Emerald Spires: First Look – miniantho cover & lineup!
Life has had a lot of ups and downs lately. (Expect some personal posts. I usually don’t make personal posts, but now I think I should!) I didn’t forget about the Emerald Spires project, though.
A brief recap: Emerald Spires is going to be an online SF magazine focusing on critical review of content by and about people who belong to underrepresented groups, with a few reprints of original works that are not available online, sprinkled in. I intend to run a small fundraiser soon to enable me to take the time to set up the website, the printing (yes, there’s going to be a print version, though possibly not right away) and other initial costs.
One of the fundraiser rewards is going to be a small collection of reprints I’ve already bought for the first five issues of Emerald Spires – three short stories, a flash story and a poem. These reprints will be made available at the site for free as the issues come out, but those of you who will decide to support the project will get them all together in a nice DRM-free epub or mobi file, much earlier! (I intend to have all rewards finished by the time the fundraiser launches, so even if there are any further delays with the project, those won’t affect your rewards. You’ll get them right away!)
Here is the long-awaited lineup:
* To Follow the Waves by Amal El-Mohtar
First appeared in: Steam-Powered – Lesbian Steampunk Stories, ed. JoSelle Vanderhooft
* Plucked from the Horo by Rose Lemberg
First appeared in: Mythic Delirium #27, ed. Mike Allen
* Flash Frame by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
First appeared in: Cthulhurotica, ed. Carrie Cuinn
* Superior Firepower by Alex Shvartsman
First appeared in: Bards & Sages Quarterly July 2011, ed. Julie Ann Dawson
* Mama’s Sword by Ada Hoffmann
First appeared in: Blood Iris 2012, ed. SM Reine
There will also be a short foreword in which I tell you why these authors and stories are awesome.
Every author belongs to at least two underrepresented groups, by my count. This is not the Oppression Olympics and it turned out this way by accident (just belonging to one is enough for inclusion!), but it’s interesting to see.
I also have a cover! I might end up hammering at it a bit more, I’m still not perfectly satisfied with it, but it’s going to look more or less like this.
The monstrous eye-thing is a monstrous eye-thing. (Someone asked if it was a vagina fish. No, it’s not a vagina fish, at least it wasn’t intended to be one.) I drew it a while ago, just messing around in Inkscape, and I decided it would fit the theme of “first look”, especially since the minianthology has a slight horror bent.
All this large type is to make everyone stand out even at thumbnail image sizes
since there aren’t that many authors. The green line on top is there because I will also provide personalized copies. That’s where my personal message to you is going to go






