frontpage stories about Occupy Boston and the arrests. That’s the most coverage it has received since it began.

If you’re not prepared to be arrested, then you shouldn’t engage in civil disobedience. Those in power are not going to allow you to break the law just because you’re right. It took years and years for King and the rest of the civil rights movement to force change, and even now, going on 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, that work is not finished. If the Occupy Wall Street movement really hopes to accomplish anything, it has to know that these arrests are not the last and are not the biggest, but only a beginning.