Call for Submissions – Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop

The Basics

Autonomous Press seeks submissions of poetry, short fiction, and short memoir
pieces for an upcoming anthology, Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop.

Scheduled for publication in Spring 2022, this sixth volume of the Spoon Knife Anthology series continues to bring some of the best short format works by both established and new writers with a focus on queer, neurodivergent, and disabled voices.

Deadline for submissions is Thursday, December 31, 2020.

What We’re Looking For

Original work exploring the theme of Rest Stop. A product of mid twentieth century car culture and the US interstate highway system, a rest stop can be clean and welcoming. Or it might be filthy and frightening. Because you never know until you enter, the rest stop is a respite of last resort.

Think transitional spaces/times/experiences.
The space between where you are and where you will be.
Times in which the present has a self awareness of impermanence.
If desired, season with dirt and compromise, and garnish with implications of seediness.

The Editors

B. Allen is a memoirist who serves as CFO and Development Editor for Autonomous Press. Since the 1980’s, in venues ranging from indie weeklies to the Huffington Post, Allen has been writing highly personal stories of disability’s intersection with poverty, feminism, queer culture, and abuse.

J. S. Allen, PhD, is a neurodivergent writer of imaginary stories. By day he is a data scientist who dons pants as necessary and uses the power of statistics to make the world suck less for children in his community. By night the pants are gone and Dr. Allen is in front of his computer composing his life’s work, a sweeping fantasy epic called The Waters of Life and Death.

Format and Length

Fiction and Memoir: We’re looking 10,000 words or less of fully-polished prose, submitted in standard manuscript format (title page with contact info, double-spaced Times New Roman 12-point font, pages numbered with either title or author’s name in the header.)

Poetry: You may submit pieces of any length and style, provided they fit the theme of this collection.

Please submit no more than three pieces total.

All submissions must be in a Word-compatible format (.doc, .docx, .odt).

When and How to Submit

The submission deadline is Thursday December 31, 2020.

Authors will be notified of their acceptance or rejection by Sunday, February 28, 2021.

Payment for accepted submissions will be 1 cent per word, to be sent by check or PayPal during the second quarter of 2021.
Email all submissions to info@autpress.com.

When submitting your work, please put in the subject line one of the following:

“Spoon Knife 6 Submission – Fiction”
“Spoon Knife 6 Submission – Memoir”
“Spoon Knife 6 Submission – Poetry”

Please include a cover letter that clearly specifies the name under which you want to be credited, along with a 3-4 sentence bio of no more than 150 words written in the third person. The name and bio should be typed exactly as you want them to appear in the book.

Previous Anthologies in this Series

Q&A with Ada Hoffmann

We’re continuing the interview process with our awesome authors. Azzia Walker, our operations manager, got to know Ada Hoffmann, author of Monsters in My Mind and The Outside, which is coming in June 2019 from Angry Robot Books.

Q. What got you started with MONSTERS IN MY MIND?

A. I started publishing short fiction in 2010, and by 2015-ish I had an amount of it out there that I felt was a book’s worth. I always loved the idea of having a short fiction collection of my own, so I started experimenting with themes that could tie together big chunks of my work and with different ways of arranging the stories and poems.

When Dani Alexis Ryskamp beta read the manuscript for my novel THE OUTSIDE, she offered to publish it. I wanted (and, eventually, got) an agent and a bigger press for the novel, but I had been playing with the collection idea for a while at that point and had been struggling with where to send it, so I asked if we could do that instead. I liked the idea of publishing MONSTERS with a group of neurodivergent publishers who “got” my work.

I actually changed the entire story order for the NeuroQueer Books imprint. I asked myself: how did the stories and poems engage with the idea, literal or metaphorical or subtextual, of being neuroqueer? I knew what stories I wanted to start and end with, and between them I was able to order the works in a way that charted a satisfying path between different ways of engaging with that concept, like a meta-plot.

Q. Was there anything that surprised you about the stories or the characters as you got further in?

A. Not a lot – most of the stories were already polished and published before I assembled them. Even the new ones had already been through beta reading and revisions.

The surprises were mostly to do with how well the stories fitted together. I was surprised how much of my work I could fit into the structure I’d come up with, even if it had nothing to do with neurodiversity at first glance. It also surprised me which stories I ended up dropping. I had a couple of published stories that I think are great stories, and that even engage with neurodiversity and mental illness themes more directly than some of what made it in. But they didn’t fit the meta-plot – they contradicted what I felt like the meta-plot was overall trying to say. So I left them out. Maybe in a future collection!

Q. What do you want people to come away with after experiencing your work?

A. I hope people feel a sense of wonder. I want them to feel that they experienced some image or idea that was new to them, that their mind expanded a little bit, or that they’ve seen something from a different perspective. I also want them to be able to engage their emotions and have fun!

Q. What’s next for you?

My debut novel, THE OUTSIDE, is coming out in June from Angry Robot Books. It’s a space opera with elements of cosmic horror, featuring an #ownvoices autistic protagonist and other diverse, non-neurotypical characters. It’s also a queer book – the protagonist is a lesbian and her supportive girlfriend is a major character. There are very few straight characters, actually. I’m watching the buzz build and I’m VERY excited.

I’ve been struggling with burnout after finishing my PhD thesis, so I haven’t written as much new work as I’d like, but short fiction and poetry will always be there in some form. I have lots of ideas for THE OUTSIDE’s potential sequel, though it won’t be greenlit until we see how the first book does, and I have the beginnings of an unrelated novel involving dragons.

