L.D. Lewis's Blog

I am currently scarce and battling burnout (my body let me know before I knew) but hope to be recovered in time for some festivities next month!

I will be live and in color at this year’s WorldCon in DC from December 15-20. I will also be in a mask (and probably in my room/elsewhere in the city oftentimes) so good luck finding me. But if you can, say hi. I promise I don’t typically bite. I’m going to try and make this a relaxing trip and not one where I’m studying the event for ways to improve a hybrid experience. If I can pull it off, it will be a feat. Not unlike the con itself, I’m sure.

Please note that I am not the Main Character of these panels, but I’ve decided against listing my copanelists in case someone drops out or doesn’t want that information publicized yet. You can view the full schedule of DisConIII events here.

SCHEDULED PANELS AND SUCHLet’s Judge a Book by Its Cover

What makes a good speculative fiction book or magazine cover? How can you give good art direction to help the artist succeed? How do we feel about eye-catching covers that show scenes that aren’t actually in the book? Our artists and publishers cover the subject in as much detail as 50 minutes will allow!

In which my experience as an Art Director is relevant. Fun fact: this is the panel with the most BIPOC on it with me.

Thursday 12/16 2:30PM ET

Public Hugo Finalist Reception

This public reception provides a chance for members to meet the Hugo Award finalists and honor the winners from ConZealand.

Exactly what it sounds like.

Thursday 12/16 5:00PM ET

The Small Press Takeover of Short Fiction

There was a time, long ago, when short fiction had to be published in one of the “big three” magazines to get popular attention and critical acclaim. The rise of magazines like Clarkesworld, Uncanny, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among many others, make markets of today a much more level playing field. We’ll talk about what’s changed and why, and what it means for the state of speculative fiction.

In which I either get shouty or sly about the common commentary on the field itself. Which way will it go? Idk but get excited. I am the token on this panel.

Friday 12/17 4:00PM ET

Bad Kidneys and Other NFTs

The perils of being on the internet have a tendency to create an infinite number of awful rabbit holes to fall into. Our panelists will discuss ways to avoid becoming Twitter’s main character, tools to steer clear from bad takes, and general ideas on good literary citizenship. All in the face of problematic favs and infinite bad actors in addition to the rest of the world’s ills.

Yelling about Twitter but not on Twitter. I love everyone on this panel.

Friday 12/17 5:30PM ET

The Magnificent Novella

Novellas are thriving. Benefitting from the work of small presses and the opportunities of digital magazines, the form has received a new lease on life. These authors will discuss the novella in terms of craft and form, in regards to their own work, and the growing landscape of novellas produced both by the lovely folks at Tor and elsewhere.

In which I continue riding the popularity of AROS (cries a little) to explain why novellas are better than your favorite non-novella format for storytelling. I am the token on this panel.

Saturday 12/18 1:00PM ET

The Hugo Award Ceremony

I’m nominated in two categories, so I’ll be there, but we’ll see if you see me! Both FIYAH and FIYAHCON 2020 are nominated for Best Semiprozine and Best Related work, respectively. More info here 

Saturday 12/18 8:00PM ET

Kaffeklatsch (sp?) with L. D. Lewis

For those who don’t know, a kaffeklatsch is apparently a small meeting and chat with a host (in this case, me) over coffee/assorted beverages. What we talk about might be up to you. Who knows! It’ll be an adventure.

Sunday 12/19 11:30AM ET

See you out there, from a respectful, healthy, fully-vaccinated distance!

It’s that time of year again! Was 2021 somehow more absurd than 2020 for anyone else? I’ve had new, good things: two Hugo nominations, ran my first Nebula Conference and didn’t break anything or get fired, started working with Lambda Literary, adopted two extremely photogenic kittens, started on my Electric Mayhem sleeve… But also I can’t tell what day it is half the time and feel vaguely dehydrated whenever I think about the concept of free time. Maybe that’s just 35.

I’ve been disappointed with my writing output this year. Granted it has more to do with the amount of time I’ve allotted to it in the midst of my community projects, but I’m disappointed all the same. It’s been hard to shake the global/national horrors of the last two years, in which I coped by developing new projects that might spark joy for the people I observed needing it. I’ve entered applications for a number of grants designed to assist with writing or buying time to write, but I’ve been denied three times so far, all of the rejections personalized and attached to invitations to do more community work. A curious phenomenon. So having to contend with the idea that my labor on others’ behalf is both of more value and worthy of more encouragement than the art I create, has done my head in a bit. I’ll just have to take the next year to center my art on my own. With that in mind, I hope this list becomes longer in 2022 than it has been the past two years, and I hope you were able to enjoy at some point what I did manage to put out.

It’s been quite a year for my Patreon offerings, as the two pieces I published this year were first featured in some form there. I have no true trunked stories yet! Publishing is often a matter of timing.

To the (very short) list!

FROM WITCH TO QUEEN AND GODArtwork by Nilah Magruder

A vignette for her character in my current duology project, this is an origin story for Ursla, the witch who steps into the seas to fill the void the old gods left behind. Mermaids Monthly published it in January 2021 and made it their cover piece with stunning illustration by the incomparable Nilah Magruder.

