Since March has five Wednesdays, I’m going to use today’s post for just some ramblings. Next week will be a more writing-specific post. (I hope.)
First, if you’re a Gen Xer with a warped sense of humor and you don’t mind some profanity, you might want to check out therealslimsherri on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and/or YouTube. She’s hilarious and I feel like she’s inside my brain, reliving WAY too many of my own memories.
If you’re a sci-fi, fantasy, or horror reader and you’d like to access lots of short fiction in those genres, this next bit is for you.
A lot of small genre magazines are about to be clobbered hard by Amazon’s decision to end the Kindle Newsstand participation of a lot of the small genre presses.
I first learned about this thanks to Jason Sanford’s “Genre Grapevine” report for his Patreon subscribers, but it can be read by the public here.
The small magazines that are most affected by these changes are the places where newer speculative fiction writers get their first publications, and they’re a great way to read new stories.
For more established spec-fic writers, these magazines are often where their better short stories are published. A lot of Hugo, Nebula, Stoker, and other award-winning short fiction owe their existence to these magazines.
If you’re not currently subscribed to any of these publications, you might check out their websites to see if any interest you. Some offer digital copies of their magazines to Patreon members, so you might consider supporting them that way.
If you currently get these magazines via Kindle Newsstand, you might want to switch to a direct subscription through their websites. Many of these publications would appreciate the direct support, and you can use an open-source e-book program like Calibre to load the mobi versions of these magazines into your existing Kindle device. (Calibre is the program I use to load all the small-press published lesbian romances I read into my Kindle.)
These issues with the Kindle Newsstand hit these small magazines just before a number of them were flooded with crap from ChatGPT-created submissions, so they’re really battling to find a way up and out of the morass. If you can subscribe, it could be a big help to them.
Many of the genre magazines also offer podcasts, so if you’d prefer to listen to your stories, that’s also an option. I’ve added several of them on Apple Podcasts, but they should also have Spotify options as well.
I’ve added a number of these publications to my Patreon because I can and I value what they’re doing. I know not everyone can. But, perhaps you can spread the word about their existence to friends or relatives that might find these magazines interesting.
Let’s see, what else is on my mind?
Why is having a sick cat about the worst feeling in the world? (A sick furry family member in general sucks because they can’t tell us what’s wrong.)
Why is it possible to throw your back out just taking groceries out of the damned back of the vehicle?
Why do I start craving a pickup truck or off-road vehicle every spring?
Why doesn’t the house stay picked up?
And, why don’t I have a robot that can cook healthy meals yet? The Jetsons had Rosie, after all. Where’s my Rosie?
Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash
Ruth F. Simon 