Happy Halloween! (Subs Closing, Hardcover Sale, & more)

It’s technically the last day of submissions, and anything that we are sent WILL be considered, but all stories are now competing to bump off one or more A-tier maybes.

DMR Books is open now, and Broadswords & Blasters will be accepting submissions starting tomorrow, so if you have a story you’re thinking about sending at the last second to us, you might be better off sending it to one of them instead. We’ll try to get rejections out in time for people who might be interested in resubmitting there to get in before they fill up, too.

Our Hardcovers are on sale today only with promo-code “TWENTY18” for 20% off. You can snag one here, and don’t forget, hardcover is the only way to get our /v/Anon Carter of Mars Ku Kuru Yo variant of Issue 2.

I’ll probably start making offers in the second week of November. Back in September, somebody hit my car, so I need to plan for covering the deductible before the other guy’s insurance comes through and have a contingency for if the body shop decides to fix pre-existing damage even though I told them not to.

Finally, have something spoopy for Halloween:

Final Day of Submissions…

THB, this submission period would be a lot less stressful if we were buying for 4 issues instead of 2. Gonna have to make some deep and painful cuts into the list of “Maybes”.

Already, we’ve narrowed down from ~250k words of fiction that if we had all the money in the world we’d make offers on to ~150k.

There’s a chance, albeit a small one, that one of the next 50 stories we read will bump something we’ve been holding onto off the bubble.

Honestly, I would recommend NOT sending us anything tomorrow. But if you do, IT WILL BE CONSIDERED. We’ll be reading everything we receive so that we can genuinely feel bad when we tell you that we can’t afford to acquire your awesome story this year.

There’s been a LOT of great submissions, and we thank everyone who has sent something to us! Without authors out there writing great fiction, we could not exist!

So, the New Sabrina Show… [lots of spoilers]

…is really weird.

I ended up watching it out of morbid curious with my girlfriend, who is a big MJH Sabrina fan.

I’m not sure what to make of it.

• Witchcraft is literally Satanism
• Virtually all the characters are evil [witches, natch]
• The Devout strong-and-independent-womyn Satanist aunt is extra evil
• “being a sodomite” makes you more susceptible to demonic possession
• Catholic Baptism protects against Satan
• CW/ABC Family edgy

If I didn’t know better, I’d almost say it was a deconstruction of edgy-hip Hollywood-progressive teen drama genre.

Whole first season was a shoot the shaggy-dog story to get Sabrina to sell her soul to the devil.

Being a witch is sold as being a free, free-thinking, strong and independent woman… With the catch that you have to submit yourself body and soul to Satan [a dude]. So, there is running theme of conflict of “muh feminism” with “actually, Satanism is inherently patriarchal”.

Sabrina doesn’t want to give up her life and soul to Satan cuz it sounds like a bad deal [cuz, uh…], but ends up through legal chicanery allowed [actually, forced, rather] to lead a split life where she MUST attend Black Masses and the Satanic school of magic even though she does not have to sign away her soul [which Satan has no claim over due to her baptism].

Sabrina gets the brilliant [dumb] idea that she can use the Satanic arts she learns to bind and defeat Satan. Which plays out about as well as you’d expect; like, the show knows it’s a dumb and stupid idea and Sabrina goes with because she’s a dumb teenager who doesn’t have the theological background that would give her an inkling of how bad an idea her plan is.

It finally ends with Sabrina stuck in a situation so bad where she thinks that the only way to save her friends is by finally selling her soul Satan. The whole scheme that brings her to that point? Cooked up by none other than the Ur demoness saint of feminism herself, Lilith. ::eyeroll::

But all of the characters who talk about the “false Christian god”, promote Satan worship as a good idea, and spout Crowley at each other? They’re the show’s villains. The one sympathetic supporting witch character? The one who helped get Sabrina baptized as an infant…

I won’t say that it’s great; it was a trainwreck bizarre enough that I watched it unfold, and at least it only had one ep that really felt like filler.  It mostly coasts on the shock value of mild gore and ongoing depiction of Satan worship in an old Archie Comic property. It was better than the ep I saw of Riverdale, and at least the whole “well, all of these characters are horrible people” is somewhat justified in that they’re all literal Satan worshipers.

The series ends with the setup of the Faustian dilemma [despite everything, Satan has no legitimate claim on Sabrina’s life or soul–he has only convinced her he has] with Sabrina’s now-ex-boyfriend, the last in a line of witch-hunters, left as the only decent person who can possibly take a stand against an army of Satan-worshipers who pose an existential threat to their town.

And no, Salem doesn’t talk. Sorry.

Update:

Dominika Lein pointed this out to me, so I’m gonna go with the woke horseshoe theory here–it’s so woke that it looks like anti-woke propaganda.

Reminder: Ad Space Available for Issue 10!

There is still space available for our final issue of the year! If you would like to advertise with Cirsova Magazine, please get your ad copy and payment to us by the end of the month! (Oct 31st)

Ad specs and contact details are here: https://cirsova.wordpress.com/cirsova-magazine/advertising

Please note that the back cover is already sold.