4869 words

WHERE TO READ

Mermaids Monthly #1 (Free)

Far be it from her to give a damn, but if she wanted to become more than a witch, more than the sea queen, she needed the reverence of Men. Becoming a deity was a question of politics. So she would see them freed and they would have her and no other god to thank for it.

DIZZY IN THE WEEDS

A piece from my San Guin universe, this Dizzy Carter story is part of Neon Hemlock’s “Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness” collection. If you’d like to queer up your various ballots, you can do so from this single, hefty volume.

Short Story, 6967 words

(Unfettered Hexes would be eligible for Best Anthology/Collected Works and wherever one might celebrate the gay things)

WHERE TO READ

Buy Unfettered Hexes

The Colorman himself was a dapper telephone pole of a man, almost impossibly tall and attractively dark with impeccable taste in tailoring. He was most often seen publicly in the form of massive technicolor graffiti murals styled by devoted disciples known casually as Krylon Kids. The murals served as gateways throughout San Guin, staged in places where he needed eyes or where the kids needed either access or an escape route.

FIYAHCON 2021

FIYAHCON 2020 was eligible for the Best Related Work category of the Hugo Awards. Some people…did not like that, so we’ll see if FIYAHCON 2021 remains eligible for next year. We had over 1,000 registrants, and the event on Airmeet was truly something special. We’re not sure if or when we’re returning for reasons stated in my Retrospective, so feel free to nominate what may be The Last FIYAHCON—or any of its components, really—for whatever applies.

FIYAH Literary Magazine

2022 will be FIYAH’s sixth year of existence, and marks the first year I will not be Art Director. That title has gone to Chris Ivey, who is in the process of killing it for our 2022 covers. I’m still around, though, composing the issues, Project Managing all of the projects in need of management, and other founderly things.

In 2021, we published 18 shorts and 9 poems, as well as 4 essays edited by our new Nonfiction Editors, and four new artists. In a dream scenario, we have also partnered with LeVar Burton to create the first ever contest for his LeVar Burton Reads podcast. We are heading into 2022 with a new Grants Series and enough subscribers that I don’t have to generate an aggressive subscription drive to insist people give us more money. That’s the good stuff. For more of all the things we’re doing, check out fiyahlitmag.com.

Hi everyone! Long time no post. Now that FIYAHCON is—for the most part—behind me, it’s time to revisit where exactly all those months of my life went.

Let’s look at some numbers:

1072 total registrations / 956 active attendees83 total programming items (including Aquarium Calm Rooms)22 booths / 2316 booth visitsFunding in ticket sales: $20,720Funding in sponsorship: $17,648Funding in donations: $295Total expenses: $36,304.82Total funding*: $48,663

*+$10k base starting fund from 2020’s event

BETWEEN YEAR 1 AND YEAR 2

Attendees of both years would note a number of differences in the execution. For one, we had much more planning time. And the use of a new platform and a year of experience meant we could do more programming. So alongside our two US-daytime tracks, we had an additional night of BONFIYAH (formerly “Fringe”), the free tier for international/global south participants. 

We also had different charitable partners. Last year we gave comped attendees (staff, programming participants, and Ignyte finalists who’d originally purchased tickets) the option to donate their refund to the National Bail Fund Network. This year, that option was to donate to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, amounting to $520. This was part of our Palestine solidarity pledge along with dedicated programming blocks for Palestinian SFF writers as well as FIYAH’s special Palestine issue coming out later this year. This was also the root of some of the harassment we received this year, which we felt was best kept internal. Our Palestinian friends were dealing with enough already, and we knew what to expect as allies. That said, the enthusiastic support these dedicated panels and organizations received were incredibly heart-warming and we’d do it again in a second.

For other comparisons with Year 1, you can view that retrospective here.

PLATFORM

We were all very, very, VERY tired of Zoom, so we set out to find an alternative platform that would make the event feel a bit more centralized and less cobbled together than our Zoom/Website/Discord scenario from Year 1. We reviewed a number of options but were ultimately impressed with Airmeet’s attendee interface and its capacity for hosting booths. One of the main things I personally missed from Year 1 was a sort of Artist Alley/Dealers Row element that has mainly only been available at in-person events. So we were stoked to be able to offer these to vendors and sponsors to showcase their offerings. 

We were less stoked about the $16k price tag.

Throughout the planning process, it became clear that the platform wasn’t able to accommodate some of the administrative features we’d gotten used to (attendee side was fine), such as the ability to easily set tiers for tickets or grant speakers the ability to customize their own profiles, and we needed to develop a number of workarounds to get it to where we needed to be. Airmeet’s support staff was great about trying to accommodate us and seeking feedback about features that would generally make life easier for conrunners doing more than just panel service. We ultimately received positive feedback about the service from our attendees (particularly a gratefulness that it was not another Zoom event). It’s very likely I’ll be using it again for some other project.

EXPENSESEarly bird swag boxes production and shipping: $10,403.22Licensing of Monterey Bay Aquarium Live Cams for the weekend: $1,500.00Boxcast (for archive hosting/broadcasts outside of Airmeet)*: $2,787.00Artists for FIYAHCON collateral and Ignyte trophy design: $1,800.00Website things (accessibility and member plugins): $297.00Airmeet: $15,999.00Loom (for instructional videos)**: $14.00Box.com (digital swag bag hosting): $147.00Scribie (captioning for 20 panels)***: $830.00

* Boxcast has been marvelous. We use it throughout the year for Em-Dash games, but it’s also allowed us to do away with a $1000 Jetpack Premium plugin on the website, used to host archive videos. We were able to upload our archive content to Boxcast and not only host the videos there, but they also auto-generate captions (Airmeet has built-in captions during the event, but they’re not available in post. So this also helped us eliminate the additional expense of live captioning.) and allow us to embed the videos on our website. Absolutely worth the money. 

