Against the man baby’s tantrums

Sun 29 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., the world| Posted by: Gavin

On November 3, 2020, the US held their four year general election and in a relatively easy manner the Biden-Harris administration was voted into the White House. I look forward to having actual humanist leaders, even if I know I will disagree with some of their policies and appointments.

The election would have been all over and done with by the next morning had the mailed and early votes been allowed to be counted in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan. The “result” wasn’t agreed on (by rational beings) until four (very long) days later — and even yet the president, his lackeys, and his republican party are still trying to pretend it is worth dragging out and fighting.

Four years of Tr*mp and his rotating band of corrupt cronies, unelected family members, acting cabinet members, mealy-mouthed mouthpieces, and quiet and not-so-quiet racist and fascist supporters has been awful and I’d like every one one of those acting cabinet members and family and mouthpieces investigated — so many of them are in jail or have done time that I am sure there are a few of the others who should be doing time along with them.

The republican party, led by the nose by Tr*mp and Mitch McConnell, has been as useful a bulwark against Tr*mp’s small-minded bigotry as expected: they did nothing. A few people quit the party and occasionally Mitt Romney or literally one or two others would speak against his rotten ways but for the most part everyone in the party went along with it — the same way for eight years they followed the party’s instructions to obstruct government rather than work with the Obama-Biden administration.

So when members of the republican party start to say they, too, were anti-Tr*mp let them point to their records, let them show where they stood up against Tr*mp’s oh so terrifying twitter feed. The senators and the house members who somehow never saw the news about this terrible thing and that terrible thing and somehow never managed to answer when queried, they can go fly a kite. The world asked them to stand up as adults against a squealing man baby’s tantrums. They refused. And we won’t forget.

Tuesday & Thursday: Martha Moody Days

Fri 27 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, online events, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin

Next Tuesday is a big day, pun intended, around here: it’s publication day for our new, 25th anniversary edition of Susan Stinson’s novel Martha Moody.

Martha Moody was a hit the first time around when it came out from Spinster’s Ink and the Women’s Press in the UK — just check out some of the reviews. — Time Out London said “Stinson’s follow-up to the utterly fantastic Fat Girl Dances with Rocks is so bloody good it made me want to run naked through a meadow.”

I realize that December in the northern hemisphere may not be running naked through the meadow weather (for most, who knows?), but it is indicative of the joy oozing from this book.

We’ll be celebrating the publication of the book online through Book Moon on Thursday, Dec. 3, at 7 p.m. with the fabulous Elizabeth McCracken. Hope you will join us, it is sure to be a relaxed and fun time and Susan will be signing books. See you there!

Get Immersed in the Monstrousness

Wed 25 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Isabel Yap| Posted by: Gavin

While we’re a bit transfixed by the ongoing democratic paroxysms of effort to get rid of the monstrous occupants of a certain White House, we’ve been working away on a different, much more enjoyable type of monstrousness: Isabel Yap’s Feb. 2021 collection, Never Have I Ever. A few advance readers have sent us reactions which we’ll share next week and the book just received its first strong trade review from Publishers Weekly:

“Yap’s impressive debut collection of 13 fabulist, sci-fi, and horror shorts explores themes ranging from monstrousness, shared trauma, and systemic violence to friendship and the ambiguity of love. Yap is at home with whatever topic she puts her hand to, easily immersing readers in the perspectives of high schoolers, ancient goddesses, androids, and witches. . . . Yap is a powerful new voice in speculative fiction.”

LCRW 42 & a Price Raise

Tue 24 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

And out it went last week — the 26.79% of subscribers who go for the chocolate option received a range of chocolate bars this time due to me not getting an order in to our supplier. All Fair Trade though, I think and I did try most of them and one I doubted turned out to be delicious, so, thanks, subscribers for giving me an opportunity to try another delicious thing.

You can still read the first section of Sarah Langan’s “You Have the Prettiest Mask” on Lit Hub’s Daily Fiction section. That was great fun to see.

Big news: LCRW subscription prices will be rising on January 1, 2021.

Printing and mailing costs have risen and we raised the pay rate to writers (I’d like to raise that again) and the price of LCRW has been the same since June 2004, when we raised it from $4 a pop to $5.

I really liked the zine being $5 since five dollar bills are easy to handle, change is easy, it’s cheap. But in 2004 LCRW was the same price as The New Yorker (and we still have it beat in weird fiction and delivering chocolate with each issue). Now The New Yorker is $8.99 per issue, so, yep, if we want to pay people a decent amount of money for their work it’s time to add a dollar to the zine cover price.

