We’re baaaack…

And just like any high wire performer who takes a spill, we’re roaring back with new acts of speculative twitter fiction and poetry, beginning May 21, 2012 (hey, that’s tomorrow!).

There’s a new Facebook page (rudimentary for now, but new acts take time to develop, right?) And, of course, you can sign up for our twitter feed to receive fresh content as it is posted.

Please join us for the further adventures of our fearless trapeze artists, and spread the word. We’re open for new submissions. I intend to operate on a rolling week basis, with submissions received during a week being decided upon over the following weekend and published the week after that.

Correction

On March 12, I posted an incorrect twitter poem, attributed to Deborah Walker. I suspect it was computer pixies and their pixelation dust that blinded me temporarily to truth. The March 12 entry has now been corrected. Please vote, like, share, and comment on Deborah’s excellent twitter poem. My apologies to her, and to you.

March Madness

We’re shaking things up for March. Rather than the two-a-week schedule we’ve been maintaining in February, we’ll be publishing a story or poem each day in March. Once we’ve worked through our backlog of accepted pieces, we’ll return to a more sedate pacing, with stories appearing on site within a week of acceptance. I also plan to institute weekly challenges and contests as well as a Facebook page to further enhance our presence in the webosphere.

The Author Showcase will return in March. In the meantime, please stop by and rate the stories/poems you read, leave comments, etc. We want our authors to feel the love.

Speaking of you wonderful authors, thanks for your patience while I acclimate to the life of a high wire editor.

New Editor Stephen V. Ramey!

Hello dear readers,

I am sad to say that I am stepping down as Editor.  However, I am very, very happy to announce that Stephen V. Ramey will be taking over as Editor-in-Chief.  Stephen’s work has been published in this space many times and I feel that he will be able to take this magazine to the next level of excellence.

It has been wonderful experience reading all of your submissions and spreading our speculative and surreal words around.  I am happy to step down knowing that trapeze will continue with one of its most prominent contributors at the wheel.

Again, thank you all for your support.

Happy reading!

 

Sincerely,

Jessica Otto

Submissions Closed Until July 1, 2011

Hello All,

trapeze magazine will be closed to submissions until July 1, 2011.  This will not effect your regularly scheduled programming, twitter stories and poems will still be published regularly every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday until I feel like stopping, which will probably be never. Unfortunately, any submissions that appear in my submission manager before July 1 will receive an automatic rejection so save your work until July.

Thanks for reading,

Jessica Otto

Editor

Note from the Editor

trapeze will be taking a brief hiatus at the end of the month.  No stories will be published between December 25th and December 30th.  Submissions will remain open but the response time may be longer than two days.  Publication will resume on January 1, 2011.

Thanks for reading,

Jessica Otto

Halloween Contest Update

Editor’s Note:

Thank you all for participating!

The Halloween Contest officially closed at midnight of September 30. All the entries are now being reviewed and will soon be passed to the fearsome Seanan McGuire. The winner will be published on the morning October 31.

Cheers,
Jessica Otto
editor
trapeze magazine

Submission Manager Update

Hello Wonderful Writers!

The Submishmash Manager has changed. Instead of uploading documents you can submit your twitter fiction or poetry in a text box. Hopefully this will save you time. If you have already sent a submission the “old” way, don’t worry, I have it and will respond shortly.

If anyone has any trouble using the text box or if you do not get a confirmation email saying that your submission has been accepted please let me know (trapezemag (at) gmail (dot) com).

Cheers,
Jessica Otto
Editor
trapeze magazine

HALLOWEEN CONTEST

Do you like innocent things like autumn or pumpkins?  Do you like not so innocent things like Jack’o'lanterns grinning innocently or the black cat sitting in your yard with a black feather stuck to its whisker?  Halloween is just around the corner, as the magical candy isles in grocery stores foretell.

To celebrate Halloween this year trapeze magazine will be hosting a themed contest. The theme is Halloween.

Guidelines:
1) Each person is allowed only three entries
2) 140 characters MAX of Halloween fiction or poetry
3) As usual, no excessive violence or erotica
4) Please remain in the realms of science fiction, fantasy, horror and surreal.

Use the Submishmash submission manager to upload your entries in the “Contest” category.

Because Halloween is a very special time, we require a very special judge.  A person willing to step out of the labyrinth of her secret, spectre plagued laboratory and work her mad scientist mojo on we humble twitter writers.  Thankfully, such a person exists (has deigned to step from the Realm of Roses and Screams into this dimension).

Judging this contest is the esteemed and talented Seanan McGuire.

Seanan McGuire was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn’t killed for using her typewriter at three o’clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider-bite. Her upbringing has left her with a love of rattlesnakes and a deep fear of weather, which really explains a lot.

Often described as a vortex of the surreal, many of Seanan’s personal anecdotes end with things like “and then we got the anti-venom” or “but it’s okay, because it turned out the water wasn’t all that deep.” She has yet to be defeated in a game of “Who here was bitten by the strangest thing?,” and can be amused for hours by just about anything. Just about anything includes swamps, long walks, long walks in swamps, most of the things that live in swamps, horror movies, strange noises, musical theater, reality television, comic books, finding pennies on the street, and venomous reptiles. Seanan may be the only person on the planet who admits to using Kenneth Muir’s Horror Films of the 1980s as a checklist.

Seanan is the author of the October Daye series of novels, the first of which, Rosemary and Rue (Amazon) (Mysterious Galaxy), was published by DAW Books in 2009. It has since been followed by A Local Habitation (Amazon) (Mysterious Galaxy) and An Artificial Night (Amazon) (Mysterious Galaxy), with more to come. She’s working on several other books, just to make sure she never runs out of things to edit.

Seanan’s short fiction has appeared in After Hours: Tales from the Ur-Bar, Grants Pass, and Apex Magazine. Her Sparrow Hill Road series is one of the featured Universes on The Edge of Propinquity for 2010, and she belongs to  the Book View Cafe, an organization of professional authors who like to give away free fiction. It’s fun! Check them out.

In her spare time, Seanan writes and records original music. She has three CDs currently available, and is preparing to release a fourth, titled Wicked Girls. She is also a cartoonist, and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical web comic, “With Friends Like These…”, as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multi-hour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her website, and go to pretty much any movie that has the words “blood,” “night,” “terror,” or “attack” in the title. Most people believe that she doesn’t sleep.

Seanan lives in a creaky old farmhouse in Northern California, which she shares with her two cats, Lilly and Alice, a vast collection of plush things and horror movies, and sufficient books to officially qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly-held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life.

Years of writing blurbs for convention program books have firmly fixed Seanan in the habit of writing all her bios in the third person, so as to sound marginally less dorky. Stress is on the “marginally.” It probably doesn’t help that she has so many hobbies.

Seanan also writes as Mira Grant, author of the Newsflesh trilogy. For more information on Mira and her works, see MiraGrant.com.

Prize:
Unparalleled bragging rights.

If anyone has any questions or concerns regarding the contest guidelines please email trapezemag (at) gmail (dot) com.

Thank you and happy hunting!

Interview Announcement

Dear Readers,

In order to spread the word about twitter literature and get to know our authors better, the last week of every month will be dedicated to one author and his/her ideas about twitter fiction. July 27 through 31 will host twitter fiction from the mind of the brilliant and talented Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé. Desmond has graciously allowed trapeze magazine a short interview, which will be posted here on the 27th.

Cheers!