** Loom has also been an amazing discovery this year. It’s basically an application which allows one to record screencap videos and provide tutorials on the fly. Using it allowed us to orient or train our panelists, Ignyte finalists, and staff without having to schedule a thousand meetings to do it.

*** Scribie, while great and competitively priced for transcribing hours of video in a timely fashion, was ultimately not needed once the Boxcast hack was discovered.

THE IGNYTE AWARDS

We came back with the 2nd annual Ignyte Awards. People who did not attend the con were supposed to have been able to watch it, but we hit a tech snag at the last minute when the ceremony was rescheduled and the relevant links didn’t update properly. The ceremony itself was lovely and we are still in the process of getting a fully composed version of it available to watch so everyone can see their favorites give their speeches. 

Ignyte Ceremony Host honorarium: $400.00

Ignyte Award Cards printing: $337.95

Ignyte trophy production: $1,195.80

Shipping of Ignyte Awards (USPS): $597.85

CLOSING

You may have attended the con and thus our closing ceremonies, which went considerably longer than we intended it to. Myself, Brent, Iori, Danny, and Suzan spoke at length (about 90 minutes) about our experience this year and the future of the convention. (The closing ceremony is available to re-watch in the Archives.)

In short, FIYAHCON is on indefinite hiatus.

It was a difficult decision, but at the end of everything, there were more reasons to stop than there were to continue. FIYAHCON began as an experiment. We wanted to prove that an organically inclusive, dynamic, and well-executed SFF lit convention was possible, thereby robbing larger, better-funded, “legacy” organizations of their excuses for failing swaths of the community every single year. And I think we did what we set out to do. 

The con was staffed almost entirely by writers. Most of us had to put aside our projects and the advancement of our careers in order to pursue this level of community engagement. And while most of the community was grateful and enthusiastic about what we were able to provide, the staff put up with a frankly absurd amount of harassment and vitriol in the months leading up to the con. Some of it from within the community we aimed to serve and from people who’ve made their brands on social media almost exclusively decrying the lack of spaces like the one we created. A lot of sleep was lost and a lot of tears were shed during the lead-up to the event. The closing ceremony was the first time any of those tears were happy. 

We’ve spent months disappointed and disillusioned. But for 72 hours, this was magic, and we want to thank everyone who participated in making the actual event everything we dreamed it could be. A lot of people have remarked on the sense they have of the FIYAHCON team as people who genuinely love and appreciate one another, and not just in a labor capacity. We hope that some of the real adoration our team has for one another bled into the rest of the event and helped forge new friendships.

FIYAHCON may return at some future time, but not in 2022. The Ignyte Awards, however, will continue hopefully annually for the foreseeable future. We’ve already got the judges in place. I’m also planning an annual conrunning workshop/retreat situation when it’s safe to do so again, to facilitate resource sharing and networking among organizers in the field. 

In 2020, the year that was actually twelve years, I published…. basically nothing. I wrote plenty, mostly novels and panicked screeds on Twitter, but not much in the way of award nominateyness. I created FIYAHCON with Brent Lambert, which was probably responsible in equal parts for Twitter screeds and my lack of writing output. And I had some stuff reprinted, like Moses at Lightspeed, which was very cool. But in lieu of the stuff I didn’t write, here are the things I put out this year that you can read fairly quickly and perhaps consider for their respective things should you be the nominating type.

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young Death is in love – a poem published April 20th, 2020 at Strange Horizons and also read by me for a first. Eligible wherever they nominate speculative poetry.

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“The Currant Dumas” – a short story in the Neon Hemlock anthology Glitter+Ashes: Queer Tales of a World that Wouldn’t Die. Available in paperback and ebook from the Neon Hemlock website, and eligible wherever short stories or sapphic things or things involving trains are nominateable.

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I am still, of course, Art Director and Project Manager over at FIYAH Literary Magazine, whose eligibility post will go up on the website toward the end of December. As, ever, it has been an honor and a privilege to amplify the talents and skills of Black illustrators from my position, and I look forward to doing it some more in 2021.

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And finally, my behemoth, FIYAHCON may be eligible in the Best Related Works categories of various genre award series. FIYAHCON was the brainchild of myself and my partner in all things genre Brent Lambert. This was our 2.5 day event back in October, centering the experiences, contributions, and perspectives of BIPOC in speculative literature, and included the first ever Ignyte Award series. It went off like a dream and the reception has been incredible, and we’ll be bringing it back September 16th-19th, 2021. You can check out the website and the post-con retrospective here on the blog.

C’est tout! Thank you so much for your enduring support, and maybe even your tolerance. Rest well, have a cookie, and read Black lit in 2021 and beyond.

L

FIYAHCON has come and gone for most, but I’m still plugging away, getting videos uploaded to the archives and sending our payments and the remaining Ignyte Award trophies out to finalists. I can’t wait to get my dining room table back.

