And a new zine publication! It’s a two for one today!
First, Stories About Kids Stealing Things is now out on Smashwords! Wow, cool cover!
Collected in this book are seven short stories, mostly written between 2018-2019. They’re not all about kids stealing things, but most of them are.
Two teens take climate justice into their own hands by stealing from the rich and giving to themselves; AI can’t drive for shit; bearing someone else’s nostalgia for a world long dead; don’t let someone slip a love potion in your cup; your awful ex-boss is running for governor of your failing state, better stop him; privatized firefighting and year-long fires; don’t predict the future, predict the prophecy.
These are stories about people with very little ability to control their own lives, and no ability to control the world at large. They are going to try anyway.
Here’s a full list of the stories collected here, you may see some you’ve read already:
“Fuck You Pay Me,” “Ride of the Blind Sighthound,” “The Hilarious Inside Joke of Our Overwhelming Melancholic Nostalgia,” “Love Poison,” “The Harrowing of Castle Maddox,” “Fires Burn Forever in this World,” and “Red, Her Hand.”
That second to last one, “Fires Burn Forever in this World,” is also now available as a print zine! For free! It’s a short story about a city where the antiquated practice of leaving firefighting to private insurance companies, and letting uninsured buildings burn, has persisted right up to the modern era. And also fires burn for a very, very long time. If you would like a copy, email me at FrancisRBass [at] gmail [dot] com. Check out some interior artwork for it at left!
What’s Next
I am going to make one more short story zine this year. It will be a re-issue of a novelette previously published as an ebook, “The War on Hormones”. A story about pharmaceutically asexual high schoolers, which I wrote while in high school myself. Pretty fun! Expect it in November or December.
And that will conclude this pilot program of zine making! I started making zines last September with “Cartographer.” Since then I’ve made three other zines, and “The War on Hormones” will make five total. I’ve been giving them away for free because I was still figuring things out, experimenting, and I really just wanted to get the things in people’s hands.
So starting next year, they will (mostly) no longer be free. I am also probably not going to release as many new zines next year, maybe just one or two.
Read: I have really enjoyed making these and giving them to y’all, and would like to make this one of the pillars of my career, such as it is. So I am going to spend next year figuring out how to do this sustainably. More thoughts on this probably when I release the next zine.
Also, non sequitur, Spooktober is upon us, this year I am reading Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon, Night Bitch by Rachel Yoder, and Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge.
Okay that’s all I’ve got for you now! Is that enough???