Since 2016, I've been working on a beast of a graphic novel more or less exclusively. And, well, it's no easy undertaking.

Don't get me wrong, it's a thrill of a ride, and I am incredibly happy and thankful to be working on it, but... I am starting to lose my mind. I've never had to work on one singular thing for so long before. So every so often I get this itch to step away from it for just a minute to fiddle with something else. Something short-term with its end clearly in sight. So at the top of this year, I decided to make a project of it: one short story a month.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I'm a hardcore printhead, and would choose doing something tactile in the real world over something digital that lives online any day. However, I also long for the Internet’s promise as a legitimate medium for narrative. I think it's fair to say that it's worked well for audio and video narratives, but not so much for prose. I mean, sure, there are prose-focused platforms out there, but the vast majority of them don't provide for an ideal reading experience. They're often cluttered with unnecessary graphics or atrocious ads, sometimes right in the middle of the text even, completely disrupting one's emersion in the story.

So rather than rant about it in a blog post that no one will care about, I figured I'd try my hand at building a version of the kind of prose-driven website I'd like to see.

I also subscribe to Stewart Brand's notion that "information wants to be free". There's truth to that, otherwise there wouldn't be a "share" button on virtually every web service we use nowadays. People inherently want to share things with one another. And if I'm going to be frank: if it weren't for things like bit-torrent and the freewheeling piracy culture of my youth, there's absolutely no way I would've had access to the music, films, books, or comics I discovered in my formative years, all of which get big swaths of credit for making me the person I am today (i.e. punk-ass trouble-maker?).
 
Which is to say, it just didn't feel right to go the Patreon route or restrict any of the material published here behind a paywall of any sort, so it's all accessible for free. But I do ask those who have the means to toss a little something in the Tip Jar if you like what you read. This will help keep the lights on and fuel for the project (coffee) flowing. It will also help me compensate my very exploited editor, Mr. Dan Hill, for his masterly expertise.

When contemplating the prospect of launching this thing, I was first considering waiting till the completion of a year's worth of stories (twelve), but then I recalled the work of the 1930's Egyptian surrealist collective that went by the name Art and Liberty. Their activities were numerous, but of note was an exhibition held in Cairo, where rather than display all the art on opening night, they instead built towards the completion of the show on closing day.

What a thrill to see something still being constructed, its fruition coming to before your very eyes. That's what I wanted to go for.

Also, I do think there's some value in minimizing the delay between when a work is first born and when it is published. A lot of the time, the fiction we write is very much connected to the time and place it is written. Immediate publication allows such connections to come to light. It's a little odd that we live in an age where one can broadcast a live video with the tap of a button, yet the publication of prose still tends to be bogged down by submission processes, overt editorial input, and thematic considerations.

This is the Internet, folks. None of that should be necessary here.

The Internet is also partly why the stories you see here will –to a large degree– relate to Science Fiction. Aside, of course, from my love for the genre, the Internet has got to be the most sci-fi thing we've ever come up with as a species. It just makes sense that if the Internet were to serve as a vessel for any kind of storytelling, then Science Fiction ought to be way up there.

I should also mention that all the work published here is being released under an “Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike” license. What that means is creators are encouraged to create derivative works (perhaps use one of the stories as a starting point for your own, or as a backdrop, etc.), just so long as you give attribution to the source and release it non-commercially under a similar license.

Personally, it would bring me great joy to see other authors go about publishing in this fashion. And I cannot possibly be the only one who feels this way.

(Right?)

Thanks for stopping by,

Ganzeer
Denver, CO
April 24, 2018