New Publication: Stories About Kids Stealing Things

29 September 20233 October 2023 Francis BassLeave a comment

And a new zine publication! It’s a two for one today!

First, Stories About Kids Stealing Things is now out on Smashwords! Wow, cool cover!

Collected in this book are seven short stories, mostly written between 2018-2019. They’re not all about kids stealing things, but most of them are.

Two teens take climate justice into their own hands by stealing from the rich and giving to themselves; AI can’t drive for shit; bearing someone else’s nostalgia for a world long dead; don’t let someone slip a love potion in your cup; your awful ex-boss is running for governor of your failing state, better stop him; privatized firefighting and year-long fires; don’t predict the future, predict the prophecy.

These are stories about people with very little ability to control their own lives, and no ability to control the world at large. They are going to try anyway.

Here’s a full list of the stories collected here, you may see some you’ve read already:

“Fuck You Pay Me,” “Ride of the Blind Sighthound,” “The Hilarious Inside Joke of Our Overwhelming Melancholic Nostalgia,” “Love Poison,” “The Harrowing of Castle Maddox,” “Fires Burn Forever in this World,” and “Red, Her Hand.”

That second to last one, “Fires Burn Forever in this World,” is also now available as a print zine! For free! It’s a short story about a city where the antiquated practice of leaving firefighting to private insurance companies, and letting uninsured buildings burn, has persisted right up to the modern era. And also fires burn for a very, very long time. If you would like a copy, email me at FrancisRBass [at] gmail [dot] com. Check out some interior artwork for it at left!

What’s Next

I am going to make one more short story zine this year. It will be a re-issue of a novelette previously published as an ebook, “The War on Hormones”. A story about pharmaceutically asexual high schoolers, which I wrote while in high school myself. Pretty fun! Expect it in November or December.

And that will conclude this pilot program of zine making! I started making zines last September with “Cartographer.” Since then I’ve made three other zines, and “The War on Hormones” will make five total. I’ve been giving them away for free because I was still figuring things out, experimenting, and I really just wanted to get the things in people’s hands.

So starting next year, they will (mostly) no longer be free. I am also probably not going to release as many new zines next year, maybe just one or two.

Read: I have really enjoyed making these and giving them to y’all, and would like to make this one of the pillars of my career, such as it is. So I am going to spend next year figuring out how to do this sustainably. More thoughts on this probably when I release the next zine.

Also, non sequitur, Spooktober is upon us, this year I am reading Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon, Night Bitch by Rachel Yoder, and Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge.

Okay that’s all I’ve got for you now! Is that enough???

Review: Sex Fantasy by Sophia Foster-Dimino

9 July 20219 July 2021 Francis BassLeave a comment

Sex Fantasy by Sophia-Foster Dimino is a collection of eight zines published between 2013 and 2017, plus two previously unpublished zines at the end. With one exception, the zines are not about sex fantasies, though they are about intimacy, relationships, and the gaps between people. The slight, but not total, mismatch between title and content is indicative of the way a lot of the book operates, in that it invites interpretation. It reaches for something, but doesn’t go all the way toward grasping it—the reader will have to do that on their own.

The book is divided into three sections of three issues each, and a fourth section of one. The first three zines are the most esoteric, consisting entirely of short declarative sentences (usually starting with “I”) paired with illustrations. Although there are a few moments of sequential art, there’s very little scene, and you could scramble the individual panels out of order and not change much. There isn’t even a consistent, recurring character that appears as the “I” or “you” in all the panels. They operate accumulatively—”I made an effort”, “I hit a wall”, “I wasn’t thinking”, “I’m useful” add up to a persona, an emotion. It’s textual-visual poetry, essentially—and like a good poem, you can slow down and appreciate each line, or panel in this case, as it’s own work of art. In fact, the format of the book encourages this, with each panel taking up an entire page, so that you’re only ever looking at two panels at once.

Although these first three zines aren’t my favorite in the collection, I think they hold some of my favorite individual panels. Some are very intricate, while others are imaginative or surprising in how they illustrate the text. “I like your socks” is printed beside a person wearing hamburger socks lightly stepping on someone’s face. “I’m a beverage vendor” appears beside a drink stand; the stand has three large jugs and three containers of ice or tapioca pearls; a bottle for tips; a vase with a flower; eight notes tacked to the stand’s single contiguous wall; a patterned canopy; empty cups held on pegs; a dangling bell; an OPEN sign; a vertical banner displaying a woman drinking from an enormous glass with a straw; and the “I”, sitting on a stool, wearing a spaghetti strap top, flip flops, a hair bow. The text is spare, but the illustrations are rich and suggestive of worlds that extend beyond their snapshot focus. They are not sex fantasies, but fantasy, or fancy, sure.

New Publications: 20, and 20

14 November 20184 November 2018 Francis BassLeave a comment

Just as I did last year, here are two collections of all the plays I published in the past year, and all the short stories I published in the last year. I’m now less enamored of the idea of this being a “complete works” series, for various reasons which I explain in the forewords of these anthologies. Mainly, what does “complete” even mean? Regardless, these collections really do have all the pieces I self-published while I was 20, and all the afterwords I published with them. And I will continue this series, because I like having a cheap way for people to buy my stuff—the collections just might always not be annual, or they might not always be “complete.”

20; Two plays and a monologue contains Suggest the Empire, Chimaera Cries ON STREAM!!!!!, and Tallahassee Ca. 2045—including a brands new afterword for Chimaera Cries ON STREAM!!!!!! You can get it on Smashwords or Amazon.

20; A collection of short stories contains “A Clash at Grozny Airfield,” “The Wisdom-Goddess Star,” “Beneath Them,” and “ChannelCon ’30.” You can get it on Smashwords or Amazon.

New Publications: 19, and 19

16 August 201712 June 2020 Francis BassLeave a comment

19stories-c-1

These aren’t really new—but the format is! Now you can get all the plays I’ve published this past year, or all the short stories I’ve published this past year, in one collection. The plan is to do this every year, with the titles corresponding to my age when I published the stories. Like a Complete Works series, but being put together contemporaneously.

19; A collection of short stories includes “Just Dig,” “The War on Hormones,” “De.mocra.cy,” “Grumbles,” “Boom Town,” and “Calamcity,” as well as all the afterwords I wrote for those stories. As always, you can get it on Smashwords and Amazon.

EDIT: As of June 12, 2020, He Molested Kids has been removed from 19. Explanation here.

19; A collection of plays contains Beach Realty of Sandcastle Isle, He Molested Kids, Monastery, and We’ll Tell Happy Stories, and the afterwords I wrote for those plays. Available on Smashwords and Amazon.