Have you read Sybil’s Garage No. 7 yet?  Read what others are saying about the latest issue.

“It’s been awhile since an anthology had this kind of emotional impact on me…this one is highly recommended.”
- N.K. Jemisin, Hugo-nominated author of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

“One of my favorite magazines.”
- John Klima, Hugo Award-winning Editor of Electric Velocipede

“Beautifully designed and printed as always, Sybil’s Garage which has been one of the best small press speculative fiction journals, graduates to anthology status.”
- Richard Bowes, multiple World Fantasy Award-winning author

“The always interesting ‘zine Sybil’s Garage is back with a thicker than usual issue”
- Rich Horton for Locus Magazine

“Every story had something for me to like: vivid description, playful language, a character to root for, mystery, poignancy, tragedy, an intellectual puzzle, a sting in the tail.”
-SFF Portal, Alison Sinclair

Get a copy here. Maybe Get two.  Or twelve.  It’s that time of year.

And Have You Seen?

• Functional Nerds Podcast – Hosts Patrick Hester and John Anealio interview Matthew Kressel & Kate Baker about Sybil’s Garage, Clarkesworld Magazine, Unicorn Pegasus Kitten, and more.

• Hour of the Wolf – Host Jim Freund interviews Matthew Kressel about Sybil’s Garage, with editors Paul Berger, Devin Poore, and Mercurio D. Rivera, plus readings by E.C. Myers, Barbara Krasnoff & Kathryn E. Baker

• How the cover of Sybil’s Garage No. 7 was made – a Youtube movie

• An Interview with Amal El-Mohtar…

Support your favorite small presses!  Remember to get your copy of Sybil’s Garage No. 7:
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble.com
Powell’s Books

And in the UK, Europe, and other regions:
Amazon.co.uk
Book Despository
AdLibris.com

And always at:
Senses Five Press

Have a happy holiday season and a wonderful new year!

Best,
Matt Kressel

For only $1 you can win a Nook, Kobo eReader, or an Alex, preloaded with fiction from N. K. Jemisin, Nisi Shawl, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Terence Taylor, Ted Chiang, Shweta Narayan, Chesya Burke, Moondancer Drake, Saladin Ahmed, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and many others.  (They’ll also be preloaded with copies of Paper Cities and Sybil’s Garage No. 7).

You can find more about the drawing here.

I’ve put the semi-finishing touches on Catherynne M. Valente’s “Prester John Online” website.  There she’ll be promoting her new and fabulous book The Habitation of the Blessed, and she hopes it will become the go-to place for all things Prester John.  I particularly love the artwork by Lisa Grabenstetter.

In publishing news, Sybil’s Garage and Paper Cities are now available at the Barnes & Noble e-bookstore for downloads as DRM-free ePubs.

At WFC, got to hang out with the awesomely cool Scott H. Andrews of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and he informed me my story “The Suffering Gallery” will be online December 2nd.  This is my SFWA qualifying sale and I’m both excited and nervous to hear people’s reactions to the story.

And writing-wise, I’ve been working on a short story for a YA post-apocalyptic anthology, which I hope to finish in the next week or so.  It’s dark, and I’m kind of reluctant about scaring kids, but I believe the theme is a positive one.  Then it’s back to the novel, which is progressing well, if a bit slower than I anticipated.

I had been feeling a bit melancholy as of late, but the convention was the perfect thing for my spirits.  Surrounded by so many smart, talented people, doing what they love, writing things that I love, what’s not to be happy about that?

I plan to make final decisions on stories this week, with a few acceptances going out as early as tomorrow.  I’m always amazed at the jump in quality of submissions with each issue.  There are truly some wonderful stories in the slush that I look forward to publishing soon.  I’m hoping for a release date before Readercon.  Stay tuned.

In other publishing news, Paper Cities is in progress to be listed in Apple’s iBookstore, so all you iPad and iPhone (and iPod Touch too!) users can have your own copy.  I’ll let y’all know when it’s live.  Until then, happy reading.

The book is DRM-free, which means there’s no copy protection.

You can get it here for $9.99.

CT: What made you decide to include those cryptic marginalia, or music suggestions under each story/poem? (And wouldn’t it be cool if one day each magazine came packaged with a soundtrack?)

MK: For the latest issue, I created an iTunes playlist (http://www.sensesfive.com/2009/05/30/sybils-garage-no-6-playlist/), which is about 95% accurate to what appears in the magazine. I know iTunes isn’t available or convenient for parts of the world, but it’s a start.

For the musical suggestions, it’s simply because I love music. Music has always been very inspirational for me, and I thought it would be a fun way to see what others were listening to and inspired by. Kind of like peeking into someone’s record collection. Crap, I just dated myself. I should say “mp3 collection.”

For the marginalia, I’m not sure I can answer that simply. I think part of the reason I pepper it throughout the pages has to do with my obsession with detail, a desire to fill in every nook and cranny. I also think it has to do with the joy I’ve felt in finding similar cryptic messages or imagery in song lyrics, album art, comics, books, films, and other media. And then, as I dig in further, discovering what they mean. I’m purposely trying to invoke that in Sybil’s, that unexpected frisson when you suddenly discover three quarters of the way through the magazine that there’s a story written in the margins, for example. It’s no secret that my favorite film is Blade Runner, and I’ve always admired Ridley Scott’s obsessive attention to detail, the intense layering of objects, so I guess in a way I’m emulating that too.

But yeah, a Sybil’s Garage soundtrack would be brilliant. I’m actually working on something related to that, interestingly enough.