I also am continuing my Autistic Book Party project, a long-running review series that talks in depth about representations of autism in speculative fiction. Autistic Book Party is funded through Patreon; the reviews are free for everyone, but backers help choose which books are reviewed, along with some other goodies. If that’s of interest, you can check it out at https://www.patreon.com/ada_hoffmann.

Call for Submissions: Spoon Knife 5

The Basics

Autonomous Press seeks submissions of poetry, short fiction, and short memoir pieces for an upcoming anthology, Spoon Knife 5: Liminal.

Scheduled for publication in Fall 2020, this fifth volume of the Spoon Knife Anthology series follows The Spoon Knife Anthology: Tales of Compliance, Defiance, and Resistance (Spring 2016), Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber (Spring 2017), Spoon Knife 3: Incursions (Fall 2018), Spoon Knife 4: A Neurodivergent Guide to Spacetime (Fall 2019).

Deadline for submissions was Tuesday, December 31, 2019. You can join our email list to become notified when we start seeking submissions for Spoon Knife 6.

What We’re Looking For

limen: Latin, “threshold”

A liminality is a threshold, the place between here and there which is, in itself, both and neither. From it we get the word “subliminal” meaning, literally, “below the threshold of sensation.” A liminal space is a transitional zone. It is at the heart of a ritual or rite of passage, when one is no longer the thing they started as, but has yet to become the thing they will be. To stand at a liminal point is to occupy both sides of a boundary at once. Liminality can be disorienting, unsettling, ambiguous, and uncomfortable, but it can also be freeing, an existence without labels or boxes, or a means to a new becoming.

We are looking for fiction, poetry, and memoir that explores thresholds and liminalities of all kinds — including those not listed here. The work must further intersect with themes of neurodivergence, queerness, and/or the intersections of neurodivergence and queerness. Some examples might be:

  • racial or cultural liminality
  • the experience of occupying liminal space as an individual
  • the experience of collective or cultural liminal spaces, such as demimondes
  • rites of passage, including via formal ritual or ceremony, or as a transition between states of being, locations, moments in time or ages, statuses, or situations
  • sensory phenomena that occur at the threshold of sensation, perhaps sensed by some but not by others
  • metamorphosis or transformation
  • explorations into the subconscious or other borderland spaces
  • ghosts, entities out of phase with the material world, virtual entities, voices, or other characters that exist in threshold or liminal/subliminal spaces
  • doorways, gateways, and the literal and figurative passageways between here and there

The Editors

Spoon Knife 5: Liminal will be edited by Andrew M. Reichart and Dora M. Raymaker

Andrew M. Reichart is managing editor of Argawarga Press, an imprint of Autonomous Press dedicated to genre fiction. He is co-author, with Nick Walker, of the epistolary science fiction novel Insurgent Otherworld and the Weird Luck webcomic. He has also written four genre-blurring novels, Wallflower Assassin and the City of the Watcher trilogy, which will be re-released in new editions by Argawarga Press starting in 2019. For his day job Andrew helps run a small utopian tech firm, and he’s also an activist with a grassroots abolitionist project. He lives in California with his wife and a couple of dogs.

Dora M. Raymaker, PhD, is a scientist, writer, multi-media artist, and activist whose work across disciplines focuses on social justice, critical systems thinking, complexity, and the value of diversity. Dora is an Autistic/queer/genderqueer person living in Portland Oregon, conducting community-engaged research at Portland State University, knitting fractals, and communing with the spirit of the City. Dora’s work includes the novel Hoshi and the Red City Circuit and the short story “Heat Producing Entities” in Spoon Knife 3: Incursions.

Format and Length

Fiction and Memoir: We’re looking 10,000 words or less of fully-polished prose, submitted in standard manuscript format (title page with contact info, double-spaced Times New Roman 12-point font, pages numbered with either title or author’s name in the header.)

Poetry: You may submit up 5 pieces of any length and style, provided they fit the theme of this collection.

All submissions must be in a Word-compatible format (.doc, .docx, .odt).

When and How to Submit

As of Wednesday January 1, 2020 submissions are closed.

Authors will be notified of their acceptance or rejection by Friday, February 28, 2020.

Payment for accepted submissions will be 1 cent per word, to be sent by check during the second quarter of 2020.

Email all submissions to info@autpress.com.

When submitting your work, please put in the subject line one of the following:

    “Spoon Knife 5 Submission – Fiction”

    “Spoon Knife 5 Submission – Memoir”

    “Spoon Knife 5 Submission – Poetry”

Also, please include a cover letter that clearly specifies the name under which you want to be credited, along with a 3-4 sentence bio written in the third person. The name and bio should be typed exactly as you want them to appear in the book.

Q&A with Dora Raymaker

Azzia Walker, our new Operations Manager, had the great pleasure of interviewing Dora Raymaker, author of Hoshi and the Red City Circuit. Dora is a fabulous person to know and we recommend checking out more of her work.

Who do you want reading your books?

Most urgently, people like me. There are so few neurodivergent characters in literature–and of them, rarely are they heroes–and of those heroes, rarely are they portrayed outside of stereotypes. Rarely do they include the realities of our lives either, like the perils (and privileges) of passing, or the constant fight for person-ness and inclusion. I tell stories I want to read. I want them read by other people who wish, as I do, for realistic neurodivergent heroes, and for themes that trouble existing disability realities and narratives.

But also, I want my books read by everyone who enjoys literary science fiction and a weird, fun romp through cyber-fueled speculative worlds! I’m not playing to the mainstream, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be excellent to have broader readership.

What was your favorite scene to write?

