Nov 21 2007
If You Help Me Build It
The outpouring of support I've gotten for my very loose open source speculative fiction magazine model has been really staggering. In addition to early pingbacks from Paolo Bacigalupi and Clarkesworld, I was surprised and very pleased to see the commentary from Warren Ellis and Lou Anders. I'd just picked up a copy of an anthology edited by Anders last weekend, so that one in particular had me hopping up and down a bit.
As is now noted over at the Clarkesworld livejournal, I've been exchanging some emails with Neil Clarke (of CW) and John Benson of Not One of Us, and John Klima of Electric Velocipede is now looking for a community maintainer. If you dig the social networking stuff, give him a holler -- you could do far worse than be part of the staff of such a terrific magazine. (Disclaimer, I have a poem coming up in the summer issue of EV, but that's not what I'm talking about -- Klima prints Hal Duncan for crying out loud.) If you don't know much about social networking but are interested, drop me an email and I'll be glad to help. This stuff takes time but it isn't hard.
And I had three separate offers of funding for the project.
I know enough about crazy internet ideas to know that just because a notion creates some buzz doesn't mean it has long term weight, and also doesn't mean it's not going to be a royal crapload of work. But I have to say that the level of discussion triggered by this is really exciting. And I do 100% think that an evolved model of the magazine I outlined could work, and rock the spec fic world hardcore. I am prepared to see how far it can go. Doing it properly is going to take some time, so don't expect any results right away, but I expect to be working on this with more attention by the end of Q1 2008. We'll see where it goes.
This note from Warren Ellis, though, is the primary reason for this post:
Following my post, a number of other blogs posted their ideas for what would make a great speculative fiction magazine. I was probably more excited to see this kind of thinking going on than I was to see any of the other commentary. I would ask those bloggers, and anyone else interested in this topic -- ye vast disillusioned masses -- to hie yourself to the newly minted pbwiki Open Source Speculative Fiction Magazine Model site:
http://opensourcespecfic.pbwiki.com
It is an open pbwiki. Have at. I've seeded it with my original model, and I'll soon be going through and collecting many of the ideas from the comments on the original page and using them to modify that model. Getting started is as simple as asking this question: what would your perfect specluative fiction magazine do and be? What would make a website that you would use so much that you'd set it as your homepage?
As is now noted over at the Clarkesworld livejournal, I've been exchanging some emails with Neil Clarke (of CW) and John Benson of Not One of Us, and John Klima of Electric Velocipede is now looking for a community maintainer. If you dig the social networking stuff, give him a holler -- you could do far worse than be part of the staff of such a terrific magazine. (Disclaimer, I have a poem coming up in the summer issue of EV, but that's not what I'm talking about -- Klima prints Hal Duncan for crying out loud.) If you don't know much about social networking but are interested, drop me an email and I'll be glad to help. This stuff takes time but it isn't hard.
And I had three separate offers of funding for the project.
I know enough about crazy internet ideas to know that just because a notion creates some buzz doesn't mean it has long term weight, and also doesn't mean it's not going to be a royal crapload of work. But I have to say that the level of discussion triggered by this is really exciting. And I do 100% think that an evolved model of the magazine I outlined could work, and rock the spec fic world hardcore. I am prepared to see how far it can go. Doing it properly is going to take some time, so don't expect any results right away, but I expect to be working on this with more attention by the end of Q1 2008. We'll see where it goes.
This note from Warren Ellis, though, is the primary reason for this post:
Special attention should be paid to An Open Source Model for Online Magazines: I think it’s wrong in many particulars, but, as an Open Source model, it’s supposed to be. It’s a good starting point for thinking and conversation.
Following my post, a number of other blogs posted their ideas for what would make a great speculative fiction magazine. I was probably more excited to see this kind of thinking going on than I was to see any of the other commentary. I would ask those bloggers, and anyone else interested in this topic -- ye vast disillusioned masses -- to hie yourself to the newly minted pbwiki Open Source Speculative Fiction Magazine Model site:
http://opensourcespecfic.pbwiki.com
It is an open pbwiki. Have at. I've seeded it with my original model, and I'll soon be going through and collecting many of the ideas from the comments on the original page and using them to modify that model. Getting started is as simple as asking this question: what would your perfect specluative fiction magazine do and be? What would make a website that you would use so much that you'd set it as your homepage?
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