Electric Velocipede
Issue 25
Table of Contents
“A Remembrance of the Future” by John Klima
“The Night We Drank Cold Wine” by Megan Kurishage
“Butterfly Effect” by Mishell Baker
“Nuclear Winter” by Ash Krafton
“The Woods of Wistman’s Grove” by Tyson Young
“Counting Stones” and “The Magician Makes a Phoenix” by Alicia Cole
“The Master Shoemaker” by Katya Oliva-Llego
“Peephole” and “Trial” by Daniel W. Davis
“The Greatest of His Age” by Bart Allen
“A Faun’s Lament” by Michael Constantine McConnell
“Musici” by Derek Zumsteg
“Upstairs Room” by Lida Broadhurst
“North” by Kristy L. Truax-Nichols
“Menace” by J. R. Salling
Blindfold Taste Test with Aimee Bender
“Glass Boxes and Clockwork Gods” by Damien Walters Grintalis
“Adaptation” by Heather Albano
© 2012, Electric Velocipede
“Wolf Girl in the Woods” Cover Art © 2012 Jeremy Zerfoss
www.electricvelocipede.com
A Remembrance of the Future
John Klima
Not that long ago—in August and September of 2012—I ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund Electric Velocipede in 2013. Not only were we successful in achieving our goal, but we also were able to hit a stretch goal to fund converting our back issues into digital format. While it was nice to think that there were plenty of people in the field who appreciate Electric Velocipede and what we do, it was very gratifying and humbling to have that proven true.
With one notable exception, running a Kickstarter campaign is no different than a fundraising drive. That exception is that if you don’t hit your Kickstarter goal, you receive no money and none of your supporters are out any money. In a traditional fundraising drive you keep any and all money pledged to you. That was a very real concern while running the Kickstarter: if we didn’t hit our goal, we’d likely have to close up shop and stop publishing Electric Velocipede. Thankfully we didn’t have to worry about that.
But will we be able to do it again next year? And the year after that? And after that?
Kickstarter has been a huge boon for a wide range of projects. From anthologies to graphic novels to watches to gaming consoles, Kickstarter has helped them all find their way to reality. Projects that would never be able to get a bank loan or would have difficulty finding financial backers are able to reach out to the public and get funding.
In my opinion, it works great for one-off projects, but it’s an inadequate solution for an ongoing project. Brian White has discovered this for his fantastic Fireside Magazine. Brian used Kickstarter to fund all three issues of Fireside. However, it was hit or miss for issue #3 for a time. Brian admitted during the funding for issue #3 that using Kickstarter was not a long-term solution.
How many times can you keep going back to the same well for the same thing?
On one hand, getting a year’s worth of funding for Electric Velocipede is no different than doing an annual subscription drive. In that respect, there’s no reason why I couldn’t run a new campaign every year to get ready for the next one. It’s the sort of thing we did when we were a print magazine and we could do as an electronic magazine, sort of.
There are two main differences between the print and electronic versions of the magazine (as we’re running them today). First, with the print version, the only way to read it was to buy it. Second, the best way to get a copy was to buy a subscription because the chances of finding a physical copy in a specialty store or at a convention were slim.
Should we think of the print magazine as analogous to the electronic version?
With the electronic version, the content is free online; anyone who has an internet connection can read it. For those who are interested, they can buy digital editions to read in the e-reader of their choice. Again, anyone with an internet connection can buy copies at places like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Weightless.
Recently we began selling subscriptions to our digital editions via Weightless. I had hoped to offer subscriptions through Amazon, but that program has been suspended. It makes it much tougher to do a subscription drive and a renewal drive, but it’s not impossible—by the way, have you picked up a subscription at Weightless? They’re online $6.50 for one year/four issues!
Are there ways of generating revenue for the electronic version which didn’t exist for the print version? Print periodical publishing lives on three pillars: advertising, subscriptions, and editorial. All three need to be successful for your periodical to survive.
Advertising and subscriptions provide your income and editorial brings them both to the door.
Since we’re a small magazine—as opposed to a huge entertainment site like Boing Boing or Go Fug Yourself—online advertising is a crap shoot, and I can’t reconcile Kickstarter to a subscription drive. There’s nothing preventing me from running a Kickstarter in 2013 to get funding for 2014. Fireside Magazine struggled by going back to Kickstarter multiple times in one year. Would going back annually eradicate some of the problems they ran into, or would we have the same problem?
A magazine subscription and renewal works on the premise that you’re building an audience. You provide something people want, they want to keep getting it, so they renew. The more often someone renews, the easier it is to retain that subscriber.
Kickstarter is geared for finding new people for new things, not retaining the same people for the same thing. Unlike a subscription, people who pledged to Fireside via Kickstarter aren’t as likely to pledge to them again and again over time. It becomes more difficult to retain customers via a crowdfunding resource like Kickstarter over time.
We’re back to: will we be able to do it again next year? And the year after that? And after that?