Definitely the chase scene that happens about mid-way through the book. I love writing action scenes, particularly chase scenes. Sometimes I act them out. That one was extra-fun because it gave me a chance to run through a lot of Red City, and I really enjoy walking through the streets of that setting and experiencing it with Hoshi. During the scene, I had to both get Hoshi from one physical location to another, and bring her from baseline to total mental and physical exhaustion. So it was a fun writing craftsmanship challenge too.

What scene was the hardest to write, and why?

I wrote this story so long ago, I’m not totally sure anymore–the position of “hardest scene ever” is seared into my current memory as a particular scene from a different novel. For Hoshi though, possibly the Claudia’s apartment scene, which in the final book is scattered throughout the story but was originally one scene. That was structurally difficult–where to put what information and when? The other possible contender is the scene where Hoshi confronts the murderer, which remains the one part of the book I’m still not totally happy with. As to why that scene was hard, it’s because I feel like I never quite got grounded on the character of the murderer. It was “good enough” for the story, but not solid enough for me write without struggle.

What feeling do you want people to come away with?

Satisfaction at a story well-told, coupled with disappointment that it’s over and a desire for more stories with these characters, or in this world, or by me as an author. I want that feeling that I get when I read a good book, and turning the last page is a bitter-sweet sigh of satisfaction and yearning for more.

Tell us something that we wouldn’t guess about you.

When I was 17 I ran away from home with a friend. We made it all the way from Maine to Western Saskatchewan, and then back down into Eastern Montana, a distance of nearly 3,000 miles. That’s maybe guessable to anyone who knew me at the time, plus or minus some details, but the reason I was found was because a psychic who was sometimes used by the police back in Maine told my parents the name of a town which happened to be in the same area where the police picked us up. The Montana police would unlikely to have been on the lookout for us otherwise, and we’d have slipped away. So, yes, I was located by a police psychic. I was an actual X-File.

What’s in Spoon Knife 3?

Spoon Knife is Autonomous Press’ annual anthology of original stories by queer and/or neurodivergent authors. Spoon Knife accepts short fiction of any genre, plus memoir and the occasional poem. Each volume of Spoon Knife has a different team of editors and a different theme.

The 2018 Autumn Equinox saw the publication of Spoon Knife 3: Incursions, edited by Nick Walker and Andrew M. Reichart (who are also the co-creators of the Weird Luck stories, a growing body of interconnected speculative fiction tales).

So, what’s in Spoon Knife 3? Twenty unique and wonderfully strange pieces by twenty authors representing three generations of queer and neurodivergent literary talent. Let’s take a walk through the table of contents and see what each piece is about…

The Bob Show, by Jeff Baker (fiction)
A fugitive hiding out at his eccentric brother’s home discovers his brother’s TV picks up shows from another reality.

Future Dive, by Alyssa Gonzalez (fiction)
A hilarious but all-too-plausible glimpse of a future dominated by the gig economy.

9-5, by Eliza Redwood (poetry)
A short poem about soul-deadening office jobs.

A Twentieth-Century Comedy of Manners, by Old Cutter John (memoir)
An autistic software designer creates an unintentional disturbance in a corporate hierarchy.

Only Strawberries Don’t Have Fathers, by Judy Grahn (fiction)
Released from a psych ward and hired as a gardner, a sensitive soul becomes witness to the evolving relationships within a family of humans and a family of cats.

Stag, by RL Mosswood (fiction)
A depressed man is revitalized by an erotic encounter with the supernatural.

Life on Mars, by B. Allen (memoir)
A childhood suicide attempt leads to a revelation.

Black Dogs, Night Terrors, and Lights in the Sky, by Sean Craven (memoir)
How do you conduct yourself in the world, when your world is full of monsters and weird visitations?

The Trumpet Sounds, by Alexeigynaix (memoir)
How does one make sense of an encounter with a Mystery too big to fit within the bounds of language and rationality?

Vigilance, by Mike Jung (fiction)
An autistic superhero faces a world-destroying cosmic force.

Spacetime Dialectic, by N.I. Nicholson (poetry)
When you look in the mirror and catch a glimpse of an alternate version of yourself looking back at you, it can lead to some interesting dialogue.

Kill Your Darlings, by Verity Reynolds (fiction)
An alien secret agent, stalking a historical figure in an alternate timeline, learns that her mission has some unforseen complications.

B3: Or, How an Autistic Fixation from the Past Blew the Lid Off My Future, by Andee Joyce (memoir)
A fascination with an old Top 40 song sparks a life-changing creative awakening.

Who Is Allowed? by Alyssa Hillary (poetry)
Being autistic in academia means navigating a system that’s determined to exclude you.

Unworldly Love, by Steve Silberman (memoir)
A gay writer’s memoir of sexual awakening.

The New World, by Melanie Bell (fiction)
In a utopian culture of scholars without gender or sexuality, the gender and sexuality of outsiders becomes a controversial topic of study.

Heat Producing Entities, by Dora M. Raymaker (fiction)
Two young thieves from very different backgrounds have to figure out how to deal with each other when they both go after the same item.

Space Pirate Stowaway, by Andrew M. Reichart (fiction)
A powerful being trapped in the form of a cat stows away on a pirate ship that travels between universes — but there’s something else on board that’s far more dangerous.

The Scrape of Tooth on Bone, by Ada Hoffmann (fiction)
A timid lesbian robot mechanic who can channel the spirits of the dead gets caught up in the deadly intrigues of rival paleontologists.

