We're late! We're late for a very important date! 

The second season of the Kaleidocast has officially been released into the wilds of the internet. It's been a long journey -longer than expected- but for a very good reason. Producing the Kaleidocast is a daunting task. It's not just a story podcast, it's a collaborative piece of art as well as a teaching tool. 

The initial goal of the Kaleidocast was a modest one, to help Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers improve their craft by giving them a high, yet attainable goal: write at a professional level. To that end, we purchased stories from well known professional authors and made their stories the standard to which our BSFW authors were writing. We kept our slush pile short, took resubmissions when we thought a story wasn't quite there yet, and gave personal feedback. It worked. Oh, how our authors rose to the challenge. 

But that wasn't enough. To make the podcast stand out, we created a radio drama as frame structure for the stories we produced. That's where Meta-Brooklyn came in, a Brooklyn populated by living, breathing stories. We developed characters Senior Junior Lecturer Sam Spellingbound, Crypto-Provost Dawn Fairweather Jenkins, Professor Brad Overstreet, Emeritus Professor Calliope Da Gammawitz, and story hunter James Earl King II.   

But to grow in Season Two, we needed to up our game and that meant $$$. With your help we ran a successful Kickstarter to raise enough money to pay our authors, actors, sound engineers, and artists. Even though we completed Season Two in half the time as Season One, it was twice the work.  

Season Two was all about clarifying our vision and upping our game. That took more time, but I think it was worth it. Award winning authors and voice actors, a more ambitious audio drama,  and gorgeous art came together in ways we couldn't imagine until we saw it on the page.

So here we are, late, but right on time for Readercon 29. This is only right since it was at Readercon 28, one year ago, that we launched the Kickstarter for Season Two.  

On behalf of the rest of the production team; Bradley Robert Parks (founder), Sam Schreiber (story runner), Marcy Arlin (director), and Jessica Plumbley (assistant manager), I invite you to dive into our world and immerse yourself in stories that matter.  Look for the Kaleidocast bi-weekly starting today, July 10th!

Sincerely,

Cameron Roberson
Kaleidocast Managing Editor ​

BSFW is on a roll!!

Ivy Spadille's novelette "The Other Side of Otto Mountain" has been published in issue six of FIYAH magazine!

"The Other Side of Otto Mountain" takes place in a fictitious version of a historically black town in Oklahoma and centers on Lazarus Caruthers, a retired Vietnam veteran. Daily, he seeks solace while fishing on the lake near Otto Mountain until events disrupt his routine.

"For me the story is about retaining a curiosity and openness to aspects of life not always apparent in everyday experience," says Ivy Spadille. "It also looks at how past events, regrets, and fears linger and limit our perspectives. I hope this story echoes that on the individual (character level) as well as on the societal level--in the ways we perceive social ills, and whether or not we choose to address them."
 
​Ivy Spadille is originally from Virginia, and currently lives in New York City. She's an alumna of the VONA/Voices workshop for speculative fiction as well as the Hurston/Wright Summer Writers Workshop.  You can follow her on twitter at @ivyspadille.

Issue Six (Big Mama Nature) of FIYAH Magazine is available now. Get your copies (and subscribe to the magazine)!

Super huge news, everyone!

Our very own Mimi Mondal has a novelette, “His Footprints, Through Darkness and Light”, coming out on Tor.com.

Mimi's story takes place in a somewhat anachronistic version of early 20th century India, surrounding a circus troupe called the Majestic Oriental Circus. This is a world in which I have written other stories, the earlier ones being “Other People” (first published by Juggernaut Books in India; an excerpt later published in Words Without Borders) and “This Sullied Earth, Our Home” (first published in Podcastle, and later by Juggernaut Books). Some of the characters from the earlier stories reappear in “His Footprints,” though it can be read as a standalone.

According to Mimi, this story is also probably a reflection on masculinities—the male heart versus the male ego, the ways in which men perform love and loyalty, and the flaws in themselves that they inadvertently fail to see. The narrator-protagonist is a trapeze master called Binu, and the story takes place in a fictitious South Indian temple town called Thripuram where the Majestic Oriental Circus has traveled to perform. The circus owner Johuree appears in both the earlier stories from this world, and the jinn Shehzad Marid first appears in ‘This Sullied Earth.’”

Mimi Mondal is a Dalit writer from India who lives in New York, and is one of the Event Organizers for BSFW. She was the Octavia Butler Scholar at Clarion West 2015, and briefly the Poetry and Reprint Editor of Uncanny Magazine. Her first anthology, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, co-edited with Alexandra Pierce, was published in 2017. She has appeared in panels at the World Fantasy Convention and given readings at the New York Public Library, Lincoln Center.
 
“His Footprints, Through Darkness and Light” will be published by Tor.com in 2019.

The good news never ends!

