Quick Thoughts - The Sippys Are Coming! (and other announcements)

I know, I know, it's just into October and already I'm thinking about the end of the year. But let's face it, we are in the last quarter of the year and that makes me think ahead, I guess. Or maybe it's just that I want to focus on anything but the weather getting colder and the approach of winter. So I want to focus on some happy things instead. Namely, the Sippys! Yes, my awards-no-one-asked-for are going to be returning in January with the same five categories as last year. For those who missed out on the Sippys, they can be found here.

But story time, dear readers. Last year I was a bit of a mess around the turn of the new year. It's not so much that I dislike what I did with the Sippys so much as I could have done so much more and I felt quite rushed when I was coming up with things for the award. So this year I've started earlier and today I want to share some of the fruits of that. At the bottom of this post are the 2015 winners of the Big Sip Awards. Instead of the old award graphics, which featured a blank giant sippy cup, they are now customized both for the specific award and for the big winners. I'm still making up my mind what I'll do for the regular Sippy Awards, because I do kind of like that one. Probably those won't be personalized, though. So yes, get excited! It's been an amazing year of fiction so far and it's going to be incredibly difficult to pick out just 25 stories to honor with the Sippy Awards.

I'm also trying to find ways to tweak the layout of the blog a little bit. People might have noticed that I've put a Patreon link on the sidebar and that I've started adding something at the end of my posts. I'm trying my hardest to balance doing these reviews, which I love, and I feel is important to do, with also needing money to live. So hopefully they are not too much an eyesore. I deeply appreciate everyone who has decided to support me though Patreon for helping me to do this work and share it for free. That said, I'm getting mighty close to hitting my $40/month goal of doing drunk reviews of the original Goosebumps! books and those will be Patreon exclusive. And speaking of that, if you're looking to maybe get a sneak peek at select reviews before they appear on Quick Sip Reviews, I've added that as a patron perk at the $1 level and up. I'll also be adding exclusive anthology reviews with notes on every story for people supporting at the $2 level and up. I've also added a new goal to do Queer Smut Reviews, so fans of queer SFF erotica might be able to get my take on what's out there.

And, of course, there is publishing news. I'm super thrilled to announce that my story, "The Death of Paul Bunyan," will be appearing at Lightspeed Magazine in December! I am super excited about this story, which brings in American folktales, colonialism, the destruction of the natural world, and some kinda messed up tall tales having sex. So…look forward to that! I also have a superhero romance/erotic romance novelette coming out from Dreamspinner Press as part of their Bah Humbug! 2016 Advent Calendar. It's called "How the Supervillain Stole Christmas" and it is cute af. Seriously, it is super cute and features superhero fights, penguins, and unforgivable sweaters. I…think that's it for publications this year. But I already have some exciting news for next year. Not too much I can announce just yet, but I will be in Diabolical Plots in November 2017 (only over a year away, nbd). And there will be more announcements soon, so stay tuned!

And there we go, an entire post where I don't think I espouse any controversial opinions. Yay me! Thanks for reading and here are your 2015 Big Sip winners!!!

All the best,

Charles Payseur

 

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Quick Sips - Flash Fiction Online October 2016

For another issue the stories of Flash Fiction Online seem to focus on parents and children. On being haunted. By the specter of ridicule and Otherness, by an actual friendly ghost, or by a past and future that seem to hold nothing but regret. These stories bring a bit of darkness and strangeness and fit rather well with the autumn season. With things winding down. With endings and declines but with the hope of something more. These stories are dark without being bleak, strange without being completely indecipherable. From monsters to ghosts to…house-children, this issue certainly is unique. To the reviews! 

Art by Dario Bijelac

Stories:

"The Monster on Her Cheek" by Rebecca Roland (861 words)

This story is about a woman, Jane, and her child, a child born with a sort of disease or deformity that takes the form of a monster that is attached to the child's face. The monster is…well, a little thing, but otherwise doesn't seem to do anything. The fear and the tension comes from the way that the woman fears she will be treated, that her child will be treated, because of the monster. The story does a lot of interesting work in looking at how people are judged for the deformities and diseases and differences their children are born with. That parents don't want to be seen as bad because of those differences in part because theey have bought into the idea that those differences are a mark of sin and shame. The story reveals a woman afraid of going out because she might face name-calling and judgment, and so she stays in while others try to convince her to go out. And the story draws Jane toward a point where she can let her own prejudices against her child and against herself drop away so that she can embrace her child for who they are. I like the message of the piece, that you have to accept your child, that a lot of what allows harm and ignorance to continue is our own internal biases and especially for parents that can lead to some awful treatment of children by parents. So I like that Jane has to learn to stop blaming herself and her child first, that she has to see that they deserve to exist, that in some ways she didn't understand that until she was so connected and she has to try and do better. Act better. Which starts at home. So yeah, it's an interesting and rather dark story with a warm, gooey heart. A fine read!

