You think I'm dead, but I sail away

[sovay]

The annual Strange Horizons Fund Drive is now on! Read more here and donate; read the special issue as it's funded here. Bonus content this year includes work by Dominik Parisien, Rose Lemberg, Nisi Shawl, and Bryan Thao Worra, so I really want to see it live. Plus, there are prizes.

Our target this year is $11,000. That's enough to maintain our current professional rates and schedule. Above and beyond, we'd like to afford one illustrated story per month and a wider spectrum of podcast readers. People trust us with all kinds of stories, in poetry and prose; we should be able to give them the voices they deserve.

So help us out!

And thank you.

(And send us more poems while you're at it.)

Comments

[sovay]

Podcast readers?

The magazine has a very small podcast department, new this year. They're linked off the regular tables of contents (archived under their appropriate genres and searchable by "podcast"). Fiction currently uses the same reader for all stories; the ideal is for poets to read their own work, but there are two to three staff readers to handle the poems where for any number of reasons this is not possible. We'd like a broader variety, to reflect more accurately the range of voices their work comes in. We don't have the resources right now to hire any more than the current number. Hence our first stretch goal!

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

If you think I'd be a good match for the reading, I'm willing to put my voice in my hat in the ring in the fires of Mount Doom for consideration.

[sovay]

If you think I'd be a good match for the reading, I'm willing to put my voice in my hat in the ring in the fires of Mount Doom for consideration.

I appreciate the offer, but I'm not the person who can make that decision—and no one will be able to unless we make our stretch goals anyway!

[rinue.livejournal.com]

To clarify, I'm not absolutely confident I'm right, but my understanding is that we do not intend to hire additional podcast staff. What would happen is that we would bring in the occasional guest reader, who would tend to fall in one of two categories:

1. somebody people would geek out about (i.e. nerdy famous, whether this means an actor, author, or someone from another podcast)

2. someone with a special voice or accent when nobody on staff is right for the poem (because the podcasters are, I believe, all American, and "good at accents" is not the same as "native speaker")

Again, I could be wrong, but that's my impression from talking with the podcast editor.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Ah well. A pity.