I expect the new cover and subscription prices will last a few years — and some readers have subscribed for 20 issues (10 years? Wow.) at the current discounted price so that’s a possible deal. Subscribe now, save a few dollars. Subscribe January 2021 and celebrate the new year, sure to be awful in its own way but better than the alternative, as our old friend Bill Desmond used to say.

Holiday Deadlines 2020

Mon 23 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., holiday, housekeeping, shipping news, usps| Posted by: Gavin

Time for our annual posting of the USPS Holiday Shipping Deadlines.

First: LCRW subscription prices will be rising on January 1, 2021.

Second: the Small Beer office will be closed from December 23 – January 4, 2021. It is unlikely we will ship over that period. Need books? We can still help:

Weightless Books is always here for you with DRM-free multi-format ebooks — which can hadily be sent as gifts on the date you specify.
Want more ebooks? We can help you with that.
Audiobooks: we have them.
Bookshop can ship books and toys to you or direct to your family and friends. We’re always adding book recs there.
Book Moon will be open.

So here are the last (domestic) order dates for Small Beer Press. (International shipping deadlines.) Along with a reminder that orders include free first class (LCRW) or media mail (books) shipping in the USA.

And the annual reminder:

Media Mail parcels are the last ones to go on trucks. If the truck is full, Media Mail does not go out until the next truck. And if that one’s full, too . . . it could be very late in December before there’s space. So, if you’d like to guarantee pre-holiday arrival, please add Priority Mail:

Domestic Mail Class/Product	Deadline
Media Mail (estimate, not guaranteed)	Dec. 12
First Class Mail (LCRW/chapbooks)	Dec. 18
Priority Mail	Dec. 19
Priority Mail Express	Dec. 23

What are we talking about? Ordering books. (And we always have a few of these around.)

All Your Questions Answered

Fri 13 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

Next week the new issue of LCRW goes out with all your questions answered and, for some people, a chocolate bar. Perhaps we should be sending out LCRW masks but the responsibility of readerly enjoyment is quite enough for us. The responsibility for the lives of our readers is fainting couch material.* Thanks everyone who wears a mask in public.

All your questions? Since everything comes down to What Is The Point Anyway? Yes. We are going with Douglas Adams’s answer, pushing it further from funny to unfunny and perhaps back to funny.

The zine comes out the same as Obama’s A Promised Land. Wonder which one will sell more?

You may have read an excerpt from Sarah Langan’s “You Have the Prettiest Mask” on Lit Hub. It is a huge, dark novella and as ever I am looking forward to hearing what people think of it. Masks being something we give more thought to every day.

The full table of contents is now up:

Sarah Langan, “You Have the Prettiest Mask” [read an excerpt on Lit Hub]
Vandana Singh, “Sticky Man”
Stewart Moore, “Madeline’s Wings”
Jack Larsen, “Bright and Shabby Buses”
Kristin Yuan Roybal, “Separation Theory”

poetry

Holly Day, Two Poems

nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, Cooking Column: “The Stories We Tell”

The zine will be in the mail at some point next week and the ebook will go out on Weightless on Tuesday. (Not as sure about other ebook sites.) It is very cheering to put a zine out in the middle of the pandemic. To take stories from writers and send them out to readers. To imagine a readership with the mail piled up untouched for 3 days for pandemic/magical thinking reasons, and then taking the zine from the pile, putting feet up, getting comfortable, digging in.

* What makes good fainting couch material is something we often ponder from our chaise lounges. Something soft, something forgiving. Something not made of thinly sliced trees. Something like a hammock or a panda.

Congratulations, Joe & Kamala!

Sun 8 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

What a relief. Lots of work to do, but let’s have that moment of joy and then head down and back to work and bending that moral arc once again toward justice for all.

Congratulations, Kathleen!

Wed 4 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Kathleen Jennings| Posted by: Gavin

We are so delighted that among all the crappiness of an uncertain election and millions of people somehow choosing Tr*mp despite the last 4 years there is the lovely news that Kathleen Jennings received this year’s World Fantasy Award for best artist.

Delighted, not only because last year we published Margo Lanagan’s chapbook, Stray Bats, illustrated by Kathleen and Laurie J. Marks’s Air Logic with a cover by Kathleen (which completed a fabulous piece of interlocking art she created over 5 years or so), and recently we published Kij Johnson’s The River Bank with a cover and illustrations by Kathleen as well as Christopher Rowe’s Telling the Map with a cover by Kathleen, but because she is a delightful person who adds joy to any day in which you see her. So, congrats to all the winners and especially this time to Kathleen.