This started out as a mission, as most things do. It was sort of a nebulous wish for years, something Brent and I talked about as FIYAH the magazine entity grew and developed. But prior to June of this year when it had never been so popular to seek out and support Black creators, we simply didn’t have the money. FIYAH had been juggling roughly the same earnest, dedicated, marvelous core of 350-400 subscribers for our first three years. October, until now, was our annual subscriber push, and with that money, we’d always put it back into the magazine either by publishing additional stories, raising rates for cover artists, or refining our back end processes through this or that upgrade to the nuts and bolts of things. Paying the magazine’s staff was also sort of this pie-in-the-sky dream. To this point, the only people being paid on the magazine’s staff were our slushers and reviewers, none of them even making a fraction of what their labor is worth.

And so when the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd happened, when everyone decided to be vocal about their position on the mattering of Black lives, when those messages went from hashtags and t-shirts and profile pictures and turned into street protests and donations to bail funds and offerings of mentorship and opportunity in the creative sphere, FIYAH, the magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, received…attention. With that attention came 8,000 new Twitter followers, and over 1,000 new subscribers, enough to take us from the semi-prozine category and allow us for the first time to pay our writers and poets a professional standard of .08/word.

The funding for next year secured, what, then, would we do with our October? 

COVID had been ruining our lives for months by the time the Nebulas happened. It was one of many larger conventions having to pivot from a physical presence to a virtual one. And as virtual events became more commonplace, (and more accessible from a budgeting standpoint), I saw our window to achieve one of those first things we’d wanted to achieve. We would do a convention. It would be virtual, it would be inclusive, and it would, as all things FIYAH, prove to the community that such a thing as an inclusive, accessible, diverse, dynamic convention where people and entities have their names properly announced and see more than one brown face on a panel at a time on anything other than a Diversity Panel, could exist. Recognizing that we are not the most oppressed group in terms of this industry, the convention would be a celebration not only of and for Black writers in SFF, but to BIPOC at large, because we couldn’t see denying space to groups already denied elsewhere. And we made it BIPOC”+” to welcome our friends in the publishing industry and community who are white but who are also doing the work where they can to see the rest of us recognized.

SFWA was approached first, and the leadership there was enthusiastic about both funds and mentorship in the “hows” of running a virtual convention after the success of the Nebulas. From there, it was all about setting up the core team (primarily from FIYAH’s NSS Slack space of Black SFF writers), banging out some graphics and setting up the website. 

I’d considered the event experimental, and so capped it initially at 500 tickets. That way if we completely fucked it up, it would only be 500 people mad at us. This had the added benefit of keeping us on the same server and I wouldn’t have to worry about crashes caused by excessive traffic. The convention site is a subdomain of the magazine website so we didn’t have to bother with new domain/hosting accounts. I love a good cost-cutting measure.

Well those 500 tickets went… like, immediately. And with enthusiasm picking up especially as offers to gift tickets, we had to expand capacity. This meant upgrading the server, and increased anxiety over, again, fucking this up for more than 500 people. I’d never run a convention before. I have a good head for logistics and execution. But when you’re putting together something like this as a Black woman especially, you know that if it falls apart, if something breaks, if you’ve botched oversight or failed to make sure everyone essentially in your care from the staff to the attendees, is literally cared for, it’s not a reflection of you and your personal failings. Someone somewhere is going to turn it into The Problem With Black/Women/Black Women. Our wiggle room, our margin of error, is non-existent.

Altogether, we released another 300 purchase-able tickets, kept capacity for 150 gift and scholarship tickets, and then comped our award finalists, staffers, panelists, and guests of honor, bringing our total attendance to 1,128 registered. And also the site didn’t crash.

Each of our Guests of Honor were selected for their contributions to the global SFF scene. Rebecca Roanhorse is a prolific, award-winning Black and Indigenous author. Cassie Hart is a Maori writer whose labors on behalf of ConZealand this year went largely unsung by the convention at large. Yasser Bahjatt chaired the Jeddah bid for a future WorldCon and was met with… we’ll call it “substantial resistance” by largely Western fanbases, which saw his government knocking on his door to inquire why they were being dragged in The Guardian. I’ll yell about that later, but all of our GOHs shared a common thread of trying to bring SFF recognition to their communities. 

The Ignyte Awards were birthed in August, after what was effectively an abysmal 2020 Hugo Awards ceremony. George R.R. Martin butchered names left and right, and to begin with, the convention was… lacking in a number of areas. In a “fuck it, we’ll do it live” DM to Brent, a new award series was born and executed in a number of weeks. A Black artist was commissioned to provide the artwork. We didn’t force teams to limit the number of names allowed to represent them on the ballot. We collected and provided both text-based and audio pronunciations of names. And we didn’t charge finalists to attend their own award ceremony.

Throughout the process, probably the most grating part was anything having to do with emails. We had issues with Mailchimp not sending emails to entire swaths of our newsletter subscribers. I received way too many emails from people who did receive their emails but didn’t read them and asked me to repeat things I already painstakingly explained. No less than 4 people received emails, opened them (newsletter services allow us to track that information, dears), and then emailed me to ask questions that were answered in the email they said they didn’t even receive. And then there were the White Guilt emails, the ones apologizing profusely for taking up space when we told them they were welcome, and offering to cancel their ticket or wishing to transfer it to someone else. I’ve spoken repeatedly on how much work that creates for us, and how there are better uses for my time than assuaging that guilt. I hope that in the future that kind of emotional labor is taken into account before requests like this are made.

