Special Entry: Flytrap

Well, we sent out the guidelines last night, so it appears Heather and I (collectively, Tropism Press) have jumped into the sea of the small press with only a tiny paper boat to keep us from becoming sharkfood.

That's right. We're doing a 'zine. It's called Flytrap.

First thing's first: The premiere issue is invite-only, mostly because Heather and I are both somewhat busy with other projects right now, and we want to limit the submissions we receive. We aim to premiere at World Fantasy in 2003, which is a long time away -- which gives us lots of first-issue screw-up time built in. We have sufficient desktop publishing mojo that actually putting the 'zine together shouldn't be too time-consuming (although once you become a small press publisher, it seems you're suddenly more prone to hard drive failures, a suspiciously high incidence of meteor strikes, and having your local Post Office get flooded, but let's not speak of such dark things), but we'll be trying different things with layout (though Flytrap already has elements of a "look" -- we've been thinking about this for a good long time) and editorial will take a lot of time, especially since we want our first issue to be as perfect and awesome and cool as possible.

What I'm trying to say is, please, please don't be offended if we didn't ask you to submit to this first issue. Hell, odds are good you were on our long list, which we cut down brutally to a more manageable size before sending out guidelines last night. There are lots of writers we love and admire who didn't get asked this time. If we don't get enough good stuff as our deadline approaches, we may contact more people, or even throw open the doors to general submissions. Regardless, issue #2 will be open to submissions from everyone, and we'll probably start reading for that next summer sometime.

Maybe we should've kept quiet about this a little longer, but we expect Flytrap to be a big part of our lives, and we want to talk about it in our journals! What we're *not* doing is announcing ourselves to the various market-report resources, or posting our guidelines anywhere, or going on about the in potentia coolness of our 'zine on various newsgroups -- there's not even a Flytrap section in my Tropism Press pages yet, and won't be for a while. Plenty of time for that after the first issue is put together and we're ready to start reading for the second. Patience, grasshoppers. (It occurs to me that, as co-editor of a 'zine called Flytrap, it is perhaps not entirely reassuring to refer to potential submitters/readers as "grasshoppers.")

Here's a few details: We expect/plan/hope to publish twice yearly, spring and autumn (practically speaking, we'll try to have issues out in time for WisCon and World Fantasy Con -- any excuse for a party, right? But the first issue is aimed for World Fantasy 2003, as I said). We pay dismally, but we pay. We're an editorial duocracy, with Heather handling fiction for the first issue, and me handling poetry, and us splitting everything else (non-fiction, art, comix, etc.) -- we may switch those duties around in the future. We're looking into various options and opportunities for distribution, review coverage, etc.; ideally, people other than our mothers will read this 'zine, though we don't expect to ever reach a particularly vast readership, and our wild blue-sky economic goal is to someday have an issue break even. It'll be your basic paper-and-staple-and-cardstock publication, but it should be pretty attractive. We'll publish fiction (slipstream/ literary/ experimental/ etc., mostly), poems, comix, reviews, some art, and assorted non-fiction on a variety of topics -- we really love essays, articles, and opinion pieces, so there'll probably be a fair bit of that. Yeah, it's another low-paying slipstream 'zine. It's what the world needs now. Having edited a bit for other people (in high school, in college, for Speculon, Star*Line, Clean Sheets), Heather and I are looking forward to having a voice in every single step of the process. There's a certain freedom to just editing -- it's not as much work if you don't have to do production and mailing and so forth, you know? -- but there's also the annoyance of having things outside your control, that you can't do anything about, that go wrong. Which won't be the case with Flytrap. If it's good, it's because we made it good. If it sucks, it's because we made it suck.

Let's hope it doesn't suck.

That's a war cry if I ever wrote one.

I guess I could write some manifesto about how we want to shake up the literary establishments both inside the genre and out and so forth, but that's not really the motivation -- we just want to publish some weird cool shit, provide an outlet for good work that might not otherwise have one, be whimsical, be challenged, and have fun. Heather and I have both dreamed of running a 'zine for years. Now we get to do it. That's manifesto enough for now.

Buy a chapbook! $2.75! Whoo! And watch this space for future Tropism Press offerings...