"Three Rules for Befriending Ghosts" by Benjamin Thomas (924 words)

This is a rather fun story about a man and a ghost haunting him and the rules that define their relationship. To me, it shows two people desperate to connect, desperate to find someone who will respect them. To respect their rules. Those simple things that are required to have a friendship, to have any sort of relationship. Because despite Mandy being dead, being a ghost, the story is all about how willing the main character is to respect her rules. They are not complicated. They are not difficult. But still they require the main character to have a boundary and not cross it. That once he knows what she wants he has to stand by her or risk losing the friendship. And it's a great way to show what's required to form a bond with another person, to illustrate the ways that it's possible to overstep and how easy it can be, caught up in something personal, to be selfish and break one of the rules. But how it's equally possible to stop and consider and refuse to use a friendship as a weapon. And I love how the main character is described as lucky to be haunted, to have this opportunity to bond. Because anyone is incredibly lucky to have a good friend. Because those friendships can keep us sane, can keep us from being alone, can lift us up and affirm us. But it takes something. Effort. Trust. And the story does a nice job of bringing that all together with a touch of the ghostly. A great story!

"Offspring" by Brenda Anderson (778 words)

This is a…rather strange and disturbing story about being a parent, about surviving grief, and about the distance between animate and inanimate life. In the story a man at a sort of sentient house for…grief counseling (maybe) learns that his emotions have inadvertently entered the house and taken root. The house is pregnant and he is the father. And…and what follows is a picture of the man trying to flee from that, trying to get away and find some sort of peace where peace doesn't seem possible, trying to avoid the knowledge that he has a child out there. The story deals with regret and with surprise, with suddenly discovering that you're the parent of a child you never expected but in a way that's…well, certainly new. This house-child is one that he wants to deny but cannot, that haunts him even as he seeks to run from it. At the same time, this is a difficult story for me to parse, personally, because the nature of the conception is so strange and because the nature of his situation is rather nebulous. Well off enough to move and stay employed but not well off enough to avoid having to be held in some sort of prison or care facility following the death of a close friend. What is more certain to me is that the story circles around the man's past, his losses. As an older man he looks back and sees no legacy, and the house-child becomes some way to connect to a future he won't see, a past he never lived. I can't tell if it's hopeful or not, to be honest, but it's an interesting and moving piece that I certainly recommend people check out for themselves. Indeed!

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Quick Sips - Shimmer #33 (October Stuff)

The October offerings from Shimmer Magazine capture a feeling of isolation. Of loneliness. The bittersweet reality of being alive, of having survived something huge, only to find that they are alone and wanting to change that. And in both stories the main characters do, do work toward a reunion, toward a community that accepts them and where they can be themselves. But the stories concentrate more on the longing than on the finding, and as such are on the sadder side, though it is only with such a lack that hope can be more fully felt, and both stories are hopeful, showing characters striving to overcome, striving to remember themselves when the world seems set on blending them into everything else. So without further delay, the reviews! 

Art by Sandro Castelli

Quick Sips - Lightspeed #77

This month's Lightspeed Magazine features a rather full lineup of original fiction. Full not necessarily in length, because it's about average for the publication, but definitely full in terms of exploring genre and in terms of emotional weight. These are story that hit and lift, some with a subtle form and style and some with an aching wound of feeling and horror and regret. These are stories that look at hope in the face of despair, at healing in the face of disappointment and injustice. At what it takes to keep going after being betrayed by someone who was supposed to have your back. The stories are beautiful and expertly rendered and it's time to review them so let's go! 

Art by Sam Schechter

Quick Sips - Nightmare #49 People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror!

People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror is official here, courtesy of Nightmare Magazine's October release, which means double the amount of original fiction to keep you up at night. The stories are…well, the stories show the range of speculative horror, with three mostly-contemporary pieces and one historical fantasy, all of which shine lights on very different aspects of horror and fear. The fear of the Other, of the foreign, and the invasion from the unknown. The fear of the self and the uncontrolled darkness a mind can harbor, that a mind can spin into tales to terrify, willingly or otherwise. The fear of anonymity, of the crush of circumstance and time that can strip people of their hope and humanity. The fear erasure, of dissolution, of death, of injustice. These stories know how to set the scene and each left me shaken, uneasy, and inspired. So yeah, without further hesitation, to the reviews! 

Art by Reiko Murakami

Quick Sips - The Dark #17

The two stories of this issue of The Dark Magazine take on some deep subjects, namely death and history. And not just death, but suicide and loss. And not just history, but torture and oppression and erasure. They both look at the wounds left over by loss, by violence, and both concern people and places being haunted. Not being allowed to move on. Having to deal first with what has happened, what has been taken, before healing can begin. These are stories with some definite punch and a strong creepiness and I'm going to jump right to the reviews! 