Waiting for the Zeppelins, by Nick Walker (fiction)
Agent Smiley of the Reality Patrol finds himself in dire peril when his plan to stop Sigmund Freud from destroying London goes awry.

You can order Spoon Knife 3 direct from Autonomous Press, or from Amazon, or through your local bookstore.

 

Weird Luck Interview Part 4

Welcome to the final installment of this four-part Weird Luck interview series? In parts one, two, and three, press partners Andrew M. Reichart and Nick Walker talked about the origins of Weird Luck, their unique approach to worldbuilding, neurodivergence in the WL universe, and the expandable possibilities of the WL multiverse. In this week’s installment, you’ll read the backstory of the WL comic, plus Andrew and Nick reveal the future of WL and give us details about the Argawarga relaunch.

– N.I. Nicholson


Ian: Now I’m thinking about the recent discussion about the webcomic in this whole thread and wondering: at what point did you all decide to include and launch a webcomic in the Weird Luck, and what spurred the idea?

Nick: I bear the blame for the idea of doing a webcomic.

Comics were a central obsession for me throughout my childhood and teen years. I mean, I wasn’t just another kid who loved comic books; I was drawing comics before I could write, and while I was still in grade school I acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of comics — not just comic books but newspaper comic strips all the way back to the days of The Yellow Kid and Mutt & Jeff. 

In fact, Agent Sojac’s name comes from the nonsense phrase “Notary Sojac,” which regularly appeared on signs and such in the backgrounds of the old absurdist newspaper comic strip Smokey Stover. That’s what kind of comics geek I am.

But once I was out of high school, the struggle to survive as an autistic person with no financial resources or familial support derailed my plans to pursue a career in comics. Too busy just trying not to be homeless, and by the time I had enough stability in my life to make substantial creative projects viable I’d gotten sidetracked into other things. I got into writing eventually, but not back into creating comics.

Meanwhile, from 1996 to 2015, I was a core member of a group called Paratheatrical Research. The work of Paratheatrical Research involved using a combination of intensive physical movement work and trance states to access and forces in the personal and collective unconscious. Essentially doing deep Jungian work via the methods of experimental physical theatre.

Andrew got involved in Paratheatrical Research as well. In 2013, we were involved in some Paratheatrical Research work that focused on exploring the archetypal forces known as the Muses. When I started connecting with the Muses, they made it quite clear to me that it was time to get back to the creative dreams of my youth — writing fun weird speculative fiction, and making comics.

By that time, I’d become a fan of several webcomics, and really liked the medium — especially its DIY accessibility and the way it fostered regular reader/creator engagement.

So one day in the Spring of 2013, Andrew and I were walking to a Paratheatrical Research session together, and I proposed out of the blue that we collaborate on a webcomic. Of course, the idea that it would be part of the Weird Luck saga went without saying, because it was me and Andrew.

It took a while to get rolling. We realized that the two of us didn’t have time to both write and draw it, certainly not draw it at the level of skill we were envisioning, so we had to find an artist who was into the idea. Eventually, Andrew got the extraordinarily talented Mike Bennewitz on board — Mike was already the cover artist for Andrew’s Weird Luck novels.

Then we spent a while experimenting with what proved to be a false start. See, the main setting of the Weird Luck webcomic is the city-state of Tal Sharnis, which was created when an interdimensional disaster caused two cities in different universes to merge with one another into one reality-warped hybrid city (the disaster also tore both cities out of their native universes and transported them to the desolate chaotic wasteland of the Plateau of Leng). One of the two cities that got fused together in this disaster was also called Tal Sharnis, and before the disaster (which everyone now calls the Great Merger) it was located on Amarantis, a world that plays an important role in the Weird Luck saga. The other city was a version of late-20th-Century San Francisco (well, really the greater San Francisco Bay Area, including Oakland, Berkeley, the Marin headlands, and the Bay itself).

Well, the original plan was for the webcomic to take place in this version of San Francisco in the time shortly BEFORE the Great Merger. When it was still San Francisco, and still located on a version of modern-day Earth, but reality is starting to come apart at the seams a bit as the moment of the Great Merger slowly approaches.

We spent a bunch of time working on that story before we realized it wasn’t catching fire for us as a team. Mike wanted to draw exotic alien locations, and wanted some of the characters he drew to be nonhuman and/or too wildly exotic to blend in on 20th Century Earth. Andrew and I wanted a story that would connect more closely with Andrew’s novels, a story where we could bring in space pirates and that sort of thing.

So we went back to the drawing board, and in the end the result is the Weird Luck webcomic we’ve got today, which we’re having a great time with and which is proving to fit perfectly with the sort of Weird Luck prose stories we’re feeling inspired to write these days.

That prequel story in the pre-Merger Bay Area, though… that story is going to be told someday. I might do it as a second webcomic with a different artist who likes drawing modern-era city life, or maybe as a solo novel, somewhere quite a ways down the road.

Man, nothing about Weird Luck has a short answer…

Ian: Wow. That is pretty fascinating. That managed to answer two of the next follow-up questions I had planned. But your mention of the novels brings me to this question: Tell us a little about the origins of Argawarga Press. 

Andrew: In the late 90s, I figured I should grab some sorta unique domain name before they were all snatched up by ‘domain name trolls.’ I picked ‘argawarga.’ In Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, arga warga is onomatopoeia for the sound of being eaten alive by wild dogs. I read that book once and it changed my life. The word appeals to me because I’m a werewolf, I guess.

