Lucky you! There's a brand-spanking-new (and FREE!) issue of Thrice Fiction out today!

As usual, I'll be discussing the artwork that went into our latest issue. This may or may not include spoilers for the stories, so I urge you to please read it before proceeding.

All done? Then off we go...

Our Editor at Large, RW, has long been lobbying to add some comics to Thrice Fiction. On the surface, this sounds easy. But finding the right comics to include in our pages is easier said than done. My first choice was the brilliant stuff that Reza Farazmand is doing over at Poorly Drawn Lines. Not only because I'm a huge fan... but because his work seemed the perfect "fit" for what we're doing.

Not that I expected he would say "yes," of course. Surely he has better things to do than hang out in our little lit mag, right? But nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I worked up some samples of how his work would be presented in Thrice and dashed off an email.

Much to my surprise and delight, Reza not only agreed to let us re-print some of his strips... he also agreed to re-work a panel from one of my favorite Poorly Drawn Lines comics as our cover! And that's how Small Cat came to end up fronting Issue No. 13...

Glorious, is it not?

And now, for a look at the first half of the art included in this issue, read onward in an extended entry...

Hey! Did you know there's a brand new issue of THRICE Fiction out?

Well, there is... and it's totally FREE! Click here to download a copy!

As usual, I'll be discussing the artwork that went into our latest issue. This may or may not include spoilers for the stories, so I urge you to please read it before proceeding.

All done? Then off we go...

This issue's beautiful cover was created by Allen Forrest. The guy has created a lot of covers for lit mags, and we're very lucky to have him gracing ours...

I try to make sure there's artistic variety in our collection of cover art, and am rather embarrassed that we didn't have any impressionistic pieces yet. To have that oversight rectified with such a great painting is icing on the cake. Thanks so much, Allen!

And now, for a look at the first half of the art included in this issue, read onward in an extended entry...

Welcome to PART TWO of a discussion about the art that's running in the latest issue of THRICE Fiction Magazine!

If you haven't read PART ONE yet, you should do that first.

And if you haven't downloaded a FREE copy of our August 2014 issue... then you should definitely do that first because, WARNING... SPOILERS MAY ENSUE!

Okey dokey then.

I've said before that laying out an issue of THRICE Fiction is like trying to put a puzzle together where you don't have a box lid to see how it's supposed to end up looking when you're done. Not once have I just dumped all the stories into Adobe InDesign and said "Perfect! I'm done!" Not even close. I move things around over and over and over again... trying to come up with a "flow" between stories that makes for a cohesive reading experience from cover to cover. At least once every issue I'll wake up in the middle of the night and freak out because I suddenly realized I've got the page order all wrong. This issue took a little longer to figure out than most, but I was fairly confident in the layout when it was "finalized" back in June.

It didn't last, of course. Right before release I had a couple of discussions that convinced me I needed to move things around... again. Which wouldn't be a big deal if I wasn't so obsessive about having some symmetry between pages on a spread. Getting that sorted out takes a serious amount of time.

And even though it delayed our release by a few days, I think it was time well-spent. We hope you'll agree.

To read PART TWO of my ramblings about the art of THRICE Fiction Magazine No. 11, read onward in an extended entry!

Another summer. Another issue of THRICE Fiction Magazine!

As usual, I'll be discussing the artwork that went into our latest issue. This may or may not include spoilers for the stories, so I urge you to download your FREE copy of Issue No. 11 and give it a read before continuing.

Alright? Alright!

This time around we are very fortunate to feature another beautiful cover by Katelin Kinney...

Even though I do composite photo work like this for a living, Katelin has a way of making it seem like magic to me. I've stopped asking her how she constructs these images for us because the magic is more fun.

For a look at the first half of the art included in this issue, read onward in an extended entry...

And here we are again... this time with a look at the art appearing in the second half of THRICE Fiction Issue No. 10, you might want to go read Part One from last Saturday first (if you haven't already).

Oh, and if you haven't downloaded your FREE copy of our latest issue, that should be your first stop!

Alright? All right!

Last week when discussing the art from the first half of the book, I talked a little bit about the formats we offer for FREE downloads... and how we're wanting to expand into others. Here's the breakdown average from December's issue...

• PDF — 94%
• eBook — 4%
• Print — 1.5%
• Kindle — .5%

Anybody looking at this breakdown would say "Wow... why do you even bother with anything but PDF?"

The answer is because our "circulation" was around 2850 last issue and, as always when we release a new issue, it has climbed a bit. As of yesterday, we topped 3200. Which means 4% translates into 130 people who prefer to read THRICE via eBook. That's worth the 90 minutes it takes for me to create it. The Kindle version is automatically created from the eBook, so now we're up to around 150 people.

The print edition is just a higher resolution version of the PDF that takes 2 minutes to generate and 5 to upload to MagCloud. For the 30-50 people who want to have THRICE in print (including yours truly), I'll spend the seven minutes to make it happen.

