Tag: zine

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 Comic Zine!

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Oh wow it has been a while! I have been hard at work writing short stories and then hard at work editing my novel and so have not had much time to write any book reviews or other posts, but I have managed to finish this collection of new comics!

Lonely Friends is a collection of comics about being lonely and having friends, sometimes at the same time. About half of these comics I’ve shared on this site in the past, the other half are brand new! You can get a digital copy on itch.io, or order a physical copy on my Etsy. Or if you’re in Philly I can give you one in person at the Philly Comics Expo—I’m not tabling there, but I will be visiting and will have some copies of the zine with me.

The pages I’ve shared on this blog have been kind of scattered throughout various posts, so I’m going to re-post those in order over the next couple months so that it’s easy to find them and click through—along with three more pages I haven’t shared before.

Also in the name of things being easier to find, I have a webpage for my comics now. Basically it’s just Lonely Friends, the new year comics, and Last Year Comic Chronicle right now, but I do want to dedicate more time to making comics going forward, so I’ll add to it as I do so.

Now, some unrelated stuff. Since it’s been so long, here’s a few highlights of what I’ve been up to over the past several months:

A video compiled from various bike rides throughout a year, from summer 2023 to spring 2024

A map for the novel which I’m sloooooowly editing right now

An online lecture series which I loved on the history of Industrial Design, focused on the ways that new materials and technologies shaped design/design process.

Okay next few posts will be pages of the comic, but the next regular post after that will be for spooktober!! Read my previous spooktober posts here! 🎃

New Publication: Stories About Kids Stealing Things

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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???

New Publication: Is Magic School Still Worth It?

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multiple copies of the zine. the covers have the title, a small glove insignia, and the initials FB

“Is Magic School Still Worth It?” is out now! It is available exclusively in print! It is for FREE! Here’s the synopsis:

Ezze recently graduated from magic school, but she hasn’t practiced magic at all since then. She volunteers at a magazine, works at a hotel, and had to sell her silkbud glove to get by. When the magazine assigns her to write an article about whether or not magic school is still worth it, she struggles to find an answer.

The zine itself is staple-bound, with a hand-lettered cover. If you’re curious how I made it, this post about an earlier short story goes into some more detail on the process.

Email me at FrancisRBass (at) gmail (dot) com if you would like a copy! If you live in Philly I can hand-deliver it to you, if you live elsewhere in the US I’ll mail you one. If you live elsewhere outside the US, I may ask you to cover postage, but should still be able to get you a copy.

Upcoming Publications

There will be two more free zines this year. They will be “Fires Burn Forever in This World” (new!) and a re-issue of “The War on Hormones” (old, but newly in print!) I will also release, in ebook form, a collection of short stories from the past few years, which will be titled Stories About Kids Stealing Things. That one will not be free.

Also very soon (maybe later this month?), my story “The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack” will gain a second life at Escape Pod! It was previously published in Uncharted Magazine in 2022, and now it will be published in audio form as well. I’m very excited for that, I hope you are too.

Until then!