Now we’re turning a big corner, becoming an imprint of Autonomous Press, relaunching with the publication of our first non-Andrew book, Dora Raymaker’s Hoshi and the Red City Circuit.
– Andrew M. Reichart

Argawarga dot com was a Web 1.0 static HTML site that I wrote by hand. Basically a porto-blog, consisting of my writing and art. I wrote a couple of books, got an agent. He wasn’t able to get any traction with the books, bless him, partly because he wasn’t very experienced, and partly because they didn’t fit any mainstream market at the time. They’d be fine in the late 60s or early 70s, maybe, but they were far too skinny and genre-bendy for the 00s.

Not long after, though, self-publishing took a turn thanks to ebooks and print-on-demand. We now lived in a world where you didn’t run the risk of printing thousands of copies that sit in storage till you figure out how to move them. I’d had an interest in self-publishing forever, since the punk zines of the 80s, really. But two mentors inspired me to finally undertake it now: Micaela Petersen of Sto*Nerd Press and The Blunt Letters, and Clint Marsh of Wonderella Printed and the journal Fiddler’s Green. Their projects were very different from what I was proposing to do, but their gumption and vision made it seem perfectly reasonable to just, like, offer bound printed matter to the public.

So, I published my first two books under Argawarga Press. And then my third, and my fourth. And now we’re turning a big corner, becoming an imprint of Autonomous Press, relaunching with the publication of our first non-Andrew book, Dora Raymaker’s Hoshi and the Red City Circuit.

Ian: Without giving away too many spoilers, what do the both of you envision for the future of Weird Luck as well as the newly launched Argawarga imprint?

Nick: We’re going to keep on writing and publishing Weird Luck stories for a long time to come. We have a lot of story to tell, and we keep on generating more. As I noted earlier, what’s been published so far is the very small tip of a very big iceberg.

We’re in the early stages of co-writing a series of Weird Luck novels, which will initially be published in weekly installments on the Weird Luck website and will eventually become available in paperback from the Argawarga Press imprint. Insurgent Otherworld is the first of these collaborative novels; it will be followed by Gods of the Endless Plateau, and then others in the years to come.

In late spring of this year, Autonomous Press publishes Spoon Knife 3: Incursions, the third volume of the annual Spoon Knife literary anthology. Andrew and I were the editors for this volume, and, like the previous volume, this one features two new Weird Luck short stories — one from each of us. We aim to continue releasing new Weird Luck short stories in every future volume of Spoon Knife. 

The webcomic has been on hiatus for a bit, but new webcomic pages are in the works. We’re just getting into the part of the webcomic that introduces Smiley, one of the central characters in the Weird Luck saga. Readers already got to meet a much younger Smiley in my novelette “Bianca and the Wu-Hernandez,” which appeared in volume two of Spoon Knife. The middle-aged Smiley of the webcomic is even more troublesome. Middle-aged Smiley is also the protagonist of my upcoming story in Spoon Knife 3: Incursions. Smiley has a gift for making any situation a whole lot more complicated and chaotic than it needs to be, so we’re looking forward to springing him on Agent Sojac and the rest of the gang in Tal Sharnis.

Andrew: As for Argawarga Press, we’ve got a big couple of years ahead, with five Weird Luck titles forthcoming — re-releases of my four books in new paperback and ebook editions, plus Insurgent Otherworld. Then when we finish Gods of the Endless Plateau, Argawarga will publish it as well, probably in 2020.

We’ve also got books coming out that are (as far as we know) outside the Weird Luck Saga: the aforementioned Hoshi and the Red City Circuit by Dora Raymaker, and a sort of tangential prequel, Resonance, which may come out as soon as next year. And she’s got a direct sequel brewing, which will make Hoshi fans glad.

Finally, for folks who like rare collectible stuff, I guess I could mention that every year I make a limited edition zine/chapbook, Weird Luck Tales, that includes a couple of Weird Luck stories. There are still a few copies left of last year’s No. 5, featuring my story “Monsters” from Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber, plus “Things that Crawled from the Shadows,” which appeared on weirdluck.org. I made two limited editions of 99 copies each, one for the Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird, and one for NecronomiCon in Providence. I’m in the process of making the exclusive edition for participants in this year’s Outer Dark Symposium, and I’ll have a second limited edition for sale later in the spring. Weird Luck Tales No. 6 includes my story from Spoon Knife 3: Incursions, “Space Pirate Stowaway,” and the backup story “The Art Collector’s Dream Diary,” published on weirdluck.org this spring.

And I’ve got other Weird Luck stories in the works as well, which I’m submitting to various oddball genre markets. There’s lots of Weird Luck stuff yet to come.


Thanks for reading our Weird Luck interview series! We hope you’ve enjoyed this revealing look at the WL multiverse, the rich backstories behind it and its creators, and the exciting future that lays ahead. To make sure you don’t miss a post, like AutPress on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. While you’re at it, don’t forget to follow the Weird Luck Facebook page for even more WL updates!

 

Weird Luck Interview Part 3

Welcome to this third installment of the Weird Luck interview! If you haven’t already read parts one and two of this series, you can check them out in the previous blog posts. Previously, AutPress partners Nick Walker and Andrew M. Reichart discussed WL’s origins, worldbuilding, and collaboration. This week, you’ll read about how all the pieces — the novels, upcoming serials, and webcomics — all fit together.  

— N.I. Nicholson


Ian: Next, I’d like to ask about how all the pieces fit together in the Weird Luck universe, especially so that newcomers just getting into Weird Luck understand. I (think) I get how the webcomics, Andrew’s previous novels, and Insurgent Otherworld fit together, but how would you summarize or explain this to someone whose first exposure is to only one of these: say, they’ve only read the webcomic, or they’ve only read City of the Watcher?