I think the answer is no. For our purposes, funding Electric Velocipede a year at a time might actually work fine in Kickstarter. You could think of Kickstarter as my subscription agency. Except that unlike a straightforward subscription drive, Kickstarter wants you to have prizes and giveaways which negate your funding benefit in the long term. Eventually I’ll run out of back issues and have to make something (i.e., spend money making something) that can be a pledge level.
Designing your campaign properly will give you the funds to pay for your rewards, but if the point of the campaign is funding for the magazine for the next year, and the money you’re raising is going towards making pins or calendars or coffee mugs, instead of money for authors, then you’re dead in the water. A lot of Kickstarter campaigns find the money they raised doesn’t quite cover their expenses.
The long and short of it is: we’re funded for next year, we hit our stretch goal to digitize our back issues, and we need to come up with something to fund us in the future. Maybe the editorial content (not just this column, but the entire issue) will bring more interested parties to the party. My strength lies in editorial, and I think this issue proves it in spades.
John Klima
Waukesha, WI
November 2012
The Night We Drank Cold Wine
Megan Kurishage
Being late, Rhodes says, is just a symptom of bad luck. It doesn’t have anything to do with the person waiting.
He tells me this so I can i
magine all the unlucky things that keep him from where he wants to be: misplaced keys, traffic jams, a stopped clock, bad directions. Sometimes, Rhodes leaves without thinking about how to get where he’s going. He wanders from his door, takes the circuitous route, and ends up somewhere else, having never paused to check the time. When he’s really late, he calls.
“I know,” he says before I mention it, “I’m late.”
I don’t ask anymore, but Rhodes always explains. If I decide to pick up the phone, he will tell me a story of unexpected coincidences to make me laugh; and I will hardly believe it, even though I know his stories always turn out to be true.
“I went to my parents’ house,” he might say. “And I locked myself in the basement. I called for them, wheedled, yelled, pounded on the door, but they didn’t hear because they were upstairs, trying to remember a song they used to know. I could hear them singing—something something, flowers and sun in your something hair, la la la la low—and then they started dancing. And, you know my dad, all the thumping shook the floor, shook the whole house, and something fell off a lamp and hit me, and you know what? They stopped singing and everything was quiet so all I could hear was the ringing of the key on top of my head.”
Rhodes will always be there soon. You can walk back and forth on the hot summer sidewalk, until your shirt clings and the houses turn on their lights when it starts to get dark, and you’re tearing pieces of grass into green confetti that sticks to fingers and under nails, and you’re shaving off the rubber of your sandals layer by layer; and Rhodes will be there in the end. He just has bad luck getting there.
I wanted to go dancing because it was too hot to stand still. I wanted to manufacture my own breeze and blow away the heavy air that wrapped my skin in thick, impenetrable wads of humidity. My head had a block of slow summer nothing wedged in its center, and I kept thinking that if only I moved fast enough, I could make it go away.
“Where should we go?” Rhodes asked. He had to move a cardboard box off the passenger seat before I could get into the car. It rattled and clinked against his chest when he lifted it onto the seat behind.
“Anywhere,” I said.
Rhodes has this way of looking at you when he’s trying to make up his mind. His eyelids go soft and his cheeks crumple to meet them so he looks like he’s trying to shrink the world down to something he can see.
“That’s helpful,” he said.
We could have gone someplace nice. We could have gone someplace cramped and dirty with neighbors shouting down the noise. It didn’t matter. The car was too warm for sitting, even with the night pouring in all the windows.
“We should go then,” Rhodes said, but instead of turning on the car, he reached behind us, untucked the flaps of cardboard, and sank his arm into the box. It was full of bottles, mostly empty from the noise, but he took one from the bottom, twisted off the lid, and gave it to me.
The mouth was crusted with tiny flakes that stuck to my lips. The liquid behind the green glass was a vicious yellow, and I would never have drunk it, except that it smelled like nasturtiums, peppery and wet.
It tasted like what wine tastes like when you’ve only imagined it, before you’ve ever had a sip. It was sweet, and slightly thick, and slippery enough to go down before my tongue could finish tasting it. My mouth felt like I had licked something sharp.
I asked Rhodes what it was, and he said it was something he made, an old family thing that wasn’t really a secret, but complicated and boring to explain, and it was too hot for that kind of conversation.
We shared the bottle, sipping it in turns until there was nothing left.
I rubbed my teeth to lose the alcohol sting, and my blood rushed up under my skin to throw away heat like a burst of fine powder in the dark. I was blushing, red all over, patched and blotchy. It made me shiver and my skin twitched tight at the illusion of being cold.
“I know a good place,” Rhodes said. He rolled up the windows. He huffed on his hands and scrubbed his fingers together.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“You haven’t been there before.”
“How do you know?”
Rhodes thinks he knows everything about me, but when I looked at him, his face pale and smeared with cold, I thought about how easy it is to sit on the surface of someone, to float along on your brittle scrap of boat and forget the ocean, with all its currents and whales and sunken treasure, that waits beneath your feet.