There were also a fair number of brusque emails demanding answers to questions found in our FAQ or elsewhere on our site. 100% of these were from white people. There were also a few incidents of Diversity Policing (again, all from white people) who demanded to know why not literally every ethnicity was represented in some aspect of the thing. 

What’s often forgotten, particularly in the cases of BIPOC rep, is that these people have autonomy. They have lives. When offered paneling, they are permitted to refuse for any reason. Scheduling conflicts. Zoom fatigue. They’re not into the programming item you’ve pitched, or they live in areas with unstable internet connections. Or in the case of in-person events, securing a visa can be a nightmare. No convention is entitled to a BIPOC’s time and energy for the sake of improving its demographic breakdown. We absolutely reached out to some people who declined participation. I set a policy of no more than one white person on any panel. It couldn’t be upheld 100% of the time because someone of color declined. And that’s okay. The point is that our threshold for BIPOC presence on programming started at 80% (1 moderator + 4 panelists per thing). We knew whose perspective we valued most and we set out intentionally to see them centered.

And then there were the “Oh, Westerners and their Western Westernness not decentralizing Westernly from the West to cater to the Not-West.” These were fun. Yes, loves, the West sucks in very many ways. But when you’re speaking to and of Black and brown people in organizing who just so happen to live in The West, you’ll find that using the same talking points as used to criticize white organizers to not actually be valid. But that’s a diaspora war for another time.

And that’s why we have Fringe, isn’t it? When Vida and Iori reached out about wanting to orchestrate some Fringe content, my first thought was that it needed to be welcomed into our formal line-up. I’ve witnessed volunteers cobbling together supplementary content to offset some dull programming or overlooked or underrepresented groups in existing conventions, only to not be formally recognized for their efforts by the concom in any way. FIYAHCON would be different. We wanted to serve other time zones, but time being what it is, that would have meant asking some segment of our U.S. based team to organize content in the small hours of our mornings. Fringe was able to do that. Vida and Iori also stressed that the $40USD ticket price may be oppressive to people elsewhere in the world. So in the spirit of removing every barrier we could, we made the Fringe tier free. And because we had the money to do it, we extended our resources, our live captioning contract, and our set up to make sure Fringe was as integrated as possible to the convention, and that they wouldn’t have to go to Youtube or something and be forced to use their own set up. This resulted in 12 hours of globally inclusive content that was both free and AMAZING. 

As ever, our goal is not to be the ONLY space doing what we do. If you see a lack in the community, it’s within your power, through the grace of the internet and social media, to correct it. And that’s what you should do rather than relying on the unwilling or unequipped existing structures to broaden their own tables after you’ve badgered them for years to do it.

What you should not do, is reach out to FIYAHCON staffers suggesting that either for free or for comped passes to your event, they assist you with the lacking diversity of your space. The goal of this entire thing was to build something organically inclusive. It was not to make additional work for team members by soliciting them retroactively to correct the spaces so committed to their antiquated ways of doing things that we were driven to make FIYAHCON a corrective event in the first place. Threads like these, created by conrunners, are not to be taken as an advertisement of services, but as an invitation to adopt their methods and apply them yourselves so that there are more people capable of doing this work, not just an overworked few BIPOC who would frankly rather be writing. And now that we’ve been able to pay our volunteers, we’re hoping it becomes another industry standard, that the performance of labor is not expected without compensation. “For the love of the community” can’t always be enough.

Below, you’ll find a fairly extensive overview of the costs associated with set-up of our virtual convention, as well as some notes on what worked and what didn’t. Next year, I’m hoping to add a book store and artists’ alley, which shouldn’t be too much of a nightmare with the additional planning time.  

At $40USD a head + about $14k in sponsorship dollars and $3k in assorted individual donations, we were able to provide honoraria for our staff, cover operating costs, put $10k away for next year’s event, and provide $200/year of service in honoraria to our magazine staff. It’s not a lot, but it’s a start.

I’d like to thank our sponsors SFWA, Uncanny Magazine, Subterranean Press, Scholastic, Elise Matthesen, Viable Paradise, DongWon Song, The Monterey Bay Aquarium, Escape Artists, Tor Dot Com Publishing, and Interstellar Flight Press for their contributions.

Expect announcements surrounding FIYAHCON 2021 in January.

L



BY THE NUMBERS

FIYAHCON was formally launched July 7th (my birthday!), making for 102 elapsed planning days. 

Including staff, Ignyte finalists, panelists, general ticketholders, Fringe, and assorted comped ticket varieties, we had 1,128 registered, and 978 active attendees by close. 

The event was staffed by 43 volunteers and 11 (also volunteer) department heads. All staff members were provided the option to receive an honorarium of $50-$200. Contributing booktubers were paid $200 for the “commercials” used particularly during Em-Dash. The Ignyte Awards Host also received an honorarium. 

