About Thrice Fiction...
We’re coming up with another book for our Thrice Library - one of the strangest books ever done. That part of the Thrice effort is still ongoing, but I would have to say the magazine is about 95% dead. It would take a great inspiration to return to it, some shattering need to showcase writers that excite me. And I don’t see it.
We took this holiday because I wanted to spend some time on my own work. In the years since Thrice’s last issue I’ve been concentrating on my own material, and it’s been a productive period for me. But what developed was I found myself continuing to evolve, unwilling to work from anyone else’s manifesto, or any manifesto whatsoever, but watching the words coming out move me to new ground, so to speak. And along with that evolution of my own stuff came the realization that there’s other stuff that I just can’t get excited about anymore, and that puts me at a disadvantage if I wanted to edit a litmag.
When we were in the middle of Thrice’s 10+ year run we took pride in the amount of “first-time-published” writers we had the honor to introduce. It was a 97% slush-pile driven venue, and we looked for all kinds of things. Modern memoir to dark fantasy to the surreal to the profane. And we jumbled it all up together. It was glorious, in its way.
But lately I’ve been absolutely bored snotless by a lot of the writing I see coming out. So careful, so correct, so unwilling to offend. The past few years has seen the emergence of sensitivity police who have actually been added to the staffs of some publications. That’s not my only beef, but it’s the first that comes to mind. I’m bored by a lot of stuff coming across in the modern realism vein, even if the writing is witty - or maybe especially when the writing is witty. It just isn’t challenging enough anymore. And I wonder if this happens to other editors - ? You read so much again and again that after a while you just want some kind of death wind to blow into your eyes to shake out the everyday worms. Where you’ve seen so much of the usual you crave, and will probably die if you don’t get, something - anything - different.
I think about the times when there were writers who were trying to change the writer-reader-protagonist tripod. The way the words on a page form a terrain, where getting to the point is difficult and the reader is challenged to negotiate their way through it, then taken to a place where they realize, sometimes in a flash, something new. A different kind of light shown on the same old thing, and there’s that moment of understanding that makes reading enjoyable instead of the same old marm-marm-marm as you go along.
The edict to “make it new.” A new way of seeing. This is the ambitious challenge that is exciting me lately. And because of this I wonder - if I put out an open call for submissions how will what I’m thinking now alter the look and feel of Thrice as we knew it? On top of that I’m quite sure I’m not done getting it all out of my system, I’m not done.
But argue with me. Go ahead. I could always make an open submission call, state what I’ve stated above, not have a publication date in mind, and just put out an issue when we have enough. Not the usual way of doing things, but it might be the only way forward.
Then I think of having five to six hundred emails worth of submissions, knowing that the majority are probably not going to have anything to do with my expectations. So yeah, it’s 95% dead. I’m not looking for it, but I would need someone’s awfully thick 5% to move me.