What’s in the Hole?

Hello again, Premium wyrms. Old wyrms and new wyrms. Wyrms united by a common cause, which is to say, meme-y speculative fiction. Welcome to the mid-month Premium issue! This issue will wiggle around with recommendations, magazine talk, and a wildcard on Ways to Ground the Writer Life™. Then I’ll pass the baton to our September editor, H.H. Pak!

Our soft launch continues to delight, and support from the SFF community has been amazing and appreciated. As of now, the date we’re looking at for our hard launch is January 1. But before then, we’ll be running a Kickstarter on October 1, and opening submissions November 1.

We’re aiming to publish 4,000 words of speculative fiction each issue, and each story must contain… a meme! A meme means anything posted online that makes you laugh. We can’t wait to see what amazing and terrible memes this submission guideline dredges up.

We hope you’ve been enjoying the reprints. We’ve been enjoying ideating and soliciting and ushering more incredible speculative fiction to the eyes of all the cool wyrms who have decided to follow along with WYRMHOLE.

But I digress. Let’s continue onward for my short story recs, and some magazine behind-the-scenes, and a wildcard, all squeezed like lemon juice from my unhole-y mind. Then we’ll see you next month!

(Also, if you like this issue— share the HOLE!)

Sara S. Messenger / AUGUST 2024 Editor in Chief / New England, USA

Recs & Reviews

Sara recs…

• For He Can Creep

  Siobhan Carroll, Reactor. 2019. 7.9k words.

  A story I read very early on in my journey into short SFF. You are a CAT belonging to a MAD POET and your job is to FIGHT SATAN!!! I cannot emphasize enough how much CAT VOICE is in this ornate novelette. 

• Discreet Services Offered for Women Ridden by Hags

  Stephanie Malia Morris, Beneath Ceaseless Skies. 2023. 6.6k words.

  Set in early 1900s America, in DC. Your estranged, well-to-do sister comes to you, asking you to be a doctor, not a sister. She’s become afflicted with a blood-sucking body-stealer, a soucouyant. You hate her for having ran away. You hate her more for what she’s asking you to do. Stephanie Malia Morris always always knocks it out of the park.

• Robot

  Helena Bell, Clarkesworld. 2012. 1.8k words.

  A short story that hits you with row after row of staccato, sinister semicolons! In the style of “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid. Intense. Set in the future. About… robots.

• tragedy of the sugarcane ghost

  Desiree Winns, khōréō magazine. 2021. 5.1k words.

  A short story in all lowercase! A ghost migrates from Jamaica to America to take revenge on the man who MURDERED HIM AND TOOK HIS GIRL!!! It’s twenty-odd years later, so, he does so by POSSESSING HIS MURDERER’S SON. Gorgeous unfurling prose and fury sharp on your teeth.

• Terminus

  Vajra Chandrasekera, Three-Lobed Burning Eye. 2018. 1.7k words.

  You are a GIANT serving as a RAILWAY SEGMENT for the TINY MASTERS. You do this by HOLDING HANDS with your FELLOW GIANTS so the trains can chug across your LINKED ARMS. Predictably, this HURTS. There are whispers of a REBELLION BREWING.

• The Bone Pickers

  Kelsey Hutton, PodCastle. 2022. 5.8k words.

  Two Indigenous women make their living salvaging buffalo bones after raiders tore apart the Plains and hunted the buffalo toward extinction. Then they find a dusty old gauntlet in the dirt, and a young boy’s voice, insisting on what they should do. Vivid, sensorial prose, and an ending that took my breath away.

Magazine HOLE

Get Assembled, Idiot:

How a Soft Launch Issue Gets Made  

Brough to you by the Editors

Welcome, Premium wyrms, to a dive into the HOLE, where we talk about the workings of the magazine! Up on this month’s list: what goes into assembling a general issue of the soft launch?

Our process is by no means set in stone, but what we’ve been doing so far has been working IOO (In Our Opinion). We know our process for assembling issues will change again as soon as we start gearing up for hard launch… but soft launch has been great for testing out methods for coordination, organization, and content acquisition. Let’s take a look at what we’ve got going on!

The issue begins the month before it releases. With the editorial schedule decided in advance, when the month before an issue’s release rolls around, the EIC of that issue springs into action as The Guy Taking Point For That Issue. There’s a lot to consider, foremost of which is: what to reprint?

After the EIC proposes the reprint, and the choice is finalized, it’s off to contacting the author to see if they’d be interested in having us reprint their story! This part is really exciting and gratifying, as it really aligns with ground zero of a magazine—publishing good stuff to match our vibe! If the author agrees, we send off the contract, obtain bios, confirming the reprint’s text—all those kinds of Very Important E-mails.

At the same time, we’re collating everything else that’ll go into the issue, like each co-EIC’s recommendations, the EIC’s wildcard editorial, the tumblr post, and the issue’s Moomin! Sometimes we also pitch for other content to be included, in the spirit of Softly Launching, like, what if we added a riddle? A sphynx moment…

As the first of the month nears, it becomes time to start curtain call, and pre-load all our content in place. This means setting all the content into our issue template in beehiiv, and adding the new story to our website, hidden but ready to post at a moment’s notice. Then comes a flurry round of communal copyedits and copy suggestions, which are speedily implemented, and then a moment of calm, of waiting and bated breath…

Then the issue hits your inboxes! At this point we’re celebrating and also Marketing on our social medias—primarily Twitter at the moment! With each issue we learn a little more about how to make our magazine tick, and it’s all thanks to your support, and your enthusiasm, and your feedback.

