Summing up what we are trying to do with Fireside

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.

Words of Others | This World Ends Now

Lupe Fiasco is becoming a regular in Words of Others. I love his music, and he is amazing at mixing in commentary, politics, and activism.

He released a mix tape. “Friend of the People” on Thanksgiving, and I have been listening to it a lot. It was obviously put together in a short period of time and then released: the Penn State creep Jerry Sandusky is mentioned, and Occupy Wall Street is in there a lot.

The Words of Others comes from the last song on the tape, which is an anthem for Occupy Wall Street. The chorus is simple but I think it sums up all the disparate messages of the Occupy movement:

This world ends, this world ends
This world ends, this world ends
Now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now

It’s a great song, and I found this video with the music nicely paired with video from Occupy. I can’t figure out if this is some sort of offical Lupe video or not, these mix tape things can be pretty ambiguous:

You can download the mix tape here.

Day 2 fundraising challenge

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!

The sekrit project revealed

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.

Yellow-bellied

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:

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.

Heartbroken

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.