Screenshot of forthcoming Kickstarter:

In a few hours, Ghostwoods Books will launch a Kickstarter to fund our 2014/2015 list.

Since we're all friends here, can I tell you about my vision for this project?

Secretly, or maybe not so secretly, Tim has been letting me do most of the running of Ghostwoods. I don't want to do it all on my own. I need his experience. But I'm learning very quickly and trying to move ahead, to discover new ways of doing things.

I want us to make a great small publishing house that supports the writers it publishes in various ways, including paying them fairly, of course. Protecting their rights to their own work as much as possible. I'd like us to provide all the benefits of any good publisher, like helping our writers network with other writers, with editors, with other publishers, with agents. Also many writers who come to us don't have much experience in publishing. So they don't know basic nuts and bolts stuff. This stops them from looking professional when they put themselves and their work out there to bigger publishers and agents. One of our hopes is that we can provide information and training to help writers reach their potential, something a big publisher just doesn't have time to do.

I also want to figure out things like emergency loans or even grants to writers in crisis eventually. I'm sure we'll come up with some other ideas as we go.


Screenshot:

We do care about being good. I personally actually love this work. I love helping other writers transform their drafts into publishable quality work. I love the collaboration. I put myself on the line with every book.

We can dedicate ourselves to this, but we still need money to get it up to its potential. Large and medium publishers have deep back lists that continue to make money for them. We need to build up to that. We have a great team and we're ready to move forward.

Feels like jumping into the deep end of the pool. Exciting but scary.

I will not kid you. There are days when the world seems impossibly difficult. But then, the rest of you show me how fortunate I am.

I watch a video of a baby born deaf getting his first hearing aid at seven weeks old. I watch the look of wonder on his face as he hears for the first time. I watch five or six times, and then I send it to my parents. (My dad has lost the hearing in one ear due to a benign tumor that grew on his hearing nerve, and a large percentage of the hearing in the other ear due to not protecting his ears when he thought himself invincible as a young man. Now he wears a sophisticated hearing aid.)

Then I watched a video of a man with ALS doing the ice bucket challenge, struggling to breathe and talk and swallow. Struggling. But also laughing. And expressing gratitude.

Then I read on twitter about a trans woman's rental deposit on a sublet being taken by the man she rented from, her calls unreturned. She resigned herself to being homeless for a while. Her friends volunteered their couches.

Maybe that's our great strength. We keep going when things go wrong. We don't give up.

I feel proud to be among you, those whose path is difficult. You are my inspiration. For you, I will strive to train my patience, my humbleness, my helpfulness.

For you, I will keep going on the darkest days. With gratitude. For even at the worst of times, I am fortunate.

He's trying to take over the world.

I've felt compelled to do a bit of digging about Lovecraft's racism, since the new anthology I put together is a tribute to his work.

I did know, though only by report, that Lovecraft had problematic racial views. I didn't really know the extent of them until I started poking around. We do not honor his racial biases with our modern cosmic horror writing. In fact, because his work is in the public domain, we are now able to (perhaps ironically) purposefully write 'Lovecraftian' fiction that benefits from the strangeness of Mr. Lovecraft's ideas while deliberately choosing a neutral view of race. [Or maybe this is too strong a statement. We don't deliberately choose it. We're just not racist, so it doesn't come up.]

When I look back at what he actually wrote or said about race, I am mortified.

When I was a kid, I lived in a very racially divided place. Maybe it's the way of kids, some instinct that has to be beaten or taught out of them, but by instinct I felt that this was wrong and inexplicable. I had many arguments with elders about race, in spite of threats. I remember trying to find books that would support my view of equality and because of where I lived, I found the opposite. My view of interracial marriage as completely fine and essentially just like any other marriage was completely unsupported. The most neutral view I could find in a book (in a library obviously controlled by people determined to reinforce their own racial biases) said that it would create problems because it wasn't culturally acceptable and therefore if you were willing to do it, there must be something psychologically wrong with you.

I was troubled by this, but it didn't influence my behavior or thinking. In this area, I had a strong sense of what was right and I never felt swayed from it. For this reason, I find it hard to forgive the kind of race based comments Lovecraft made.

Regardless of those comments, the eerie, atmospheric  quality of his writing has influenced the course of literature. Even if you never read his work, you are likely only a few degrees of influence away from it. We have the opportunity now to take what was influential about his work and utilize it to make new art that doesn't have a racist stigma attached to it.

It's a step toward what we have to do still in the world, as we are reminded by recent events. We must learn how to take what works in our world, or in our literature, what we want to keep as modern and upright, and what we want to set aside as lessons for what we don't want to carry forward.

I've been thinking about anthologies in a time where short stories have lost much of their popularity. 

Writing shorts is a different skill from writing novels. I guess reading sjhort stories is also a different skill from reading longer fiction. Reading a novel requires patience, but that is made up for, if the book is good, by immersion in the story. But what if you don't have the time or patience to read a novel at the moment? That's the moment to read a short story.

Only now there's the internet. So all short attention span moments are devoted to email or Twitter or Facebook.

Why do publishers publish anthologies? Or, a question I can answer wtih more assurance: Why does Ghostwoods Books publish anthologies? It's not for the money. It's fo the authors. It's an opportunity for us to meet and work with new authors. It's an opportunity for us to help authors network with other authors. Sometimes new deals or collaborations are struck that way.

It's also an opportunity for us to show the quality and care we put into our books. We have  very little control over what gets submitted to us on the novel front. As a small publisher, we're in a kind of Catch 22, where most of the best books are submitted to larger publishers with more immediate money to spend on them, and more clout to get them seen by audiences. We have to work up to that. But in the meantime, we need to publish books to advance.

It's also fun, as an editor, to work on short fiction. There's some art to putting together an anthology, beyond just deciding which stories to take. There's the ordering, to create a certain pacing to the book. In a themed anthology like you want to avoid too many similar stories. But also, you might have a particular slant you want the stories to take.