Anathema: Spec from the Margins, Live in 2017

It’s been a few hours since the fundraising campaign for Anathema: Spec from the Margins closed. At the end of that month-long effort, we slightly exceeded our goal (101%, with $2,025 raised), and that’s a full year of funds and change in the bag and good to go! :D

This was a very long campaign. But everyone who contributed their time, their funds, and helped signal boost made this absolutely worthwhile. You also eased the burden of handling this by ourselves immensely for myself, Andrew, and Chinelo.

Thankfully the campaign coming to a close also means we can stop shouting at you to throw money our way. Which has never been my favourite part of putting together a project, so it is fantastic that that stage of getting Anathema up and running is done. Now we get to focus on the magazine itself more directly once again.

Specifically, over the course of December we’re finalizing Anathema‘s website so that can go live come the new year, doing some submissions soliciting, and making sure we’ve got everything else we need ready to go for the start of next year. I’ll also be getting in touch with campaign contributors who have manuscript edits or a book that needs mailing owed to make sure those perks get delivered properly. And we’ll be catching up with everyone owed a subscription package more generally come January.

Anathema will also be opening to submissions formally come January, and we’ll be posting our guidelines on the website. For those just catching up on hearing about the magazine, the basics are as follows:

Anathema is a free, online tri-annual magazine publishing speculative fiction (SF/F/H, the weird, slipstream, surrealism, fabulism, and more) by visible minorities on every range of the LGBTQIA spectrum. We’ll also be using cover art from queer POC. We’ll be publishing 15 stories and three pieces of non-fiction a year, each paying $50 (CAD), and each use of cover art will be paying $100 (CAD).

More specific details as to content length and submissions will go up in January, but in the meantime we’re happy to answer any questions people have via the Anathema Twitter account @anathemaspec, and/or on the Anathema Facebook page.

And in the meantime, for anyone who wants to catch up on Chinelo’s, Andrew’s, and my thoughts on why we’re putting together Anathema, you can have a look at our campaign essays (“The Light at the End of the World,” “Because it Matters,” and “This Machine Kills Fascists,” respectively) on the Anathema IndieGoGo campaign’s updates page.

Above and beyond all that, it’s nice to be able to take a breather again (not a lot of downtime in November one way or another) and just bask in the fact that Anathema‘s going to be a real magazine come next year! Just … holy shit, we made it! :D