Bull Spec is edited, designed, & published by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn with poetry editor Dan Campbell. To learn more or to order back issues (or subscribe!) visit [bullspec.com] or email [bullspec@bullspec.com].
EDITORIAL: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SUMMER?
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hat’s left of the summer brings (along with its heatwaves) a pile of new books from local authors: David Drake’s Out ofthe Waters and Into the Hinterlands (with John Lambshead), Mark Van Name’s anthology The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge, Rebecca Rowe’s Circle Tide, John Claude Bemis’s The White City, and Lewis Shiner’s Dark Tangos; while the autumn will see: Stephen Messer’s The Death ofYorik Mortwell, Clay and Susan Griffith’s The Rift Walker, John Kessel’s anthology Kafkaesque (with James Patrick Kelly), and Natania Barron’s Pligrim ofthe Sky.
It’s also going to be a busy late summer and early fall in terms of bigname authors having a tour stop in the Triangle. Lev Grossman (The Magicians, The Magician King) comes to Flyleaf Books on August 30, Quail Ridge Books hosts both Terry Brooks (Legends of Shannara: The Measure of the Magic, September 7)
and Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow, Doc, November 15), and for readers more attuned to the graphical medium, NC Comicon returns to Morrisville on November 5-6, bringing a long list of writers and artists. Earlier, Mur Lafferty’s launch party for her Afterlife series was a wonderful celebration of her books and the community
who supported and help launched their beautiful hardcover print versions through Mur’s successful Kickstarter campaign. Another local creator, artist Angi Shearstone, also relied on Kickstarter to launch her vampire-punk “painted comic” series BloodDreams. Meanwhile, it’s a time of transition for the magazine. Slowly but surely, I’ve started the handover of the fiction editing reins to Natania Barron and Eric Gregory, whose selections will start appearing as soon as issue 8 early next year, and upon whom I’ve already begun to rely for story editing. It sets out a vision for the third year of the magazine that I hope you are as excited about as I am—excited enough to tell your friends and coworkers to subscribe, and excited enough to want to be a part of it through our own upcoming Kickstarter fundraiser. Lastly, I want to once again thank Jeremy Zerfoss for delivering a wonderful work of cover art and design for this issue. To thank us in return, Jeremy has a special offer: use code CHEEKYTENNO at his design house [tennoarthouse.com] for a discounted print of “Squid Ascendant Upon the Cabinet of Thackery”. Jeremy is also the cover artist and designer for Jeff VanderMeer’s Cheeky Frawg e-imprint, and I knew immediately that I wanted him to design a cover for this issue around the VanderMeers’s projects. He nailed it.
Samuel Montgomery-Blinn Editor & Publisher, Bull Spec
Document layout created in Scribus with additional text editing performed using OpenOffice.org and additional image editing performed using GIMP and Inkscape. Printed by Publishers Press in Shepherdsville, KY, USA.