Smooth Criminal

Let's go back.

We done

Full circle night. Eric Jones wrote the first story I published for Thieves Jargon, and he gets to be the last in line.

Thanks again to all the writers, readers, the editors I've worked with, the artists, anybody who has submitted. You'll be in good hands with Scannell.

Drop a line and say hello sometime.

Mather's big day

Mather as Ed the Schizophrenic Synth-Player of a Punk Rock Band

Who you callin' psycho?

Five years ago tonight, under the influence of cheap wine and California smog, I put together the first issue of Thieves Jargon, which contained work from:

-- Eric Jones, writer and bandit, perhaps my first personal contemporary influence. Cover artist for Kittens in the Boiler and Year of the Thief.

-- Nate VanSweden, who wrote for Barstool Sports, the shitty Boston with some of the sleaziest editors in the game.

-- Bill White, whose story "Chicken Shack" in the late journal Pig Iron Malt(along with Chuck Palahniuk's "Guts") made me want to start Thieves Jargon.

-- Stephen Shea, my favorite literary Sox fan, maybe the only honest person I ever worked retail with.

--Hollywood, my pseudonym.

The original goal? Do it better than anybody had previously done it. I'm pretty sure we were the first journal with anything approaching a message board. Maybe 3am, but I don't think anybody else was doing weekly issues. We had the weekly writers. When artwork showed up with issue 100, there weren't too many journals doing artwork.

We didn't catch much traction until issue 5, when we ran a piece called "Redemption, TX," by Megan Frazer. She pimped us on the Zoetrope message board, and then we started getting a lot more submissions and readers. That's where Jeff T. Kane found us.

Delphine Lecompte showed up for issue 11. I remember sending her email saying, I've never seen anything like this before, I'd love to see more, and then she sent me two stories a night, as she wrote them, for a year straight. She gave Thieves Jargon as much a voice as anybody, and her writing led to the first release from Thieves Jargon Press.

We've published almost 700 authors and 1400 pieces in the last five years. I've spent the past month running some of my favorites. I have a few more weeks of classic TJ authors that I want to publish one last time, and then I'm retiring.

Thieves Jargon is going to continue under the watch of Dan Scannell, who has been a TJ co-editor for long enough that I know he's thoughtful, smooth, and has enough similar tastes to me.

I'm going to concentrate on editing novels and compilations. I have several on my plate to get me through the summer. Send suckas my way and I'll do them right.

Thanks for reading.

More, better, later...

Young publishers take note

From 18 challenges in contemporary literature on wired.com:

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

Interesting article and discussion.

Speaking of JVN...

I always thought he was criminally underappreciated. It's rare when writers write about things they know about and it's not about getting fucked up.

"Guano Arc"


guano arc by ~jvnjvn on deviantART

jvnjvn

TJ5yrs

And this thing in front of him was squirming.

Musical interlude