This past weekend, the well-respected print ‘zine Talebones announced that they were ceasing publication, with plans to return next year as an anthology. Last week, the equally well-regarded e-zine Lone Star Stories also ceased publication. And last month, the alt-history print ‘zine Paradox too ceased publication, with tentative plans to return as an anthology.

All three of these magazines were on my list of places to send my stories. I’m very sad to see any magazine close, but especially the “mid-level” ones. As a “mid-level” writer who hasn’t yet gotten the higher-profile markets interested in my work, I think the mid-level markets serve a very important role. All three of these magazines had published great fiction from all sorts of writers over their roughly five-year runs, which in these bleak days for short fiction is quite impressive.

I found it interesting that two of these magazines cited as their reasons not the current turbulence in publishing or the economy but rather the time commitment or needing to take a break. All three of these magazines as far as I’m aware were “sole proprietorships”– magazines run exclusively by one person. As is my magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

All of which got me thinking. I’ve certainly learned about the time commitment in running a magazine– the first five months of this year I was working seven days a week every week just to keep up with the magazine, especially the podcasts, and my own writing. Things have eased a bit lately, but only because I’ve set my writing aside for a while. And I still have plenty of other things demanding my attention, including thirty manuscripts to critique this month in addition to BCS slush.

So where might I be after five years of BCS? Or even three? I’m less concerned with where publishing in general and short fiction might be– I’m publishing a different sort of fantasy than anyone else, and I’m happy doing my own thing on the periphery. But maybe that means the state of my sole proprietor is even more important.

So we’ll see. Nothing ever lasts forever, so someday there will inevitably be a post saying that BCS is ceasing publication. But I will do every last thing I can to make it five years at least, if not ten. Hell, I’m booked through the end of this year already!

This past weekend, my First Reader and I went back into D.C. to see Tom Stoppard’s new play “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” at The Studio Theater.

It’s about a Czech dissident in Cambridge, who returns home during the 1968 unrest, and his mentor, a British communist university professor. Stoppard himself was born in Czechoslovakia before fleeing the Nazis, and the play mixed twenty years of Czech opposition with the Western rock music that was an important symbol for the dissidents.

It was an interesting play and an engaging production in the round, and there were lots of wry truths about totalitarianism of all stripes, but for me this play was nowhere near as brilliant as Stoppard’s “Arcadia.” “Rock ‘n’ Roll” seemed mostly about ideas–the Czech opposition movement, communism in Britain, 60s and 70s rock in general and the music and life of Syd Barrett (the Pink Floyd founder and Cambridge native who became mentally unstable) in particular. The parallels, to me as a musician and a student of history and literature, were fascinating.

But other than some tender moments with the British communist Max and his extended family, the play didn’t seem to be as much also about the characters. Perhaps it was the long lapses of narrative time between scenes, often three or more years. Perhaps it’s that the essence of rock or of winning societal freedom is hard to dramatize. Perhaps it was that the dissident protagonist didn’t seem to have a clear goal–he went home to Czechoslovakia but didn’t know exactly why; he vacillated about signing a political petition then got talked into it; he spent time between scenes in prison but didn’t seem much changed for it; and his running off with another character at the end of the play seemed sudden to me and not fully motivated.

“Arcadia” is likewise about ideas, but at the same time it’s also about the characters. Thomasina is aching to learn, Septimus is driven to teach her, Bernard aches to prove that Byron stayed at Sidley Park, and Hannah is driven to endure Bernard’s blather. That may be that play’s higher genius, that it’s about both ideas and people at the same time.

Which is definitely the combination I prefer. I don’t care for SF that’s purely about ideas or fantasy that’s purely about a milieu. I’ve got to have dynamic people (or aliens) amongst those ideas or that milieu, rife with their own core hopes and fears, driven to pursue something, so I can empathize with their core humanness while they’re wrestling with ideas or moving through a milieu.

For me, it all comes down to that line from Faulkner’s Nobel acceptance speech–the only thing worth writing (or reading) about is the human heart in conflict with itself.

Last weekend my First Reader and I went into D.C. to see “Arcadia,” Tom Stoppard’s early-90s masterpiece, at the Folger. The play itself is utterly brilliant, seamlessly weaving literature and science and their history over nuanced characters and vivid settings both past and modern.