Nick: The Weird Luck saga is an ever-growing web of interconnected stories. Most of the stories are in prose form, except for the webcomic — though in the future there’ll be more stories in comic form with various artists.

Most pieces of the Weird Luck saga are designed so that they can be enjoyed as standalone stories by anyone who’s never read any of the other pieces. But the idea is that the more pieces you read, the richer your experience, as you get more and more sense of how all the pieces fit together into a bigger picture.

There are aspects of the big picture — mysteries and hidden plot arcs — to be discovered and figured out as one puts together more of the pieces and stumbles on hints within various stories. That’s part of the fun for both us and the reader.

You can read just one piece — just the webcomic, or just one short story in an anthology somewhere — and if we’ve done our job right, that piece is perfectly enjoyable on its own. But we’re always hoping people will want to follow us down the rabbit hole and keep reading more pieces, getting deeper into the intricacies of the bigger tales we’re weaving out of the various pieces.
— Nick Walker

If you think of any saga made up of a series of stories — the Harry Potter books, for instance — there’s a bigger picture that emerges over time; puzzling things that eventually fit into place as you read more of the books. But one thing that makes the Weird Luck saga unusual and brain-twisting is that it’s non-linear. A new reader can start reading with any piece, and read the pieces in any order. And we’re not writing and publishing the pieces in the order in which they take place.

Also, the overall Weird Luck saga isn’t centered around just one single central character or small group of characters. Different characters have their different story arcs. You read any given piece and you’ll get part of the long-term arc of that piece’s central character — and probably also part of the long-term arcs of various other characters. A character who’s central in one piece might be a minor character in a bunch of other pieces. That’s part of the fun, part of the puzzle. Figuring out the story arcs, motives, etc., of the various recurring characters, based on the glimpses you get of them in various stories that take place at various points in their lives. There are characters and events that are important to the big picture but that one only gets to learn about one glimpse at a time in the course of reading stories that center around other things.

You can read just one piece — just the webcomic, or just one short story in an anthology somewhere — and if we’ve done our job right, that piece is perfectly enjoyable on its own. But we’re always hoping people will want to follow us down the rabbit hole and keep reading more pieces, getting deeper into the intricacies of the bigger tales we’re weaving out of the various pieces.

One of the most interesting things about doing it this way is that different readers will have different experiences depending on where they start reading. If you start with the webcomic, you encounter Bianca and you’re like, “Whoa, what’s her deal? Seems like something’s kind of creepy and sinister about her? What’s her species like? How’d she get her job? How’d she lose those fingers?” And if you keep reading the webcomic over time, you’ll eventually learn everything you need to know about her. Or, you could read my novelette “Bianca and the Wu-Hernandez” in the Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber anthology, to find out the truth without having to wait for the webcomic to get to it. On the other hand, if you read “Bianca and the Wu-Hernandez” before you read the webcomic, then your experience of Bianca showing up in the webcomic is entirely different, because you already know her backstory, so it’s sort of like watching the first season of Hannibal, where the viewer already knows Hannibal is a serial killer but the other characters in the show don’t know it yet.

One example of what I mean about story arcs emerging a piece at a time is the Witch-Queen of Gomothrax. The Witch-Queen is a very important character in the Weird Luck saga. She’s had a major influence on the big-picture-level story. But she hasn’t yet appeared in person in any published piece. Instead, readers are getting little hints. You see Gomothrax, her home, at the end of Andrew’s City of the Watcher trilogy, but you don’t get to meet her. She’s mentioned in Insurgent Otherworld, in a letter written by Cordy’s friend Chiku, a researcher of occult artifacts, who reveals some interesting things about her history. And near the end of “Bianca and the Wu-Hernandez,” we learn in passing that Smiley grew up on fairytales in which the Witch-Queen was a character. More of her story will emerge in the future, one small fragment at a time.

As for how the largest pieces we’ve published so far (or are about to publish) fit together chronologically…

  • The biggest single chunk of story so far is Andrew’s City of the Watcher Trilogy,which consists of the novels Weird Luck in the City of the Watcher, Time-Traveling Blues in the City of the Watcher, and Cannibal-King. Because it’s a time-travel story, all three books of the trilogy take place more or less at the same time.
  • Andrew’s story “Monsters,” which appears in the Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamberanthology, takes place about 6 months after the end of Cannibal-King. 
  • Insurgent Otherworld begins about 24 hours after the end of “Monsters,” and takes place over the course of a couple of months.
  • The opening scene of the Weird Luck webcomic takes place about 9 months after the end of Cannibal-King and just a few weeks after the end of Insurgent Otherworld. 
  • Next year, right after we finish serializing Insurgent Otherworld on the Weird Luck website we’ll begin publishing our next collaborative novel, Gods of the Endless Plateau, in weekly installments on the site. Gods of the Endless Plateau begins immediately after the end of Insurgent Otherworld, and takes place over a long enough period of time that parts of it will be concurrent with the first few volumes of the webcomic.
  • My novelette “Bianca and the Wu-Hernandez” takes place 28 years before the opening scene of the webcomic.
  • Andrew’s novel Wallflower Assassin takes place sometime after the first several planned volumes of the webcomic.

Stay tuned for the final part of this interview series! Next week, you’ll read about how the Weird Luck webcomic came into being, plus Nick and Andrew chat the future of WL and the relaunch of Argawarga Press as part of the Autonomous family. To make sure you don’t miss a post, like AutPress on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. While you’re at it, don’t forget to follow the Weird Luck Facebook page for even more WL updates!

