Spurred by Simon Owens’s blog post that I blogged about yesterday, several other people have chimed in on the viability of the genre e-zine, including John Kilma, Publisher and Editor of Electric Velocipede.

I usually find his posts very insightful, and I agree with pretty much everything he says here. I had the exact same reaction to ESPN.com when they started charging–I went elsewhere. I also think that e-zines have the potential to hook casual fans reading online in free moments at work, but that type of reader likewise would not pay for content.

My friend Erin, who has great ideas about building online community, thinks that e-zines could snag funding from the ad budgets of big companies like game publishers. I think such arrangements are more luck (Sci Fiction) rather than repeatable strategies, because those companies are going to expect a return on their investment and the e-zine audience doesn’t overlap enough with their customer base to provide it. I think the only way to make a genre e-zine work right now is the Strange Horizons model–set it up as a non-profit company and depend on the kindness of donations.

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….

My pal in writing and often also drinking, Justin Howe, has a prose poem now online in the current issue of Abyss and Apex. He has a unique blend of the fantastic and the bizarre, always worth checking out.

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.