Ted Rabinowitz's short story "A Dog of Wu" will appear in the March/April edition of the Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy!

Check out this mysterious blurb below: 
In a genetically optimized future, one man discovers - to his horror - that there is more to life than preserving his lineage.

After working as a story analyst, lighting technician, and professional gambler, Ted Rabinowitz now writes marketing copy and speculative fiction, two entirely different kinds of imaginative literature. Ted is the author of The Wrong Sword, a comic fantasy, and his short stories have been featured in Lore magazine and on the Kaleidocast podcast. A Dog of Wu is his first appearance in F&SF. 

Great News! Chris Mahon's four-part story "Hypnotica" has been published in Fantasy Hive. 

"'Hypnotica’ is a story about dreamwrights, mage-musicians who travel across the dreamscape at night to hijack dreams and turn them into mind-bending concerts. The story focuses on two dreamwrights, GRIN and NO-FOOT, who are left picking up the pieces of their lives after one of their shows turns into a nightmare."

Chris Mahon is a fantasy writer and essayist living in New York. He has a Bachelors in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University (they weren’t Lutheran, and neither is he) and graduated from NYU’s Summer Publishing Institute in 2014. After that, he went into hermitage in Brooklyn.

Chris appeared on a number of sci-fi panels, at NYCC, Silicon Valley Comic-Con, and Columbia University, spoken about ARGs at Glasgow International Fantasy Convention, and served as Managing Editor for Outer Places, a sci-fi/pop culture website.

Chris also has another short story "Old No-Eyes", scheduled for publication for Summer 2018, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

A huge congrats to Jane Sand, whose short story "Lures" has been published in Fantasist Magazine. 

Jane Sand was invented by a health care worker in New York. She lives in a crumbling house, possessed by a cat. Her hobbies include writing, painting, and decapitating Orange Lantern dolls to give them more suitable heads.

You can check out "Lures" here.

A big congrats to our very own S.A Chakraborty, whose debut novel, THE CITY OF BRASS, has just been published by Harper Voyager.

The synopsis:

Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of 18th century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trade she uses to get by — palm readings, zars, healings — are all tricks, sleights of hand, learned skills; a means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles.

But when Nahri accidentally summons an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced to accept that the magical world she thought only existed in childhood stories is real. For the warrior tells her a new tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire, and rivers where the mythical marid sleep; past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises, and mountains where the circling hawks are not what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass?a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.

In that city, behind gilded brass walls laced with enchantments, behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments are simmering. And when Nahri decides to enter this world, she learns that true power is fierce and brutal. That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics. That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences.

After all, there is a reason they say be careful what you wish for...

Even before its release, THE CITY OF BRASS had garnered a lot of attention and praise. It made Paste Magazine's "Ten Most Anticipated Books of November 2017,". It also earned a starred review from Kirkus, which called this novel ​"Highly impressive and exceptionally promising,". The Library journal called it a "beautifully constructed world that will entrance fantasy aficionados.” 

S. (Shannon) A. Chakraborty is a NY-based speculative fiction writer and history buff. When not buried in books about Mughal portraiture and Omani history, she enjoys hiking, knitting, and recreating unnecessarily complicated, medieval meals for her family. You can find her online most frequently at Twitter (@SChakrabs) where she likes to ramble about history, politics, and Islamic art. You can also keep up with her on her author website.

We can all show our support by buying her book! You can get it everywhere books are sold, including Amazon. Double up your support by dropping a review there or on Goodreads.  

Check it out! Sam Schreiber's short story "Homo Homini Lupus" has been published in the 3rd issue of Occult Detective Quarterly, a short story market that centers supernatural detectives solving otherworldly crimes.

Sam Schreiber is a writer of Science Fiction and Fantasy and currently teaches creative writing at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and Wagner College. Sam Schreiber's work has appeared in Podcastle, Tales to Terrify, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and Martian Migraine Press.

We're on a roll! Congratulations to Marcy Arlin, whose short story "Brooklyn Fantasia" will be published in the Diabolical Plots magazine. 

Marcy has taught theatre at Yale, Brown, CUNY, U. of Chicago, Pace,  and many universities in Eastern Europe. Currently she is an artistic director of the OBIE-winning Immigrants' Theatre Project. Oh, and did we mention she's a Fulbright scholar to Romania and the Czech Republic?

Marcy's story will be available at Diabolical Plots in January 2018.

Congrats, Marcy!

Congrats to Elliot Rusty Harold on his new short story publication! His story "Claim Jumpers" is part of the Third Flatiron anthology, Hyperpowers. 

Rusty is a man of many talents. He is a computer scientist, , software developer, lecturer, and nature photographer. He has also authored numerous publications on Java and XML. 

Third Flatiron: Hyperpowers is available on Amazon.