You can read the full interview here.

• For those who haven’t heard, Sybil’s Garage will be opening to submissions for our 7th issue on January 15th.  Guidelines here.
• The World-Fantasy award winning anthology Paper Cities is now only $12 for the holidays.  Get it now.
• Altered Fluid, my writers group, will be appearing on Jim Freund’s Hour of the Wolf on January 16th.  We will be critiquing a story by the talented writer and amateur lepidopterist Paul Berger.
• I’ve been toying with the idea of changing the trim size of Sybil’s Garage from 7″ x 8.5″ to 6″ x 9″.  (The latter size is a common trade paperback size in the U.S.) For issues two through six, we used the “half-legal” size, which I shamelessly borrowed from such great zines as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Electric Velocipede. But there are problems with that .  Most notably, the size is not an industry standard.  The printing costs are higher.  Additionally, I’d like to start selling Sybil’s as a print-on-demand title.  This would allow it to be sold on Amazon and through bookstores via distrubution.  Previously, we only sold Sybil’s at conferences, through the Senses Five website, and at a few local bookstores.  So the pluses are: cheaper printing costs and greater potential distribution.  The negatives?  We will no longer be old-skool “zine” sized.  I’d like to hear opinions from people on this, as I’m not 100% convinced.  (More like 98%).
• I saw Avatar with my girlfriend last night.  We both enjoyed it.  It’s a totally immersive experience.  The world is rich, beautifully rendered, full of life.  Pandora seems like a real place.  Exotic, colorful, a complete biosphere.  The plot is flawed, however.  It’s chock full of stock plotlines and easy stereotypes.  Many characters are no more than cardboard (how odd that in a 3d film the flattest things were the humans themselves).  But the world is so vibrant and alive that I was able to overlook the plot flaws and engross myself in the planet’s wonders.  I’d like to see what a good writer can do with this technology.
• Generally, it is not a good idea to be a hallucinating hipster knocking on my door at 5:30 am on a Sunday morning and claim to live in my apartment.  Additionally, knocking again at 8:00 am and claiming to know  me will not solidify your case.
• Have a happy holiday season.

Also, here’s a video of the World Fantasy Awards, where they announce Paper Cities as the winner for Best Anthology.  That’s me accepting the award on behalf of Ekaterina Sedia.

“I am delighted and humbled to be receiving this award, but I feel that the honor belongs to the writers who contributed their amazing and unsettling visions of urban fantasy and what it can be, and to our publisher, Matt Kressel, who recognized that these stories deserved to be seen. Today, I thank you all for this honor, even though my role was secondary to your talent.

–Ekaterina Sedia”

Work, family, and other obligations have kept me supremely busy as of late, but I thought I’d give you an update on what’s going on with Senses Five Press.  As I (might have) mentioned on this blog, I’ve been working to get Paper Cities out as an e-book.  I’ve just submitted the complete e-manuscript to Amazon and am awaiting their approval.  So the first platform it will be available for is the Kindle (obviously).  I expect to make the anthology available for other platforms as well in the coming weeks.  If you haven’t had a chance to read this 2009 World Fantasy Award Nominated anthology yet, now’s your chance.

As for Sybil’s Garage, I’ve been so busy lately with work that I can’t conceive of trying to fit reading slush in with all the other things I have to do.  This is not to say that Sybil’s Garage is going anywhere.  I still plan to publish the magazine for a long time to come.  But the next issue may be delayed some.  I do not have a firm date for when I plan to open for submissions, and right now, to be perfectly honest, I am enjoying the downtime from reading & producing to work on my own fiction.  Oh, you didn’t know?  I also write too.

My most recent stuff is in Electric Velocipede and Apex Magazine, both of which you can read online by clicking the links at left.  That’s about all I have for today.  Merry blogging.

Right now I’m still severely depleted from Readercon, so an in-depth review of my time there will be forthcoming.  In the meantime, here are some photos from the con.  It really was a wonderful time, and I think perhaps my favorite Readercon to date.  It was so great to see everyone and just be surrounded by such creativity.  I know I will be inspired for a long time to come.

The photos.

“The Ditmar sub-committee has released the Australian SF (“Ditmar”) Awards finalists for 2009. This ballot honours the best works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror published by Australians in 2008 as nominated by members of Australian fandom.”

Best Short Story

* “Pale Dark Soldier”, Deborah Biancotti (Midnight Echo #1)
* “This Is Not My Story”, Dirk Flinthart (Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #37)
* “The Goosle”, Margo Lanagan (The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction, ed. Ellen Datlow)
* “Her Collection of Intimacy”, Paul Haines (Black: Australian Dark Culture Magazine #2)
* “Moments of Dying”, Robert Hood (Black: Australian Dark Culture Magazine #1)
* “Sammarynda Deep”, Cat Sparks (Paper Cities, ed. Ekaterina Sedia)
* “Ass-Hat Magic Spider”, Scott Westerfeld (The Starry Rift, ed. Jonathan Strahan)

Congratulations Cat!

The full list is available here.

A full list of winners is here.

UPDATE: Mercurio D. Rivera was gracious enough to point out these comments from the judges’ report:

“Long after reading, this is a story that returns to haunt the reader. From the very first word, ‘Sammarynda Deep’ drags you into a world both wonderfully exotic and strange, yet undeniably familiar in the emotions and ambitions that drive its inhabitants.”

Winners will be announced on January 24th.  Please wish her luck!

And what better gift for the Holidays than a nice, shiny copy of Paper Cities, eh?