I’ve been thinking a lot the past six months about web-based genre fiction magazines. It’s one of those never-ending online or blog-post discussions, perhaps because every short fiction writer or editor seems to have an opinion about the viability of the medium or the best format to exploit it, or perhaps because writers just enjoy talking!

Regardless, I saw a blog post today by writer Simon Owens that sums up many of the questions raised in this overall never-ending discussion. Owens also adds some neat behind-the-scenes details about several well-known e-zines, taken from his interviews with their editors.

Any general thoughts on e-zines must also include my writer friend Erin Hoffman’s excellent suggestions on e-zine format. Erin has worked for a long time in the computer gaming industry, and she has a novel vision for e-zine format based on many of the techniques that make gaming sites so popular.

All fascinating food for thought….

In working my way through Weird Tales #347, the issue containing my story “Excision,” I recently read Clayton Kroh‘s story “The Yankee at the Sitting-Up.”

Growing up in the South myself, with family roots in the upper and Deep South going back 350 years, I’ve always had a shine for Southern literature and culture. The region and its history are so checkered, good mixed with some very bad, and the juxtaposition of such elements has always fascinated me. I read tons of Faulkner and Penn Warren in high school and college, and I’ve tried to keep up with modern Southern lit like Bobbie Ann Mason and Daniel Wallace. As a fantasy writer, the Southern gothic has always intrigued me, but I haven’t yet found a way to make it work within what I do.

Clayton sure made it work in his short piece. The speculative element was slight, which isn’t a problem for me, but the characterization and the setting just dripped from his word-choice and descriptions. It might’ve helped that I knew all those things he was talking about, so the story leapt right off the page for me.

Clayton, according to his Weird Tales bio, got his degree at ODU, just down the road from where I went to school. He’s an Odyssey grad like me, but I haven’t yet had the chance to meet him. Hopefully I will soon.

My copies of Weird Tales #347, featuring my story “Excision,” arrived a few days ago. The severed head in the jar looks even cooler in person! It was odd for me to read the teaser sentences; about my story but not written by me. The artwork for my story is awesome, especially the tiny picture in the margin of a cute little bunny with wicked cat’s claws. I haven’t yet read any of the stories, one by fellow Odyssey alum Clayton Kroh, or Mike DeLuca‘s non-fiction column, but so far it’s pretty damn cool.

In a recent critique circle, an experienced writer friend of mine made a very astute observation. She found the scatalogical humor in a particular piece very funny when it was abstract, but not so funny when it got more specific and vivid. One of the beauties (and horrors?) of the grotesque is that everyone’s threshold for that funny-becomes-gross line is different. But I still think she hit upon a neat universal truth about that kind of humor, and I’ll remember it in case I ever need to apply it.