Beyond the issue itself, though, is even more Soft-Launching a Magazine—website design, newsletter design, marketing, rewards fulfillment, ideating for the Kickstarter—but we’ve got time yet to touch on the More.

We hope you enjoyed this peek into the assembling of a (w)hole issue. See you next time!

Editors out!

Premium Moomin of the Month

WILDCARD

The Long Pursuit:
Mooring Yourself as a Working Writer

by Sara S. Messenger

What kind of writer do you want to be? How can you write to reflect it? What goals do you have for your career, and what opportunities should you seek to get there? And what should you do once you’re there?

As a working writer, I wrestle with these questions. Three years ago, when I was a fledgling in the short speculative fiction world, just accruing my first publication credits, it felt like every atom of my being was oriented toward that one elusive thing: achieving publication. As I’ve gained friends and career experience, the spellbinding enchantment of publication has become comparably faded, and I’ve had to re-evaluate my goals and self-perceptions.

Having gained perspective through being published and watching others publish, discussing the publishing industry with my peers, witnessing in real time how publishing animates the forces of our world, and reading critical thought and history regarding the power of publication and literature, my concerns have deepened and broadened. I’ve become, in some ways, more focused. No longer is the answer to what kind of writer I want to be simply “a published writer,” but: a writer whose work aids liberation, as opposed to greasing the wheels of the machines that crush us.

To pursue your own answers to these questions, it helps to moor yourself, to be grounded. Being a working writer is a slow journey, a long pursuit, often life-long. And pursuing a career means dancing with these questions as long as you’re working, and accepting that as you shift, they shift too. Though a quality of the long pursuit is that these shifts are inevitable, it does not mean you have to be unmoored. Pursuit is easier, after all, with both feet on the ground. This essay will aim to answer: as a writer, how can you moor yourself in the face of these questions?

I cast my line back to when I was in college. First, at a base level, as I began being paid as a writer, I had to decide what role writing will play in my life—I’m referring to the work vs. hobby debate. I had to brainstorm and research, decide, and then make peace with the decision in the present. (Though, in the long pursuit, we are always researching and absorbing.)

We grow up on the stories of the super-writers who write novels full-time and can financially do so, only for us to grow up and find out that most novel advances don’t allow their authors to quit their day jobs. The baseline level of mooring myself meant deciding that I wouldn’t be rigorously pursuing writing as my day career, and accepting that I would be working an unrelated full-time job that allowed me the means to pursue writing in my off-hours. This was a hard concession to make to myself, but it’s tempered by that long pursuit of being a working writer, by that capital-S Strategy—if the right opportunity came into my life to write full-time, then, maybe then, I take it.

I think realizing and coming to terms with the role writing will play in your life is essential for grounding yourself to pursue a long-term career, and it’s often one of the first career questions fledgling writers tangle with. The answer looks different for everyone, and like everything in this career, it’s heavily affected by a writer’s circumstances, and their access to a writing industry—the career calculus someone in the Global South would do to pursue launching a book in America would be vastly different from someone living there.

Continuing on our discussions of labor and positionality. The next way I moor myself as a writer is by acknowledging that a writer is not an ephemeral entity of ideas divorced from their surroundings, but a culture worker participating in a rich circulation of ideas and collaborations and viewpoints, of which there are material impacts. As writers we have power, and it would do us good to be responsible with it. If we all implicitly understand the power of literature, we understand the power of those writing it, and we acknowledge the power of those writing it to change the world.

Which is not to say to kneecap yourself in fear of possibility. No, the opposite— feel emboldened to be intentional with not just your writing, but all that encompasses it: where you submit your writing, the editorial teams you work with, the opportunities you seek or are offered, the awards you accept, the money you take. There is remarkable power in being intentional with your name and participation, and you’ll find this, too, will move you closer to grounded-ness and alignment with your goals.

The next two ways of anchoring yourself I’ll group together. I view my writer friends and the writers I look up to as crucial to anchoring myself and how I conceive of my career. Making friends with other writers who are working in the same space as you, and who are in similar career stages as you, has uncountable benefits, the first of many being that you gain confidence when you have friends who have your back, and then unfurling from there—you can learn from each others’ industry experiences, build a shared historical knowledge of your publishing spaces, pass along and debate opportunities, encourage each other to take that risk!

I am also bolstered by those writers I look up to, often those who are further along in their careers, who are doing things I want to one day, who feel like they are blazing a trail on which my grateful, meager footsteps may one day appear. In fiction we try on a variety of alluring experiences, and we enjoy seeing how they unfold on the page and imagining what we’d do in their place. In the writers we admire, we entertain the echoes of events we may one day experience.

Anchoring yourself as a writer is hard, and finding answers to questions about yourself, your craft, and your career is harder still. Through sharing what I’ve learned with my experiences, I hope to make the long pursuit a little easier for you.

A parting song from the Editors…

Garden Jargon - Madilyn Mei

That’s it! That’s all we got! Thank you, Premium Wyrms, for your continued support as we branch out to greater, depth-infested holes. Your enthusiasm and excitement for the magazine has been overwhelming, and we are so grateful for each and every one of the guys in the HOLE. :3!

Coming up on the SEPTEMBER issue: a reprint of Sharp Undoing by Natasha King; ever more luminous recs, and above all, H.H.’s WILDCARD Editorial, where she ranks her childhood OCs based on how willing she is to body-switch with them.

Yes… it’s called a card of wildness for a reason.

And remember that riddle from the August 1st issue? Well, the answer is… drumroll please… LIPS!!!

All the warm wishes, worms. We’ll see you in two weeks :)