Tag: new publication

New Public(Domain)ication: BLOOD DINER • FULL SERVICE • BUTCHERED LIVE

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Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow by Piet Mondrian, 1930.

Happy Public Domain Day!!! Today, works published in 1930 enter the public domain in the US and many other countries. This year that includes The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos (the first book in his U.S.A. trilogy), Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, and the 1930 Watty Piper version of The Little Engine that Could, with illustrations by Lois Lenski. You can read more about what’s entering the public domain over on Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain blog.

As I do every year, I’m celebrating by releasing one of my own works to the public domain. This time it’s a little different—the work I’m ceding to the public domain is a script for an as-yet-unwritten graphic novel, titled BLOOD DINER • FULL SERVICE • BUTCHERED LIVE. It’s set in a future where medical technology allows for the rapid regeneration severed body parts, and the story follows a server on a trial shift at a restaurant which serves human meat.

So you can take this script and read it, print it, adapt it into your own comic, adapt it into a film or a play—whatever you want! I do intend to eventually make it into a graphic novel, and when I do I’ll probably publish that graphic novel as a copyrighted work—but even then, the script will remain in the public domain.

You can download BLOOD DINER as a PDF or Docx. If you end up doing anything with it please let me know! It may be a while before I get around to making my comic.

In further celebration of the public domain, I just reviewed Who Owns this Sentence? A history of copyrights and wrongs by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, and you can read that here. And if you want to see previous years’ posts about the public domain, and all the other works I’ve ceded to it, you can find that here.

Composition by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, 1930.

Spooktober 2025 (and new zine!)

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Alright before I get to the main event, I first have an announcement: I have a new zine out! “Map of the Lost City of Uatdan Wuchke” is an interactive fantasy story in which you, the reader, must draw the map. The zine includes a fold-out drawing surface for readers to use while they read. You can order it online on etsy, and I’ve also just added some bike goblin stickers to my etsy shop, if you’re interested in those.

Now, on to the spooky stuff! Every October I like to read a few horror books, and then review them all together in one post. You can see my previous spooktober posts here. This year I read:

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr — I always expect multi-author short story collections to be a mixed bag, with some decent stories, some great ones, and some duds. But this book’s got no duds! The worst stories were just decent, and the best had me wanting to read more by their authors. The pieces encompass a great breadth of styles and genres, from blood-and-guts horror to lyrical ghost stories to gritty crime. It was also really fascinating to see so many takes on storytelling, with several of the pieces containing stories within stories. Here were some of my favorites:

  • “Hunger” by Phoenix Boudreau—a beautifully lyrical wendigo story which, three quarters of the way through, switches perspectives to become a kind of monster-of-the-week episode. Both parts well executed.
  • “Scariest. Story. Ever.” by Richard Van Camp—Much like Tenacious D’s “Tribute”, this is not the scariest story ever, but a story about the scariest story ever. The narrator wants to win a scary story contest, so goes to a storyteller to ask him for the scariest story he’s ever heard. The storyteller agrees to pass the story on, but starts by explaining how he came to hear the scariest story ever … wonderfully absorbing, layered, and sticks the landing. This one’s my favorite of the whole collection.
  • “Collections” by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala—a Native American English major goes to her lit professor’s party so she can schmooze a letter of recommendation out of her, and finds that the professor’s house is decorated with human heads. Real heads. No one else seems concerned. Collections.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s into horror or dark fiction—with any luck, you may find a new favorite author in there.

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New Edition of “The War on Hormones”, Year in Review, and More!

Francis BassLeave a comment

I’ve got a bunch of little announcements to make so I’m throwing them all together in this post, roughly in descending order of importance.

Free Zines!

As promised, here is the 4th and final zine of 2023! This one is a re-issue of a novelette I previously published as an ebook, “The War on Hormones.” It’s about pharmaceutically asexual teenagers at a performing arts high school, and I wrote it when I myself was in 12th grade. Despite or because of this, I think it holds up! I had fun rereading it, anyway, and only made a few minor edits for clarity. I also cut the afterword to keep it a more conveniently printable length.

This new zine edition is free! Just email me at Francis.R.Bass [at] gmail [dot] com and I’ll send you a copy. You can also still buy the old ebook version on Smashwords if you want to throw me some money.

Also, if you would like any of the zines I’ve previously released, now is your last chance to get them for free, with free shipping!

To wit, that is:

  • “Cartographer,” a grotesque fantasy about a person lost in the colossal corpse of their god, and the mapmaker they always end up returning to. (LOW STOCK)
  • “Masters of the Wine Printers Guild,” an economic fantasy about a conspiracy of apprentices who decide to defy the masters and print their own wine;
  • “Is Magic School Still Worth It?”, a fantasy short story about trying to put a price tag on our nobler aspirations (i.e., magic.);
  • And “Fires Burn Forever in This World,” a short story about a city where the antiquated practice of leaving firefighting to private insurance companies has persisted right up to the modern era..

If you missed out on one of these before, or if you really liked one and want another copy to share with a friend, let me know! Going forward I will be charging for my zines like the mercenary wretch I am. So get them while you can, orders close Jan 1st.

Year in Review

It’s been a pretty quiet year on the magazine front, but a big year for self-publishing stuff. There are all those zines of course, and also a new collection of short stories which I released as an ebook, Stories About Kids Stealing Things. The book collects seven 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.

It’s also probably the coolest cover I’ve ever made.

I wrote a very long and very negative review of The Parable of the Sower. I mean, I wrote plenty of other reviews this year, but I think this one came out really well, and even if you don’t care about the book, the review gets at some of the things I find lacking in dystopian fiction. If you only read one of my posts from this year, read that one.

No new publications in magazines this year, but I did have one reprint—my story “The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack” appeared on Escape Pod! This is a story I really love, and it was great to have my work appear in such a prominent institution of contemporary short sci-fi.

Not much other than that! I am still writing this fucking novel, the one I mentioned I’d started back in April. It is about 2x the length I expected it to be. I will hopefully have the first draft finished in January, and then can spend the next year writing short stories. I like writing novels, and I honestly think this one is going to come out amazing, but I think I am just too artistically promiscuous to write long projects like this one all the time. Like I cannot imagine committing myself to another novel right after I finish this one. So I’m looking forward to being a narrative slut next year.

Public Domain Day

Public Domain Day approaches! Each year on January 1st, Public Domain Day, I celebrate by releasing one of my works to the public domain. Last year, some friends and fellow artists joined me in this, ceding some of their works as well. If you would like to do the same this year, let me know so I can link to the work you’re ceding in my post! The work can be a song, a photo, a short story—anything you’ve made and would like to release forever to the commons.

For more info on Public Domain Day, you can check out my page on it, or the post from last year.

Happy holidays, see you January 1st!