Weird Luck Interview Part 2

Greetings, readers! If you’ve read the first part of this four-part Weird Luck interview with our press partners Andrew M. Reichart and Nick Walker, you’ve read a little bit about the origins of the concept. (And if you haven’t, you can go read it in last week’s post.) In this week’s installment, they discuss worldbuilding, the expansiveness of the WL multiverse, and collaborative possibilities.

— N.I. Nicholson


Ian: I’ve read various materials and guides to world-building, including more recently N.K. Jemisin’s Worldbuilding 101 seminar notes. With that in mind, what approaches did you take to world building when it came to Weird Luck?

Andrew: Well, I reckon our story’s not typical. Our shared multiverse has continuity going all the way back to the tabletop roleplaying games and stories we collaborated on in high school. In fact, I can trace narrative continuity back to the first D&D game I ran when I was 12. It all ties in, and we’ve invented dozens of worlds along the way.

I was interested in alternate worlds ever since I read the Narnia books and Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion stuff. So that sort of interdimensional travel was a staple of my RPGs in junior high and high school. We co-created the Reality Patrol in high school. Characters have appeared who go back that far — I won’t name names, but Nick might want to. In any event, our world-building has been an organic process over decades, drawing inspiration from innumerable sources.

To point to a few specific sources: my City of the Watcher trilogy is a bit of a satire of portal fantasy, indicting it as a colonialist trope. “Ooh, primitive world in crisis, I the White Man from Earth will set things right for you and reign over your poor primitive selves!” As we say in California, “Yeah no.”

What we see of the magical world of Kaios is awful. An oppressive military dictatorship, a racist class hierarchy, a genocidal war against tribal peoples, and a blatantly complicit middle class (this last item being a critique we don’t see nearly enough of in world-building, IMHO). A hierarchy well deserving of destruction.

However, there’s also an indictment of revolution in the trilogy, insofar as (spoiler) everything goes fucking awry. This isn’t because I oppose, per se, militant self-defense against the status quo up to and including its violent destruction. I just think it’s realistic to acknowledge that, unlike the heroic battles of good vs. evil in epic fantasy, in real life this is always an awful process, likely to fail, and almost certain to instate a new status quo that is also awful.

Changing gears to our most recent example of worldbuilding: many of my contributions to the city of Tal Sharnis are rooted in recent real-world political concerns of mine. Patterns of gentrification & displacement, abetted by capital, city government, and police violence. The dehumanization that underlies policing, incarceration, and punitive models of “justice.” Pitfalls of grassroots organizing, including disorganization, infighting, co-opting, scenesterism, bad strategy, and ineffective tactics. Organizing against small-scale fascist groups which on the one hand may pose credible and growing threats, yet whose ratio of “spectacle” to “actual harmfulness” is the inverse of the dull yet massively deadly status quo. Etc.

Things like these get morphed in their translation from our world into Tal Sharnis, taking on a flavor and a life of their own as they draw influence from the local conditions. So, as an example, the True Guardians of Bifrost are earthling-supremacist, not white-supremacist. Which has its own unique implications, since the two are not deeply analogous. My intent is not to create direct satire of things in our world, as a simplistic 1:1 substitution. On the contrary, I present analogies as tools for thinking about how power operates, how the status quo preserves itself, and what sort of political effort actually results in substantive change, rather than just tokens.

Nick: Yeah, we’re definitely atypical. We’ve been collaborating on the shared worldbuilding project that evolved into the Weird Luck saga since we met in the Princeton High School art room when we were both fifteen. And, as Andrew said, it all ties in — every single bit of fiction and art and gaming we’ve done, since we met and in some cases since before we met. Andrew can trace narrative continuity back to his first D&D game, and I can trace the genesis of Agent Sojac back to a peculiar recurring daydream I had when I was in elementary school.

We ran some epic roleplaying games in our late teens and on and off through our twenties. Running roleplaying games — the old-school, tabletop, pencil & paper kind — is something I highly recommend for anyone doing worldbuilding. Readers are going to poke at your fictional worlds to see if they have real depth and coherence, and one of the best possible ways to prepare for that is to invite a gang of roleplaying gamers into your world as beta-testers, to poke at it first.

I don’t recall any moment where either of us said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if all these game worlds and stories and stuff we’re creating all interconnected as part of one intricate multiverse.” It was just somehow obvious from the start that that’s what we were going to do, that anything we created should be integrated into a single ever-more-complex canon. The more interconnections, the more it suited our synchronicity-oriented aesthetic.

Andrew and I think very differently from one another. Not in the sense of disagreeing, because we largely agree as far as opinions and whatnot go, but in the sense that his mind works very differently than mine. Or mine works very differently than his? At least one of those statements is true. And that’s an asset, because each of us tends to focus on different aspects of the worlds and settings and characters and stories we’re building.

Andrew’s got a strong focus on the sociopolitical, and I’ve got a strong focus on the psychological. Andrew has a cinematic imagination —his books really demand to be made into high-budget action movies. I have a mind that can keep track of enormously complex continuity and how it all fits together, and I get fascinated by the intrigues and chemistry between characters.

So Andrew will come to me with a vision of some story he wants us to tell, something that sounds like a pitch for a really interesting action movie. And I’ll immediately see how it can be tweaked to make it fit in perfectly with all of our existing narrative continuity, and a dozen ways that we can create connections between this story and other stories. And so the canon grows, ever more rich and complex and ever more cohesive and intricate in its interconnections.