Rhodes drove to a street not far from where we used to live, back when we were small. The houses there have thin fences on three sides and trim lawns in between that they sit on, like polite gifts in half-opened boxes.
Rhodes walked and I followed. I hummed a little and bounced on my toes to escape the cold. The night was hot; I could feel the weight of it hovering just outside my skin, but I was still cold and had to wrap my arms around my chest, to keep my warmth from deserting me completely.
“Here it is,” Rhodes said. There was a gap between two fences, unclaimed by either side, and when we slipped into it, other people were already there. Their faces were flushed, like ours, and mottled around the edges with the same chilled, empty spots that grew on Rhodes’s forehead and across my wrists.
A short man walked so close to the fence that his arm rubbed splinters from it. He paused when we passed and held up a green bottle. Fragments of wood and spider webs stuck to his sleeves, and his face was consumed by a badly kept beard.
“Good stuff,” he said. The yellow wine sloshed.
“Thanks,” Rhodes said.
“Always worth it too, even when you charge me more than I should spend. Every summer.” The man kept blinking, as if his eyes were full of dust. “You’ll see.”
We left him behind, but his voice lumbered along with us.
“Good stuff. Yes, good stuff, even with it never lasting long and still, but good stuff.”
The gap between the fences went on much longer than I expected. We never came to the other side of the road, or ran into someone’s backyard. We only stopped when we reached a door, which was closed. An old woman sat next to it in a white folding chair. She had a lamp under a pleated canvas shade, and she pressed the tips of her fingers together, one after another, in the light.
“Where’s your face?” she said. “Put it down here where I can reach it.” She lifted her hands and the silk of her sleeves, a tacky orange stripe, drooped to show a stretch of skin, wrinkled and ancient to the elbow. She caught my face and pressed the insides of my cheeks together, and when she let go, her hands left oily smears that smelled like jasmine.
“Cold as bone,” she told me. “Not one scrap of warmth left, lucky you. Otherwise, I’d have to take it away. Go on.” She took a key from her lap, bent forward, and unlocked the door. From the other side, voices came out, and laughter, and the sound of glasses clinking together.
She put the back of her hand on Rhodes’s forehead.
“Cold as bone,” she said again. Then she tapped a knuckle against her teeth. “You look familiar.”
“I wish I were,” Rhodes said. He smiled, but the woman frowned.
“Like someone I used to know, but then it’s been a long time and I’ve been known to make mistakes. Go on.”
We went through the door together, elbow to elbow and so close that Rhodes’s foot caught on my ankle and I should have tripped, but I hopped into the air instead and glided down, landing on the tips of my toes. Rhodes laughed.
“How does it feel?” he asked.
I thought about this as we went to join the party. It was a swirling, glittering party full of people that we didn’t know, so elegant and serene that I should have been embarrassed to intrude. But we were wearing costumes now, pleats and buttons that I didn’t remember putting on. Rhodes had a suit and a tie of such crisp silk that it could have been cut from frozen butter. I had heeled slippers of velveteen with flowers that swallowed my feet. Collars pricked our throats, and the jewels were so heavy that it took a moment to figure out how
to breathe.
These things distracted me more than they should have. If I had been paying attention, I might have noticed the door when it closed behind us and the click when someone turned the key to lock the other side.
How does it feel?
That’s what Rhodes’s mother asked me later, when I went to her to get advice.
It feels like putting a mask in front of your face, tying it behind your head, and pressing it flat around your eyes so you can’t see the edges anymore.
It feels like arriving at a party and knowing every word before it lands in your mouth, and each one tastes just the way it should.
It feels, after a while, like you are being closed into a new skin, all that is warm and sweaty and plain tucked beneath a thing that pinches the tender spots under your arm and over your hip. It gets tighter, and then too tight, and then it’s time to take it off before you don’t have the strength.
That’s what the dancing is for.
At least, that’s how Rhodes’s mother explained it. She gave me a glass of water from the refrigerator and a towel to wipe up the sweat that dripped off my hair and onto the kitchen table.
Rhodes’s father sat in a chair at the other end, close enough that we could have reached over and fixed his shoe, which was half off, but he was asleep, so we didn’t. He slept while I caught my breath and while Rhodes’s mother explained magic to me. He wore reading glasses and his hands slowly crushed an open newspaper into his lap, but he didn’t wake up.
The room on the other side of the door is large. It would be as big as a museum, if you knocked down all the walls and dumped the exhibits in the street.
The room shimmered in silver and grey. When Rhodes and I stopped to look, we saw that the walls were covered in paper trees. Sheets of paper, trimmed and layered so, from a distance, they looked like a crowded forest on a moon-swamped night. Close up, they looked like exquisite wallpaper. Shiny hard lacquer smoothed down the edges, and none of them peeled up when I slid my fingernail across the top. It must have been a lot of work.
Electric Velocipede Issue 25 Page 1