Happy New Years folks! And Frivolous Comma is officially 1 year old as well!
Since the end of September, Frivolous was on something of a hiatus. It was a necessary one, surrounding my personal ability to maintain a consistent throughput. You've all been incredibly patient and wonderfully loyal audience members, and I sincerely thank you all for it.
That pause, though, provided me a chance to think about what Frivolous Comma started a year ago, what worked, and what to do for 2024. I realized that Frivolous Comma, for all the planning and ruminating I did for it, took a life of its own, one that I did not intend for it to take. To be clear, I'm not bothered by what it's become, but I wondered how I ended up started thisunintentionally.
When FC was just a newsletter, sending out 3 interesting speculative-adjacent trivia to its audience members, I looked around and thought, "How hard could starting an e-magazine be?" It was an experiment. What was surprising was that with the technology and social networks and some will, it was way too easy. And that's where the unintentionality came. With about 2 days worth of infrastructure setup, marketing, I was up and running and FC took on a life.
What was that life? A quick set of stats:
- Received over 750 submissions in 3 months. So many excellent stories; we plan to work with many of the writers
- Published 18 wonderful stories and poems (out of 24 planned)
- Brought on 6 amazing part time and volunteer staff and first readers who donated their time so generously and provided much needed sanity to the unexpected flood of submissions.
- Published / posted over 70 articles/social media posts
- Posted 5 author conversation podcasts.
All that to say, I'm thrilled we did this. But at the end of the day, this all happened rather unintentionally, and I was just keeping up. I was overwhelmed with 750 submissions a key factor in why we published only 18 out of 24 planned and the hiatus since September.
So, will we stop? Nope. But we will be more intentional. Which brings me to...
2024
This year we're going to be a bit more measured, pushing for meaningful deep stories; meaningful, thought-provoking, and helpful posts and conversations.
- We're launching a "collection" of commissioned stories called "Children of Imagined Worlds" focused on, or from the perspective of, children in speculative worlds, situations, etc. I watched the show "The Runaways" which, while I wasn't entirely thrilled with the direction it took, the premise was perfect and I wanted more. This, along with Stranger Things and Super 8 are compelling stories and invite so much exploration. The first one will be coming out end of January, and then 1 each month. These are longer stories from authors we've already worked with.
- We will open submissions windows more tightly and as we have more budget. We pay all our authors pro-rates, so this is an important consideration.
- More author conversations.
- I'm working with a group of editors of other magazines who publish wonderful work and we'll post links to their stories, all in the service of both writers and readers to keep a constant stream of beautiful stories circulating in the world.
To that point, I've updated out subscription tiers and encourage you to subscribe / upgrade if you haven't. Any paid subscription goes directly to writers or staff. While I love my volunteers, I know this is work for them and want this to be meaningful to them.
I actually had a hard time deciding how to reward my subscribers. The easiest thing would have been to charge for stories, but that's perfectly AGAINST everything we're trying to do. Writers want their work out there; putting that behind a paywall doesn't make sense (yet; maybe one day when we're publishing longer fiction).
Instead the paid tiers provide you personal notes from me, early access reads to the fiction and podcasts we publish. The highest tier avails you to a more frequent email-only note from me on things I'm personally thinking about, including the evolution and growth of Frivolous; as well as "additional perks" (read, "merch") and other things that are frivolously exciting.
To all of you, I sincerely thank you for being with us! Today's the first day of 2024, and we're looking forward to engaging with you all more, and more intentionally.
Happy New Year!
Chi