And if we can expand our readership by adding an online version... an iPad version... or whatever else we can think of? We're going to do that too. Because as our downloads continue to blast past our every expectation, even small percentages are going to account for more people than R.W. and I ever dreamed would be reading in the first place. We're happy... nay, thrilled... to provide THRICE in whatever format people want to have it.

So look for our "Cerebral Implant" edition, coming 2025.

And now... back to the artwork for THRICE Fiction No. 10, which you can read about in an extended edition...

One of the things R.W. and I set out to do when we created THRICE Fiction was to make sure it was available in a variety of formats so people could read it however they wanted. Want to read a printed magazine? You can order a copy. Want to view it as a PDF? It's there. Want to read it on an eBook reader? We got that. Have a Kindle? We got that too. We've had all of it since Day One, and all the digital editions can be downloaded for FREE.

Like our brand new issue released today (featuring a stunning cover by Chris Walton)...

And we're not stopping there.

Our next outlet for THRICE will be an online edition. We want for people to be able to read every issue right on the THRICE Fiction website. There are many, many solutions for doing this, and I've looked at dozens of them. You can see a sample of one solution (from JooMag) here...

If you expand it to full-screen and have a decent-resolution display, it's pretty nice. I don't know if this is the route we'll take, but we'll get it figured out eventually.

Anyway...

Back to THRICE Fiction No. 10! For a look at the first half of the art included in this issue, click onward to an extended entry...

And... I'm back!

But before I continue with a look at the art appearing in the second half of THRICE Fiction Issue No. 9, you might want to go read Part One from yesterday first (if you haven't already).

Oh, and if you haven't downloaded your FREE copy of our latest issue, that should be your first stop!

Okay? Okay!

Now then... before I get started, I was going to talk a bit about what it means to be closing out three years and nine issues of THRICE Fiction. On our Facebook somewhere, I was joking about how "People said we wouldn't last... shame on them." But it was more than a joke. People were literally saying that we wouldn't last. Apparently there's past precedent: "New magazines rarely make it past a year... two years if they're lucky," they would say.

At the time, I didn't know why that would be. I guessed it was because the magazine ends up being more work than people realize. You start out strong with the best of intentions... but life gets in the way, and eventually the time between issues grow longer and longer until you realize you just don't want to do this any longer. Or maybe the people who quit started their magazine to get rich (ha ha) and the money never came. Maybe they didn't feel enough people were reading to make it worthwhile. Maybe the experience just wasn't what they expected. I dunno. And while I can't speak for our Editor, RW, I can say that it has never occurred to me to pack it in. I'm as enthusiastic about THRICE Fiction now as I was at the beginning. More so, even, because the response we've received has exceeded my wildest dreams.

So many thanks to all our contributors who have made us look so good these three years... and also to our readers who continue to download issues by the thousands. We're so very grateful, and there's more to come in Year Four!

Oh yeah...

The art for Issue No. 9... Part Two!

You can find that in an extended entry...

There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.

The process of putting together an issue of THRICE Fiction seems simple... the editor hands you a stack of stories, you paste them into a document, you add some pictures, and BLAM! a magazine is born.

Except it's nowhere near that straightforward. And most of that is my own fault.

When R.W. and I first began discussing how THRICE was going to work, I had a very clear direction I wanted for the design of it all...

• Stories would never be interrupted. There would be no "please turn to page 24" in the middle of a story to distract the reader or interrupt the relationship the writer was building with them. I positively hate that, even though I fully understand the need for it... namely, it offers the designer a heck of a lot more flexibility in filling up pages when they can chop stuff up into little pieces. But since I don't go there, laying out an issue of THRICE Fiction is ten times more difficult than it has to be. It's like a massive puzzle that takes days to get figured out how things fit together.
• Stories would be accompanied by art. While there's always give-and-take, the one absolute R.W. and I agreed to early on was that THRICE Fiction as a literary magazine would always be centered around the written word. But since we wanted a visually appealing lit-mag, we also wanted to accent every story we publish with pieces of art... maybe even letting in a cartoon or two. And, if the right piece comes along, perhaps we could have one "art spread" featured each issue. Of course, finding all that art is a massive challenge, and many a deadline has been stretched trying to find the right visuals for a story.
• The layout is dictated by the story. I have four story templates with three variations each. How a story is presented is solely dictated by which layout it fits into for the best readability. Most times, I don't even read a story while laying it out. Which is a long way of saying "every story we publish is treated equally." This is an intentional process designed to avoid playing favorites with our writers. Sometimes it works that a story gets a full-page image. Sometimes a story gets just one small image. Other times a story gets a ridiculous amount of art thrown in... because that's what fits. I can count on one hand the number of times I've changed a layout because a story "needed" something different upon reading it. This "rigid" layout structure is design to keep things fair and make sure the focus is on our stories, but it's a lot more work than if I were to just dump things on a page and designed it to fit.

Of course, had I known three years ago what I know now... I probably would have done things differently. A lot differently. I'd hack stories apart, add art only if I could find it, and just cram stuff in any which way. It would have made my life much easier going forward.

