FM isn’t featured, but it’s still pretty neat that there’s an annual anthology recognizing all the great work published online.

Poetry Super Highway’s fifth annual E-book Free-For-All is on for today only, with 65 E-books available free until midnight: http://poetrysuperhighway.com/pshffa.html. I’m hoping to find to good poets I didn’t know about before.

Sari

Check out At-Large Magazine, a new literary journal produced by graduate students at Sarah Lawrence, including FM contributor Angela Williams (4.22.2007).

From the Web site:

“At-Large Magazine is about collecting the reams of brilliance that tend to go unnoticed by the myriad of Harper’s Bazaar knock-offs out there. We’re looking for people who love being frivolous, crass, write their lines with razor-sharp wit and aren’t afraid to explore the ugly, awkward and tawdry parts of human nature. Writers we’re keen of include Banana Yoshimoto, Aimee Bender, George Saunders, Chuck Palahniuk, Junot D’az, Bret Easton Ellis, Kim Addonizio, David Sedaris and Louise Glück. Some of us are also fond of Lypsinka.”

—Sari

Happy new year, and welcome to the second year of Fickle Muses!

You’ll see some changes in the current volume, some in response to reader feedback, some just ’cause I felt like it.

Readers were pretty much split down the middle on how often FM should come out, with slightly more than half preferring the weekly format, the rest preferring monthly or quarterly. To accomodate both tastes, FM will continue publishing weekly, and will also offer a quarterly, printable pdf edition beginning in April (i.e., including all work published January-March).

To receive notice of weekly updates, email editor@ficklemuses.com with the subject line “Subscribe.” To receive notice only when quarterly editions are released, use the subject line “Subscribe Quarterly.” (Current subscribers who want to continue receiving weekly notices, do nothing.)

We’ve also switched to relative text sizes. If your browser is set to view text size at “medium,” text should appear roughly the same is in volume 1; to get larger or smaller text, adjust the size on your browser.

That’s about it for house keeping. As always, send comments to editor@ficklemuses.com. Hope you all have a happy & creative year!

– Sari

A few weeks ago, I sent FM to a site that selectively lists and reviews various sorts of indie publications (which I won’t name, since I’m about to say nasty things about it, and it is on the whole a good resource). Now, had the editors declined to link to FM because they thought it sucked, I would have disagreed, but at least understood. However, the reason they gave for turning it down was because FM isn’t formatted like a traditional print journal (despite the fact that this was for a section of Web journals).

As I see it, content should be adapted differently to suit different media. For example, when adapting a book to film, narration might take on a different but equally effective expression through an actor’s body language (one good example is Roger Michell’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”). Likewise, the logic behind FM’s format (which I went into in more detail in a January post) is rooted in the medium.

The publishing industry is still largely geared toward print. Though certainly more people are realizing the potential of online publishing, resistance to Web-adapted formats seems to me much like the early film industry’s tendency to format movies as if they were stage plays.

While the Web isn’t exactly new, there’s still plenty of room to experiment with its possibilities, especially in the literary realm. Some journals, for example, use the medium to blend music, poetry and art – a feat beyond the capabilities of the average piece of paper. I say experiment away – the gatekeepers of industry tradition will catch up eventually.

– Sari

When I was mulling over what to call this myth magazine a couple years ago, my search was centered around one question: What kind of name would express mythic arts without also expressing a limitation to one mythic tradition?

This led to a series of ridiculously long, dull titles (“Journal of Poetry and Fiction on Myth and Legend,” among the worst). For a while I was stumped, until one day “Fickle Muses” popped into my head. Of course, it completely violates the second condition of the question, coming as it does from the Greek/Roman traditions. But as modern myth has made the muses more the gods of art than of ancient Greece, I thought I could get away with it.

At first, I just thought Fickle Muses sounded neat, but since then I’ve given the title more thought. Aside from the obvious association for artists, the term has an interesting relevance to mythic arts. Even the ancient texts within themselves are full of contradictions, and every generation has new twists to contribute to the old tales – religiously sanctioned or not. The resulting quagmire transforms victims to heroes, tyrannical regimes to prophesied saviors, gods to demons.

Perhaps the muses are presenting us with paths as diverse as the people who follow them. Then again, maybe they’re just messing with us.

– Sari

I read once (I cannot recall where) that the ideal size of a magazine is 48 pages – the length of a comfortable evening’s read.

The online medium presents different needs. A Web journal is not the sort of thing one is likely to curl up with in the comfy chair – at least, not for desktop users like myself. At home, the Internet is something I squeeze in over a couple cups of coffee before work. Though for a longer journal, I can break it up and read a poem or story a day, I thought it would be simpler and truer to the medium to use a shorter format.

The other issue is frequency. A primarily subscription-based print journal will simply arrive when the new issue comes out, with no need for the reader to remember the publishing schedule. A free Web-based journal with no subscription requirement, on the other hand, must come out often enough not to be forgotten – I’d say anything less than monthly risks losing readers from sheer absence of mind.

– Sari