Art by Tomislav Tikulin

Quick Thoughts - Some Opinions on the State of Short Fiction

First, some happy news. This month marks the second anniversary of my monthly short fiction recommendation series, The Monthly Round: A Taster's Guide to Speculative Short Fiction. Woo! I did not know starting The Monthly Round that it would pull me into SO MUCH reviewing, as it's a large reason that I decided to start Quick Sip Reviews, but here I am. After the official anniversary post a little later this month, I will have featured 216 of my favorite reads paired with thematically appropriate drinkables. Mostly short fiction and flash, but with a few poems for good measure (and some not-so-short-but-still-considered-short short fiction). So yeah, two years after I started doing the Monthly Round I feel like it's a good time to check in and have some thoughts.

To be honest, I was waiting for Truesdale over at Tangent to release his full rant from the State of Short Fiction panel before really looking at this issue, but seeing as how each week seems to bring some other flavor of…response to the state of short fiction, I didn't feel like waiting any longer. I am not an editor of short SFF. I am not involved with any publication or magazine or site that's really in a position to talk about the business of short SFF. I understand that financial concerns are large and that the pressure to always succeed is great and that sometimes to make money people aim for what might be easiest. For what they expect to make the most money. I don't want to speak to that, really. Again, I am a (mostly) unpaid reviewer and blogger and a (sometimes) paid writer of short SFF. I am, however, first and foremost, a reader and a fan of short SFF. So…

There are a great many different conversations going on in short SFF at the moment. And most of them absolutely need to happen. It's not the overwhelming response that one might have hoped for, but Fireside's report about black writers of short SFF has already seen large impact. Strange Horizons and The Dark have been vocal about adding new editors in hopes of working to fix the issue. Apex has announced guest editorships along the same lines. Fireside had eluded to changing the way that submissions are received (and Strange Horizons also announced that they might be changing some of their methods, as well). Clarkesworld has hinted that something might be happening there, though no details on that yet. Meanwhile Fiyah has opened to submissions and Mithila Review has recommitted to reaching out to more marginalized voices. And there is more that I'm sure I've missed in my haze of trying to keep up with reading and reviewing.

This conversation seems to me linked but also distinct from the one that centers around awards and the more nebulous idea of "diversity." In some ways, the conversation surrounding awards, which the Puppies and the like have been and still are engaged in, is so far removed from the one surrounding how to better solicit to marginalized and non-dominant writers as to be laughable. Forget trying to do better, the Puppies have essentially declared—we're already too special snowflake and entitled and blah blah blah. Kids these days, amirite? This framing of the conversation seems consciously and deliberately constructed to try and stall the conversation. To try and Trump up the idea that it's those damned SJWs who are too easily offended. PC politics run amok! When really, really, it's not that racism and homophobia and ableism are offensive so much as…harmful.

To be fair…is a terrible thing to say in an argument. So is "life's not fair." Pretty much anything about fairness. Trust me, the people for whom life is less than fair already know that, and the people for whom life is more than fair don't know what fair is. Using that as a tool against those who are already oppressed takes a certain amount of assholery and I fear is the reason why certain fucking horrible politicians have gained in power and popularity. By ignoring the facts and speaking to what "feels" true. Ignore the fact that statistically short SFF still has HUGE problems and instead speak on how you "feel" that it's gone too far toward the "PC" and how the proof is how there's not a violent mob running non-dominant writers and fans out of the genre. All this while sharpening pitchforks and testing torches. This is not to say that short SFF doesn't also have it's share of people who see that, see that the genre is taking some steps in the right direction, and declare mission accomplished. Who think "I'm on the good side of this debate because I don't support X [Trump, the Puppies, what have you]." When…boiling the conversation down to an argument between two sides is erasing so much of what is being said.

There is a sense of clueless white guy "Yeah, but what am I supposed to do?" about this entire thing. An urge from certain parties to want to demand some magic way of doing things that will result in no risk, in no possibility of being called racist or homophobic or…"bad." You have people upset with "call out culture" because it doesn't allow dominant people a clear path to never being harmful. When…I don't really care what your history is or how much "good will" you think you're due, when you cause harm you should fucking own that, try to make amends, and then improve your actions. And even then, no one owes you understanding. No one owes you forgiveness. Do the work because it's important, because it's necessary, because it's right. Don't do it for cookies and certainly don't do it to profit off of the harm done to others.

It's been two years since I started The Monthly Round. And in that time I've read thousands of works of SFF. As a reader, I am excited about the stories coming out. I think the quality and the complexity rivals or surpasses anything written previously. But I know that there are even better stories out there that aren't being published. That are being rejected out of hand or that never get submitted because the field is such a fucking minefield of shit. I want those stories. And many need those stories. So what's the state of short SFF? It's a beautiful mess. It's among the best pockets for amazing, affirming, and inspiring stories being published today. But it needs improving, because it could and should be so much better. Thanks for reading!

All the best,

Charles Payseur