But then THRICE Fiction wouldn't be THRICE Fiction, so I guess everything happened as it was meant to all along.

Which brings us to Issue. No. 9...

Download the issue for FREE by visiting the THRICE Fiction website!

As always, the cover was a struggle. Originally I had done painting for it, but I had already done the past three covers and really wanted something different this time. I was working on an alternative, but that didn't come together this time around, so I was back to my design again.

Until...

I remembered an incredibly talented artist named Katelin Kinney that I was lining up for Issue. No. 10, and decided to throw a Hail Mary pass in her direction to see if she might have something available. Lucky for all of us, she was perfectly happy to let us borrow some works for her portfolio, and we ended up with this amazing cover to close out our third year. It's a photo art composite titled Seed of a Soul, and the reaction to it has been overwhelmingly favorable, so thanks, Katelin!

On the bright side, you're half-way there!

This is PART 2 of a two part series on the art found in THRICE Fiction Magazine Issue No. 8. Needless to say, you should probably read PART 1 before continuing if you haven't already.

Or don't... either way, I get paid the same.

Anyway...

When last I left you, we were half-way through the magazine. Kinda. Because while I now have the luxury of going through the issue page-by-page, it doesn't work that way when putting the book together. Absolutely nothing is done in-sequence. Especially this time around, when things were running so late that I didn't have time to reach out to as many artists as I would have liked. Lucky for me, THRICE-regular Kyra Wilson painted two beautiful last-minute pieces she was able to work into her schedule... then Ira Joel Haber came along with his wonderful body of work that really saved my bacon! If not for him, this issue would have slid into September for sure! So, to both of these gifted artists, my heart-felt thanks for your help.

And now, on with the show.

The art of THRICE Fiction No. 8 continues after the jump...

Stand back, it's a big one!

Laying out an issue of THRICE Fiction is like putting together a giant puzzle where all the edge pieces have been removed. Stories have to "flow" into each other in a way that keeps the reader engaged, yet still manage to make them feel like separate entities. You'd think that the more stories you have, the easier it would be to fit the pieces together because there's more options to choose from. You'd be wrong. It's actually quite the opposite. It's the choice that drags things out and makes things hard. If you only have a few stories, then the way they should fit together is more obvious. With a lot of stories? Well...

Yet, it is what it is.

RW Spryszak and I made the decision early on that the size of the magazine would directly relate to what we have to put in it. If we only received two stories that were "right for us" then that issue has two stories. But we never accounted for THRICE getting as popular as it has. RW is getting hundreds of submissions each issue. Hundreds. Our odds of getting great stories that are "the right fit" for us have exploded.

So I ended up with an issue that was 84 pages which I then had to pare down to 70. Because things start getting expensive after that.

And since THRICE shows no signs of slowing down, we've adjusted our publishing schedule to allow more time. The last thing we want to do is start slapping an issue together haphazardly to meet a date on a calendar, so it was our only option. The good news is that the quality of the magazine can be maintained. The bad news is that our submission window has dropped to one month intervals.

I'm choosing to look at this as a good thing.

Anyway...

Once again I am going to write a blog post about all the art that goes into the issue. But this time it will have to come in two parts. Here is the first half...

RW had an idea for a cover after reading one of the stories he accepted. He envisioned the Brooklyn Bridge all lit up at night in the fog. I thought it was a good idea, except I couldn't find a photo that would work. All my photos of Brooklyn were shot in the daytime, and any nighttime shots I found weren't working. I decided to just up and DRAW the idea, but I could never get it to come together. The Brooklyn Bridge is a very specific structure and people know when you get it wrong. I simply didn't have the time to get it right. Or I'm just not that talented an artist. Regardless, I had to try a new approach.

So night became day, fog became clouds, and away we go.

The photos I had taken from my last visit to Brooklyn were a good start. I wanted the cover image to be on the bridge instead of looking at it, and I had plenty of shots for that. But the clouds were never where I wanted them to be. This meant I had to painstakingly cut out the bridge so I could manipulate the sky as I wanted... namely, having a big ol' cloud at the top for the magazine title to sit on! After I composited the bridge and the revised sky, I was dismayed to find that the cables were falling away, so I then had to paint over each and every one to get them to stand out a bit. After a lot of work, I sent the photo through a couple of Photoshop filters to add a bit of watercolor feeling and, voilà, our cover was born.

Except not really.

Everybody thinks that Photoshop filters are a magic button you press to get cool stuff happening with no effort. And, for the most part, that's true. But I'm never satisfied with the "magic button" approach, so I always end up re-painting parts so that they filter better... or using different strengths of filter on different pieces of the photo... or whatever. In this case I ended up with a photo that had twenty-two separate layers in the final composite to get what I wanted.

As usual, I find myself thinking it would have been easier to actually take the time to paint the thing from scratch.

Oh well.

To read about the rest of the art in this issue, you'll have to take a look after the jump. And I'll see you tomorrow for part two!