Shimmer Issue 10
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. –Sir Francis Bacon
So, what’s Shimmer? Simple answer: it’s a magazine that publishes short speculative fiction. You can download our 10th issue (Happy Anniversary, Shimmer!) for free and see what we’re all about. We’re awesome, and now you can see why, totally free. We’re not even going to make you register for a mailing list: totally free. Please celebrate with us.
Long answer: it’s mine. It’s my joy and my challenge and my burden. They tell you publishing isn’t personal — but that’s in the context of how to handle rejection. True enough, rejections aren’t personal.
But don’t let anyone tell you publishing isn’t personal. You don’t put in this kind of effort unless you have deeply personal reasons; it’s not like going to your job at the widget factory. Running a small press is what you do after your shift at the widget factory. It’s what you do with what shiny bits of yourself you’ve been able to protect from the conveyer belt; it’s what your labor at the widget factory supports.
It’s personal.
I don’t know, maybe it’s different for the top editors, the ones who work at the big magazines who earn a living editing. But I have every reason to believe that they’re in it out of a deep love for the stories, the craft, the trade, the industry. They’re in it for the same reasons I am; they’re just playing at a different level than I.
If not, we might as well just all go work at the widget factory.
Point Two. This is something I didn’t realize until I was a year or two into Shimmer: publications really do have an editorial voice. A vision. You can tell a lot about the editor by reading their magazine, though indirectly. I knew that writing was revealing; I knew that the best writing connected at a deeply personal level and that authors can have no secrets and no shame. It took me longer to realize that editors also have no secrets.
The stories that I choose to publish say as much about me as an editor as they do about the authors. You have to squint, and look at them in aggregate, but sweet hobo Jesus, it’s all there, once you know how to look.
Point Three. Therefore, my mission is to find our Right Readers, the ones who dig what we’re doing, the people for whom our stories resonate the way they do with me. Every magazine is different at its core; our job as publishers is to find the readers who dig us. Thought Exercise: imagine Shimmer publishing an Analog story. Imagine Analog publishing a Shimmer story. Your brain just can’t do it, can it?
The thing is, every magazine is that fundamentally different from every other magazine. I read a lot of magazines, a ridiculous amount, really. I often think, “That’s an awesome story.” Only rarely do I think, “That’s a Shimmer story. That’s a story that I, personally, would have put my money behind, because it so completely captures my personal vision for my magazine.”
Incredibly rarely.
So, yeah. It’s personal.
It’s also awesome. Check it out.