The Folger’s production of it we thought was pretty good but not equally brilliant. I saw a lady on local PBS saying it was the best “Arcadia” she’d ever seen, but we saw a fantastic one at UVa about ten years ago, which included several very good theater department grad students in the adult roles and undergrad future actress Sarah Drew as Thomasina. It’s hard to remember exactly, and at the time I may partly have been blown away by the play itself, but I still think that production was better.

Either way, it’s a shame that there isn’t a film version of this play, or of more of Stoppard’s work (the Tim Roth/Gary Oldman Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the only one I know of, and I agree with Roger Ebert that the movie falls flat). Especially with the Hollywood screenplays he’s written, you’d think some indie director would be interested in filming one of his plays. Maybe they’re just far too cereberal for a film audience–which might be one reason I love them.

Some interesting comments recently about online short fiction from F&SF editor Gordon Van Gelder and novelist/ famous blogger John Scalzi. As the Publisher of an online magazine myself, I think they’re both missing a few subtlties.

Van Gelder, in an interview on Tor.com, says:

…essentially publishers are using short fiction as a loss-leader for selling books. Perfectly good marketing, but not perfectly good publishing. Tor.com could not sustain itself doing that. It has to live off the profits it generates from the sales of Tor books. I couldn’t do that with F&SF.

Strange Horizons gets by… I’m pretty sure they work off donations. … Scifiction… paid great rates, real money behind it. … Unfortunately I think they did more harm than good because it conditioned a lot of people to think that all online fiction should be free.

The great irony, as Van Gelder is aware, is this interview appearing on Tor.com. They are the poster-child for free online short fiction used as a loss-leader to sell books–given away, even though it’s losing the publisher money, to attract attention to those authors’ novels. That’s why every short story I’ve seen on Tor.com has been by a Tor novel author–Tor.com isn’t a magazine, they’re just one big web ad for Tor books. (At least they sure look that way to me–see the Comments for an assertion to the contrary.)

But the real reason online fiction has to be free in order to attract wide attention is the universal attitude among online people that content must be free, and that conversely any content that’s not free isn’t worth the hassle of paying for it. This attitude extends to all types of content–sports articles, online gaming, pretty much everything online except porn.

Van Gelder praises the subscription-based business model of Baen’s Universe, but I don’t know a single person among my short fiction colleagues who’s ever bought an issue of Baen’s Universe or IGMS. Yet they read Strange Horizons all the time, and listen to the free audio fiction from Escape Pod (the only SF/F magazine in recent memory successful at expanding the reader-base). The subscription-based model looks nice on paper, but I don’t think it will expand the audience into casual readers when those casual readers aren’t interested in paying.

That’s why the very first decision when I started Beneath Ceaseless Skies was that the content must be 100% free. Trying to draw readers to a new magazine, one with the unique niche of literary adventure fantasy, would’ve been impossible if they had to pay. The only current business model for that is the one Strange Horizons pioneered–a non-profit funded by donations. So that’s what I did. Strange Horizons has gotten by. Hopefully they will continue to, and BCS will too.

Scalzi replies:

Why did I write a story for Tor.com? …because they asked me to write a story, paid me a multiple of what I’d get for the story in most other SF markets (including his), and allowed me to submit my story electronically. …

The problem I have with print people blaming the Internet for their troubles is that …(it) allows them to ignore — and indeed, actively avoid — taking responsibility for their own acts that have contributed and are contributing to their current bad times.

I agree with him on the latter. Many of the most famous SF/F magazines still publish in the B&W format of the 50s, and that isn’t going to attract new readers. I also think they’ve lost some reader interest because of their generalist approach–publishing many different subtypes of SF/F rather than specializing.

But as for the former–where does Scalzi think that much higher pay rate he got for his Tor.com story came from? How is F&SF, or any online market that likewise doesn’t have Tor Books’ profits from book sales, supposed to match it?

As a writer, I don’t blame him one bit for taking a high offer from the company that happens to publish his novels. But as an online publisher, trying to compete with Tor.com for great stories even though my magazine already pays pro rate, I worry. If many big publishing houses start publishing original short fiction online at a loss just to promote their books, their huge financial resources may pull the best young novelist authors and their great short fiction away from the online magazines that are trying to draw reader interest and expand the audience.

Which I think would be a sad day. Which is more important for the future of the genre–expanding the reader-base for short fiction or selling a few more novels? Maybe I’m a hopeless short fiction fool, but I know my answer.