Yesterday NaNoWriMo finished, so today I am doing what any sensible writer would do… rushing headlong into another project! Starting today, and up until Christmas Eve, I will be posting daily on the blog to signal boost a marginalized creative person (or a project by such a person). I call it… #Adventboost! A word of warning: this has been a very hectic fall for me and there’s a chance that, rather than a very carefully curated and well-balanced list with well-written, inspired posts, it will be a jumbled mess of “oh hey, check out this cool person/thing!”. I just haven’t had the time to actually sit down and have a proper think about how to balance and pick things for this list. So if you find yourself thinking “wow, she focuses a lot on such and such a marginalization” or “hey, she doesn’t have anyone on here with such and such a marginalization”, then I apologize. I promise that I will do better next year! Now, on to our first boost!
I want to start the calendar by tallking about Capricious, a magazine for literary speculative fiction which is published four times per year (as a PDF, epub or mobi file). It features short stories in the spec-fic spectrum, and sometimes essays. Some of the issues are themed and some are not, but all are brilliant. It has recently released its fifth issue, and some older issues are even available for free on the website. Not that you really need to get them free when a year-long subscription is only $8! Which reminds me, I need to renew my subscription…
As far as I know, not all writers who are published in Capricious belong to marginalized groups, but a lot of them do and many of the stories published concern issues pertaining to marginalizations of various kinds, such as issue of identity and belonging among many, many others. The magazine intentionally focuses on fiction which is a bit… weird. Fiction that pushes boundaries, that goes out of the box, that breaks convention in various ways. This can be on the level of narrative, of theme, of character or even the language itself.
The stories published in them are all unique, all brilliant, all moving in some way. I have yet to find a story in it I dislike, though in every issue there is usually one or two stories that stand out extra to me. Some favorites have been “Bone Length, Wavelength” by Octavia Cade from Issue 2, “The Need for Overwhelming Sensation” by Bogi Takács from Issue 1 and “Märschen” by Jordan Taylor from the latest issue. This magazine has really reinvigorated my love for short fiction, which had been suffering for a while. It’s reminded me of how powerful the format can be and inspired me to seek out more short fiction as well as to write more of it myself
Capricious is edited by A.C. Buchanan, who is awesome, and you should all go subscribe to it right now!
By the way, I’m doing a more Christmassy calendar over at Zero, Eight Love. The first post is about advent calendars.
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