TICKETS

Guests (panelists, GOHs) as well as staff members were comped, meaning that their attendance at the convention was free. They were provided options for refunds in the event that they’d purchased tickets before being added formally to programming or to the team. Options included receiving their ticket refund, foregoing the refund to support the coffers for next year’s event, and having their refund paid forward to either the Monterey Bay Aquarium (who provided our Aquarium Calm Rooms), or to the National Bail Fund Network.

GENERAL CONTENT

Panels: Zoom – 3 accounts, business tier (one per content stream + tea house)

Broadcast: Dacast*  $750 for the year

Live Captions, SRTs for pre-recorded content: ACS Captions – Total roughly 63 hours of content $4889

*We’d originally planned to broadcast through Boxcast, but would have required their Experience tier which offered their two concurrent streams option. That plan ran $199/month but forced annual subscription which we didn’t need for a single annual event. This prompted us to explore other avenues and we landed on Dacast which is $750 for the year. We’re now having issues accessing some of our recordings like our opening ceremonies and the Ignyte Awards, and customer service has been less than helpful, so I would not recommend using them again in the future. As we’re stuck with this annual plan, however, we’re looking forward to using it beginning in 2021 to host monthly Em-Dash games. 

SWAG

Early Bird swag boxes: swagup.com $8056

Qty 200 Boxes included a recycled leatherbound notebook, two Le Pens by Marvy, a sticker, note card, and 8gb flash drive each with the FIYAHCON logo. Shipping was also included.

Digital swag bags: publisher donations

TECH/UI

Website: WordPress

Archives hosting: VideoPress (available with Jetpack subscription)

Tiered Member Access Areas of website: Restrict Content Pro Plugin

Schedule, Guest Profiles: Sched.com $1700

Newsletter/Email Correspondence: Mailchimp**/MooSend

** We had issues with irregular correspondence with attendees, primarily because whatever it is Mailchimp’s got going on in the back end, they weren’t sending our emails to our entire mailing list, or even entire pre-designated segments. As a result, we switched to MooSend, which has proven cheaper, more effective, and without a lot of the junk that’s gummed up MailChimp’s interface as they’ve grown over the last few of years.

IGNYTE AWARDS

Trophy Production: thestudio.com – $1198

Full purchase included qty150 3”x3” challenge coins for both winners and finalists with velvet boxes and rush delivery

Shipping: USPS

Small flat rate boxes (qty 100 with prepaid postage for domestic: $830) + (qty 50 without labels for international: free)

International postage: $686.40 (between $27.90 and $38.60 each)

Collateral printing: MOO.COM – $367.60

Ignyte Award trophies went out with foil printed cards

OFFICE HOURS + WORKSHOPS

Whereby: 50-room Business Plan for $259.99/mo

Whereby is where our four Workshops and one-on-one meetings with 37 Office Hours hosts were held. Office Hours provided face time between aspiring publishing professionals of color and existing publishing professionals for pitch sessions, query critiques, and Q/A’s. To date, we’ve received word of 11 different opportunities resulting from these meetings, from full requests to editorial mentorships. 

COMMUNITY SPACES

Discord – free tier

Calm Rooms by Monterey Bay Aquarium: $1500 for the leasing of two live cams

PLANNING

Slack – free tier

Central planning hub

Airtable:

FIYAH already runs its back end processes on Airtable, so a separate subscription purchase wasn’t necessary. Airtable allowed us to store form responses and generate our volunteer, panel proposal, office hours host, programming participant, and Meloscriptorium playlist contributions in a single centralized location.

Google Meet – free tier

Meetings were held every-other-Thursday between July and September, and every Thursday in October.

Google Drive – free tier

Planning documents were hosted in a shared Drive space

Box.com

Hosting for FIYAHCON digital swag bag

Why, HELLO again! I apologize for not having updated a single thing since *checks notes* last summer, but I have had barely a single day’s worth of respite from what has become a very hectic work schedule.

But onto the things!

 

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I’ll be on a panel this weekend at the Flights of Foundry SFF convention. It’s free and virtual and full of some pretty fantastic programming, so if you’ve been itching for some genre activities that aren’t reading (you know you’ll never get to the bottom of that TBR stack), I encourage you to check it out. I’ll be doing my thing on the Small Press ‘Palooza panel with , Sunday morning at 10am ET. An uncharacteristically early time slot, but what even is time anymore, right?

 

And if you can’t make it and plan to attend the Nebulas virtual conference later this month, good news!

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I’m there, too. You can catch me on yet another small press panel, “The Small Press Experience” Friday May 29th at 12:30pm ET and on a “Writing Multiply Marginalized Characters in SFF” panel at 2pm ET Saturday, May 30th.

 

Be good to each other and stay hydrated!

So ICYMI, it was announced that I’m editing the April 2020 issue of Fireside Fiction! Working with their team has been an incredible experience. I’m learning a lot and I’ve got some wonderful stories that I can’t wait to share with everyone.

SPEAKING OF STORIES (and also of Fireside), my shortest story ever, SIGNAL, also dropped earlier this month and has been well-received. When I started writing fiction, I was sure that I only knew how to ramble on forever, relegating myself to epic novel-length works. SIGNAL was a personal challenge to see how short I could make a coherent story. Apparently the answer is 2k so far.