Issue 10 will be going out December 1st.

Music – Dungeon Lvl5, Dakuu

Final Week for Submissions Update

October 31st is the final day for Cirsova Submissions.

As you can imagine, I’m still buried in submissions, though I’ve at least got the remaining unread manuscripts printed out and in a stack.

We are probably going to have 50 strong contenders for space by the end of our submission period which we will have to narrow down to what we can fit and what we can afford.

At this point, if your submission receives a rejection from us, unless we specifically tell you to send us something else, we strongly advise not sending us another manuscript. Many of the rejections we will be sending out soon will have less to do with the quality of story than our inability to place every good story we receive, particularly since we’ve received some great ones that we may end up having to turn away. Chances are that a new submission will not bump one of the stories we are still considering off the bubble.

Over the next two to three weeks, I will be personally writing around a hundred rejection emails. It is literally my least favorite part of the gig. Please also understand that we can’t provide extensive feedback on stories that we are not making offers on. Sometimes, a story is just not to our taste. Sometimes, we love a story but realize that it’s just not going to be a piece we can fit given our space and budget constraints. Sometimes we want a story but have to make the hard choice to give one of the available slots to a different story.

Generally, do not hold rejected stories for us to try and submit next year. Submit them elsewhere; get your story out there. Even in cases where we like a story but can’t fit it one year, there’s a good chance that we might not be able to fit it the next year for similar reasons. There have been a few occasions where we have gone back and asked for stories we’d seen before that either we really did not want to miss out on but simply could not buy it at the time or what had not fit the magazine’s format at one time now fits our direction, but these cases are very rare and we will be the ones to ask about those stories we have already seen.

Thank you again for all of your submissions! We have enjoyed reading them and are looking forward to the next year of our magazine’s publication!

Slush Pile Update

After looking like the weekend was gonna be largely a waste, I managed to make up for time on Sunday and get through two binders of stories.

Current Status:

67/114

5 Accept*

23 Under Consideration

I’ve finished reaching out to authors whose submissions are still under consideration.

*:These are stories that have been accepted and had offers made; while we’ve got several stories marked “Accept”, we are holding off on making offers and final decisions on further pieces until we reach the end of our submission period. We are doing this in part so as to not unfairly disadvantage stories that were submitted in the latter half of our submission window.

 

Wheee! [Still buried in Manuscripts]

We’ve broken our record for stories submitted. We’ve received over a hundred and still have a week and a half to go.

For various personal reasons [October has just been a very busy month], I’ve been a bit slower than in the past, so we’re only half-way through the still growing pile.

I’ve reached out to most of the “Maybes” we’ve gotten to so far to let authors know their stories are under consideration.

We’ve sent out a few rejection letters last week and will be sending out the next batch next week [my least favorite part of the gig].

Current status:

52/108

4 purchased

20 under consideration

Cirsova on Shane Plays

Weekend before last, I was on the radio with Shane Plays, our local weekend geek news show.

You can listen to the episode online here:

https://shaneplays.com/heroic-fantasy-science-fiction-cirsova-magazine-radio-show-podcast-episode-166/

Quick note on submissions: We are buried but making slow progress. Remember than “soon” and “shortly” are relative terms when we say that we will read your stories “soon” and get back with you “shortly” thereafter.

As of right now, we’re about 1/3 of the way through nearly a hundred manuscripts. Due to the volume, we will be making very few immediate offers on stories and will be weighing our options on our many “maybes” once we’ve made more progress on the “stack”.

Will Cirsova Crowdfund?

No. We won’t.

Recently it was revealed that not only had Kickstarter blocked Richard Meyer’s Jawbreakers campaign for alleged TOS violations [it was, as I understand an apolitical comic, and despite being mildly too salty for people with emotional hypertension, Richard is a fairly apolitical guy], they leaked their communications with him to Richard Pace who dumped them all over Twitter.

Now, IndieGoGo decided to tank Chuck Dixon’s Alt-Hero Q project after it had finished funding for nebulous claims that it had violated their terms of service. Backers have been refunded their money, but there’s nothing on the project page that would seem to violate the terms of service. IndieGoGo pulled the plug on Alt-Hero Q the same day that a Bleeding Cool article featuring an in-depth interview with Vox Day was posted. Following the outcry of their lunatic readers, Bleeding Cool took down the article and issued an apology. This is certainly not a coincidence.

Cirsova has never really NEEDED to crowdfund. All of our projects are finished and paid for by the time that the Kickstarters have gone live, which is how we’ve been able to ship out as soon as the money clears. Before the Alt-Hero Q incident, we had considered moving to IndieGoGo; we even have an extensive Illustrated Stark project page setup and waiting for us to flip the go-live switch. This changes things, however. Going forward, we plan on taking our products straight to print, making them available on Amazon and through retailers without spending a month flogging a crowdfunding event.

We hope you will stick with us despite no longer using these platforms.

[Disclosure: While I backed for Chuck Dixon’s Alt-Hero: Avalon on Freestartr, a platform that was recently murdered by its payment processor, I was not a backer of either Jawbreakers or Alt-Hero Q.]