Readers are going to poke at your fictional worlds to see if they have real depth and coherence, and one of the best possible ways to prepare for that is to invite a gang of roleplaying gamers into your world as beta-testers, to poke at it first.
— Nick Walker

In our collaborative novel, Insurgent Otherworld — which we recently finished publishing in serial form on Patreon, and which we’re about to start re-serializing in weekly installments on the Weird Luck website so everyone can read it — you can really see our styles interacting and complementing one another. Andrew’s parts of the book are full of the street-level politics of Tal Sharnis: the warfare between fringe groups like the True Guardians of Bifrost and the Unravelers Curse-Coven, the police brutality of the Monster Hunters, the grassroots resistance to a gentrification plan by a predatory development company. My parts of the book deal mostly with the way the leadership of the local bureau of the Reality Patrol responds to these events in the city, and how Cordy and Bianca each find ways to fit in once they’re transferred to that bureau to help respond to those events, and the contrast between Cordy’s naive enthusiasm and Bianca’s devious manipulations. And by the end of the story, Andrew’s threads of it and mine come together seamlessly.

I may have drifted more into talking about our collaborative synergy than about worldbuilding, but for us those may not be clearly separable.

Ian: Wow. When I started reading the Insurgent Otherworld installments on Patreon, I could maybe sense a little bit that what was happening with Weird Luck was a sort of long-term collaborative synergy that’s been in the works for several years. As an outside observer, it seems to me like a rather organic process. I also loved how RPing, particularly D&D, factored into Weird Luck’s backstory and love your suggestion to writers to allow roleplaying gamers to beta-test their fictional worlds. 

Here’s my next question: How does your creation/expansion of the Weird Luck universe encourage crossovers/linkages between Weird Luck and other universes (Verity Reynolds’ Non-Compliant Space, for example)? In other words, how do you foresee that Weird Luck’s structure and artifacts might allow like-minded authors to forge stories that take place in its universe? 

Andrew: Well, the simple answer is: there’s a hypothetically infinite multiverse, with an unlimited number of ways to get from one world to another. There’s tech and sorcery and magical beings — in fact, somewhere there could very well be any tech or magic that anyone might wanna come up with. Does some new idea destabilize the status who? Not a problem; there is no real interdimensional status quo. Even the Reality Patrol varies from one place to another, sometimes so much so that branches may be at odds or even unrecognizable. The multiverse is a chaotic mess.

So, anything can be “canon.” And frankly Nick and I can probably integrate anything… ’cause we’ve been doing exactly that for decades. We’re masters of retcon (especially Nick truth be told). Hell, the party in my eighth grade D&D game had a frickin’ spaceship. That’s… not exactly in the rules, haha.

Nick: We’re excited about other authors and comic creators and such referencing and playing with the Weird Luck canon, as long as they check in with us about it first and become collaborators rather than appropriators.

At present, Verity Reynolds, Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon, and some mysterious person named N.I. Nicholson all have open invitations to explicitly tie their stories in with the Weird Luck canon. That might happen in a small way — just small mentions and references, like if a character in a story by one of those authors says, “Don’t do that, you’ll bring the Reality Patrol down on us” — or it might involve more elaborate crossovers. Either way, we have understandings with all three of those authors that their fictional universes and ours are part of the same big multiverse and canon. We’re looking forward to bringing even more creators into this conspiracy.

Verity Reynolds is the first author with whom we’ve started collaborating on significant crossover stuff, where characters from her stories come into ours and vice-versa. I love that sort of thing. It definitely requires some discussion in advance — but that’s a feature, not a bug, because discussions of that sort are fun and tend to generate all sorts of story and character ideas for all the authors involved.

We’ve already referenced Reynolds’ Non-Compliant Space canon in small ways in Weird Luck stories, like Cordy’s brief mention of Niralans in one of the letters she writes in Insurgent Otherworld. Very soon, Autonomous Press will publish Spoon Knife 3: Incursions, the third volume of the annual Spoon Knife literary anthology. Andrew and I are the editors of this volume, and we’re each contributing a Weird Luck story to it. Verity Reynolds’ short story in Spoon Knife 3, entitled “Kill Your Darlings,” features a Reality Patrol agent as one of the central characters and is the first major crossover story between her Non-Compliant Space stories and the Weird Luck saga.

I also have a Weird Luck novel in the works, featuring Bianca, which because of my other writing commitments probably won’t be completed and published for another six or seven years. But when it finally appears, it will include an appearance by Aqharan Bereth, one of the major antagonists in the Non-Compliant Space stories. My conversations with Reynolds about Bereth’s history with Bianca generated all sorts of fun ideas about both characters. So we’re looking forward to more of that sort of thing, with Reynolds and other authors.

Definitely important to check in with creators if you’re going to use any of their actual characters. But the Reality Patrol is huge   — one could put Reality Patrol agents into any story and they might be from a branch of the Patrol that operates somewhat differently from the branches you see in the stories by me and Andrew.

Somewhere down the road, I’d love to produce some anthologies where we invite a bunch of authors we know to write stories explicitly set in the Weird Luck universe —say, a book of Reality Patrol short stories written by half a dozen different authors. But we’ll want to publish a lot more of our own work first, so that potential contributors and collaborators have a better sense of the Weird Luck universe. Because so far, the bits of the saga that we’ve published are only a tiny tip of the iceberg.


Stay tuned for part three, where Andrew and Nick discuss how all the pieces in Weird Luck fit together. To make sure you don’t miss a post, like AutPress on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. While you’re at it, don’t forget to follow the Weird Luck Facebook page for even more WL updates!