Happy New Year From Your Friends at Monadnock Underground
There is much to be said about the fact that we've moved from the utter terrors of 2020 into the wholly unstable uncertainty/unknown of 2021, and we're gonna let other people say those things. If we want, we can even say we are holding space for those people - and we do want.
Yes, the collections
Instead, while we hold that space, we'd like to start things off by regaling you with all of the wonderful news we have. We'll start with the obvious without lingering there overlong - we've been screaming about these collections every chance we get over the last month and to belabor the point would almost certainly be beneath our dignity. Nonetheless, we are extremely proud of our 2020 year-end paperback anthologies: Spiritus Oppidum, a collection of spiritual essays, poems, reflections, abstractions, and fictions, and Demiurges and Demigods in Space, a collection of wildly diverse speculative fiction. Between the two, we are presenting twenty-four original pieces from twenty-one different authors - the vast majority of whom hail from the Granite State.
Buying one of these not only gets you access to the wonders within (and possibly a ticket to heaven), it supports this project and helps us do things like actually pay our darling print authors a small something for their work. Plus, they're cheap - hard copies for $12 each or bundle them both for a flat $20. Paperbacks and PDFs can be ordered directly from us here and Kindle versions can be obtained directly from Jeff here.
An Actual M/U EVENT!
No, it's not live, of course. But to promote the release of these collections and allow our authors a chance to strut their feathers (all writers are vain, whether they know/admit it or not), we are once again overjoyed to partner with the Peterborough Town Library on a Zoomed release party. Mark your calendars - Weds Jan 13 from 6:30-8 pm. Details are here, and the Zoom link will be provided closer to the actual event.
We have TEAM ADDITIONS to announce!
The executive team couldn't be prouder to welcome heroic realtor and M/U contributor Sam Abbott to the team in the role of Associate Editor! Over the coming weeks, Sam will be introduced to and integrated with all of the facets of our editing, publishing, and posting processes and will ultimately play a defining role in our day-to-day operations. Remember how, in our completely mad frenzy to publish the collections before the holiday season, we essentially ceased all weekly online publication? Sam's gonna help make sure that never happens again - among many other things. Kellie and Jesse will continue to provide invaluable guidance and contributions in their respective roles as Founding Editors. Please join all of us in giving Sam a warm welcome - and feel free to appropriately haze him should the opportunity arise.
In addition, we want to call attention to the fact that for the most recent episode of our audio variety podcast, Underground Over the Air (our "Time Travel Poetry Special", episode 4), as well as for the upcoming episode we hope to release later this week, Chad Patterson has graciously volunteered his time as our unofficial sound engineer and producer. In so doing, he not only masterfully improved our amateurish sound quality, he greatly served to ease our audio editing burden during a very time-crunched period. Our intent in calling this out in print is to make his role de facto official, whether he likes it or not. Welcome, Chad!
As we move boldly forward with all our exciting plans (only a fraction of which we can reveal today, BWAHAAHA!), there will be many other opportunities for interested and eccentric individuals to be a part of the Monadnock Underground project. (For example, we would just loooooove it if anybody out there wants to take over all the website stuff....) Even if you just sort of vaguely want to participate, hit us up - we never even know what we don't know that we need (Donald Rumsfeld said that, h/t to John "New Jersey" "Recently Married" Palmucci). Reach out direct - diloreto@monadnockunderground.com and/or zoe@monanockunderground.com.
This goes double for any person or group out there who wants to collaborate or run some schemes together. Put those doubts aside and get at us today.
We will always tease you a little
It's one of our favorite parts. And this is it: all you writers out there, keep your eyes peeled - within a week or two we'll be announcing a new call for submissions for our next themed print collection. Can't say any more than that just yet, other than the fact that the deadline will be in early spring for a publication target of mid-June.
Fast and furious new writing is on the way
Moderation has never been a strong suit of ours; maybe one day we'll get there, but so far we tend to ride the extremes. In that spirit, we are following up our fallow fall with a rapid-fire volley of fresh, creative M/U writing posted nearly every day online at monadnockunderground.com.
The truth is, we've got a massive (and somewhat shameful) backlog of submissions to work through (to all you patient citizens out there who have submitted over the last several months, we are so, so sorry, and will make it up to you in spades - or at least good vibes). It's not just that, though. After creating his column Transcendental Dad for Parenting NH, M/U friend and collaborator Dan Szczesny managed to permanently sink that publication. (Sorry, Dan, I swear that's the last time I'll make that joke.) Not one to accept premature defeat, Dan has instead opted to continue his column in a syndicated form, and we're among the very first to contract with him for an outstanding essay to land on the first of each month. (We ran the first installment, "The Madeleine Effect," on New Year's Day.)