There’s been a lot of what I’ll call kerfufflery about the state of the short SFF field this past week, how considerations for compensation stop at writers, leaving the staff at our venues to work for the feel-goods alone and how that’s a widely accepted policy. I considered compiling numbers to make this into a whole thing, but I’m hyper-extended on a couple of deadlines, so you just get my distilled thoughts instead. Go you!

From my observation, spec fic zines aren’t started as money-making ventures and thus aren’t started by people with a particular business acumen. They’re fueled largely by a love of reading, a desire to help shape the zeitgeist, and an occasional mission toward the amplification of underappreciated voices. They have access to contract and sub guideline templates, web hosting services, a domain name, and a logo. They have time. If they’re also print, they have money. Starting a zine isn’t something you have to wait for permission or need a wealth of resources in order to just do it. And so as long as the desire to do it is there, the numbers don’t matter so much. Until, of course, they do.

We’re in an ideal-driven space here. One which rewards the labor of publishing marvelous work with perhaps an award nomination and the opportunity to do it again next year. And that’s all you’re supposed to want while you boost people in other industries fighting against unpaid labor.

What I haven’t seen addressed are the different avenues these places have explored in order to try and pay their staff, only how it can’t be done because of X, Y, and terrible, confounding Z. (Not to say it doesn’t exist, but I haven’t seen it and I’m nosy). It’s the fault of strained readership. Of a saturated marketplace. Of those goddamn Kickstarters. Of time and energy not being ample enough to look into it. Have we tried an ad structure? A sponsorship structure? Establishing and utilizing grants? Collective organizing? Expanding our offerings and methodology to reach new audiences? Merchandising for revenue streams? Where did we fail? What options are more fertile?

And if I can be shady for a moment, (I can) there’s also a martyrdom element of being a volunteer-only publication. If you don’t pay yourself or your staff for doing this work, you can maintain a purity of purpose when asking for support. “Help pay me for my labor” is a less appealing ask than “help support this mission.” You can keep at the forefront your selflessness in committing to your writers. And if you survive long enough, you can explain after some years of helping shape the market how fraught, how impossible it is to shift into a paid-staff structure in a landscape where everyone is working off that same volunteer model.

Anyway, all this brings me back to Fireside, who pay their staff. It’s not a living wage, but it’s monetary compensation in a world where we’re increasingly insisting creatives especially are paid for their work. If you know anything about the relationship between FIYAH and Fireside, you know that we love each other and lift each other up. Pablo Defendini in particular has been a great help in a mentorship capacity, and I’m sort of shadowing him to learn what I can what resources are available to us on the FIYAH-side (heh) so that we can start paying our people for their labor.

The pursuit of reshaping this scene so that everyone eats has got to be an intentional one for the health of the market and of the people sustaining it.

That’s it for August! If anyone’s coming to Decatur Book Fest or DragonCon’s Aquarium night, you might see me there. Otherwise, I’ll see y’all in September with some new fiction over on Patreon (follow me there for more unsolicited opinionating) and some swag as we expand my Feint universe. Be good!

-L

Last week, I posted about the FIYAH Hugo Meetup on Patreon. You can find pics there.

This weekend was huge in the world of speculative fiction, what with WorldCon and the Hugo Awards in Dublin. More importantly for me, however, was the amazing opportunity I had to meet my FIYAH teammates in the flesh and celebrate our first-ever Hugo nomination.

Spoiler alert: we didn’t win. But the Best Semiprozine category was so stacked with friends and colleagues we love and respect, it was almost impossible to be disappointed. We’re still a relatively young outfit, though. Stamina and the grace of our supporters permitting, we’ll be back on future ballots and inevitably on the Hugo stage.

BUT THAT MEETUP THOUGH. I’m not sure how to properly convey the magic that is getting to meet your family for the first time. Relationships typically work the other way. We meet each other first, build rapports, pool our skills, our talents to then make something powerful through the Voltron-esque arrangement of our collective energy. Here, though, we’ve given life to something immense and celebrated and beloved FIRST. It’s like we became such fans of one another through our work together, that it was easy to view our collaboration as surreal. How did I end up in the company of such driven, impassioned people? How did so many of us manage to mine the empty seconds of our days for the last 3-ish years and connect them in a way that keeps this project growing? This time and effort isn’t snatched out of the air. It belongs to people. And that’s something you only know in your periphery, really, until you meet the people giving it.

So the weekend was spent with the team in Atlanta. It involved shared meals, book shopping, planning for the future, and so much laughter. Saturday was team-only and we relished the time we had to just talk to each other. Sunday, we linked up with our local (and some not so local) supporters after/concurrent with the Hugo ceremony. These were also people we’d only engaged with in a digital space for years, and getting to meet them in real time to talk about the work and receive the love borne from it? That was a privilege. These people were our community and having them tell us we were doing them proud was the Hugo award for me.

(We’re still coming for that rocket, though, baby.)

Anyway, flick if you will through some of the pictures from the event. And my eternal gratitude to everyone who showed up or donated to make this happen.

Somehow we’ve all made it to the halfway point of this year. Good job, all of you.

This was a busy month! ICYMI, my short story MOSES dropped at Anathema Spec technically on the last day of April. I couldn’t be more pleased with the way it’s been received (1, 2). My goal with the work was to provide compassionate representation of addicts and addiction in SFF, and by that same token give readers pause in their judgment or analysis of how substance abuse happens. We are all one particularly horrifying set of circumstances from using any means necessary to escape ourselves. I’ve succeeded in this at least once, so I count this story as a win. Thanks to all my patrons for buying me time to write it. You can read the story by itself for free here, but I strongly encourage you to buy the issue and subscribe to Anathema, as they exclusively publish works by queer BIPOC and that’s a worthy endeavor on its own.

Also this month, official progress has been made on the new POB Project website!

As you can see, it’s now leaning into its growth as a resource to track more marginalizations than just Blackness in the field as an “Inclusion Tracker”. That actual bit will take some time and extra hands to develop, but I’m excited to get the hub in place. The goal is to launch at least the market reporting tools by July at the latest so we can get the updated POB Scores issued in August. In the Fall, I want to have the blog feature set up to host pieces that provide context and education on things like harmful tropes, best practices for attracting marginalized writers, and networking opportunities for writers/editors and the publications seeking to staff them. We’ll likely be pursuing sponsorship to help pay contributors for guest posts. I can only pontificate on so many Black tropes myself.

I’m plugging away at the back end, but you can sign up for the newsletter now to be notified when everything launches. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek of what’s behind the maintenance landing page:

As for Patreon news, I’ll be doing the drawing for which patrons get to be added to the Feint universe of stories on June 15th! Two patrons will get their own San Guin this summer, allowing me some much needed practice in micro/flash fiction writing and also forcing me to revisit this world that I love so much. Signed San Guin postcards and a sticker will go out to all supporters with a cumulative patronage of at least $10 as of July 1st.

I’ll also be doing a worldbuilding hangout for patrons in the next month or so. It’ll just be a live AMA or something. I’ll post a poll asking what logistics work for the folks interested. I think that’s an easier way to go about it. I tend to brain-fart every time I think about writing a more formal themed worldbuilding post. Most worldbuilding is a just a series of questions you need to have the answers to in order for it to feel fully formed, so I’ll be happy to field those, or whatever y’all need.

Remember it’s never too late to join as a supporter! Just $2/month gets you access to all kinds of goodies and buys me time to do all this.

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That’s about it!  I’m 5 chapters from beta on YEMI, which has seen some reformation influenced by GoT’s lackluster end. Super stoked to get that out there. Umm… watch all FIYAH spaces June 1st for Issue 11’s incredible artwork by Seth Brown and the ToC launch at midnight. It’s hot out there, so be sure to hydrate and make sure your sunblock is broad spectrum and not expired.

Be good. Love you.

L

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In what is probably the 36th Hugo-related post you’ve read today, I’m here to shout at you that FIYAH is being nominated for a Hugo in the Best Semiprozine category. It’s a STACKED category as we’re on there with some incredible friends and colleagues doing amazing work year in and out:

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, editor-in-chief and publisher Scott H. Andrews
Fireside Magazine , edited by Julia Rios, managing editor Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, social coordinator Meg Frank, special features editor Tanya DePass, founding editor Brian White, publisher and art director Pablo Defendini
FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, executive editors Troy L. Wiggins and DaVaun Sanders, editors L.D. Lewis, Brandon O’Brien, Kaleb Russell, Danny Lore, and Brent Lambert
Shimmer , publisher Beth Wodzinski, senior editor E. Catherine Tobler
Strange Horizons , edited by Jane Crowley, Kate Dollarhyde, Vanessa Rose Phin, Vajra Chandrasekera, Romie Stott, Maureen Kincaid Speller, and the Strange Horizons Staff
Uncanny Magazine , publishers/editors-in-chief Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, managing editor Michi Trota, podcast producers Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky, Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction Special Issue editors-in-chief Elsa Sjunneson-Henry and Dominik Parisien

I’m also extremely proud to know people both casually and otherwise who are nominated in other categories, (Phenderson, Julia, the whole squad over at Fireside among about a dozen others) some of whom belong to the secret-but-not-so-secret NSS Black SFF writers collective that birthed FIYAH. This has been such a gratifying day.

My boundless love and appreciation to my team: Troy, DaVaun, Brent, Danny, Kaleb, Phenderson, and Brandon. Their *exhaustive* passion for our mission to amplify and celebrate Black creators is what sustains our presence in this field. This labor is all blood, sweat, tears, and truncated Slack messages. We stumble in the balance between this and our other lives, but we make sure we can laugh as we dust each other off and get back to work. In 2.5 years, we’ve built this thing into what some Black writers consider their dream market. That is HUGE. This has been as real a family as one could hope for, staff, writers, and readers, and I’m so happy to see other people love on us as well.

FIYAH grew out of the necessity to fill a void, to shine a light in beautiful dark places that apparently only we could see. But what a thrill to be able to view this another way: FIYAH can exist because people want our stories. We don’t have to prove that anymore. There will be work to do in this field for a long time. Nothing in publishing changes quickly. But at least that question, the one of are people ready for this, has an answer. And it’s a relief that the answer is a resounding yes. We didn’t need a Hugo nod to tell us our work is valid. It’s really, really nice, though.

In addition to all that, we dropped FIYAH #10 yesterday, and Gumroad came through with the sponsorship that will allow the POB Project to grow this year. We have been and will continue to be busy in all the best ways. Thanks to everyone who sees the power of our message and finds it something worth supporting.