Furthermore, we love you all so much that we'll slowly be rolling out much of the contents of the print anthologies online so that even the freeloaders can enjoy these magnificent works. Part One of Jared Radke's "Earth Cooking with Thanos" will run later this week, and we'll release Jeff DeRego's "Jobber" to coincide with the release of our Jeff DeRego-themed podcast, as soon as we can wrap that up. Starting tomorrow, (our own) Chris DiLoreto's super long space opera (also found in Demiurges and Demigods) will run as a Flash-Gordon-on-acid serial every Tuesday and Thursday throughout January and February.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, without even dipping into the spirit collection. Watch out for that next week.
Let the printings roll
We can call this a half-tease, I guess, but we can tell you already that we know our print publication plan for 2021, and we are confident that it's realistic and achievable within our actual resource limits. It will involve four new print titles - yes, we're actually going to make another attempt at true quarterly publication, and no, we are not going to try to do anything so brilliant as publishing two titles at the same time again this year. (I don't know why we didn't realize from the start what a difficult idea that was.)
Without committing to details and timelines we can't guarantee just yet, we can share that our winter title will be a new book from Creative Director Chris DiLoreto - it's the one we keep joking about in every podcast episode, the one written months ago at the height of the pandemic that's sat waiting for a final edit ever since. It's a first-person, real-time account of grappling with faith and belief amid the chaos of early 2020, and we swear it's better than that sounds. More to follow there.
The remaining three titles will be collections and we will be making public calls for submissions (separately, and in staggered fashion) for each one. The first will be another trade paperback similar to the two we just published. Without giving away the actual theme (seriously, you gotta wait until next week at least), it is being timed for a June release with the express intent of being a 2021 beach read.
If we can pull it off (no promises - one thing we learned from 2020 is to give ourselves a lot of leeway when it comes to these things), the plan is to return to glossy magazines for our two releases in the back half of the year, and at least one of them will afford us the opportunity to open submissions for artists as well as writers. But that's all we can say.
We love everyone the same, but we love our patrons the most
By the time you read this, our dear and blessed Patreon subscribers will have been informed of all of this and more.
Here's the thing: we're creative types, not real businesspeople. (Chris calls himself the "Business Manager" in addition to Creative Director; no one is sure if he is actually serious, but this is a joke of an idea regardless of his intent.) We don't make money, we lose money. So far, our print offerings have eventually broken even or almost broken even, but once we factor in all of our monthly subscriptions and registrations and ministrations that form part of the infrastructure that keeps us in existence, we live very comfortably in the red.
And that's cool! We honestly don't even know why we're an LLC and not a nonprofit (we might flip ourselves eventually). We aren't trying to make money, we are trying to help form and nurture a creative nexus of artists and craftspeople who write and think and contemplate and express themselves in such a way as to elevate us all, and especially Peterborough and the Monadnock Region. When you lay it out like that, it's not hard to see that our aims are quite a bit more ambitious than money. They're alchemical.
Maybe that's arrogant (we cop to the charge) and maybe it proves foolish (which we'll refuse to accept unless we have to), but we take our first steps in that direction in small ways - among others, by giving a wide variety of writers a place to call home and by paying everyone involved with our print projects. We spend more on writers and artists than the actual printing (even the glossies), and that's actually one of our favorite parts of the whole thing. (Feeling sure there are sinister malcontents out there who are thinking it, we'll also explicitly say - just this once - for the record that we on staff don't pay ourselves anything, even when we contribute our own writing.)
We fund this in large part by the grace and generosity of our Patreon subscribers. It's a small base, but we're both humbled by and proud of their loyalty; though we made few new gains in subscriptions in 2020, we lost hardly anybody - frankly, that's a miracle. To all of you out there among that number, we thank you most of all at the start of this year. Without you, we couldn't do this.
Yes, when you subscribe, you do get stuff. For every public episode of Underground Over the Air, you'll get a private, much more uncensored bonus episode. At $5 per month, you get PDF access to our entire print catalog (including new releases ahead of the public), and $10 will get you all that plus automatic hard copies of all new releases. It's a cool deal.
But we know almost none of our subscribers are in it for the prizes, they're in it for the love (or something like that) and that's why they've stuck with us without wavering, even through the dark times.
Would you like to join them? https://www.patreon.com/monadnockunderground
Thanks again, everyone. Happy New Year. Much more to follow.