Fossil closes and plans begin

That's it! Fuselit Fossil is closed. And with it, fittingly, the end of an era.

The eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that Fuselit is perennially behind schedule. This is due in no small part a) to Jon and Kirsty's other commitments, such as Sidekick Books, paying the exorbitant London rent etc. and b) the increasingly elaborate format of Fuselit, which many of you have kindly complimented over the years.

We would like to change this. To do this, drastic measures must be taken. We're planning and plotting what these will entail, but almost certainly, Fossil will be the last hand-made issue. In some ways it's very sad for us, as it's part of what made Fuselit unique. In other ways, it's a relief.

As soon as we've hatched our diabolical plans, we will let you know. In the meantime, Kirsty is working through the hundreds of excellent Fossil submissions (some beauties in there) and we'll be sewing Amazons by the light of Netflix.

Thanks, as ever, for your patience, your artwork and your support. It means so much to us.

J & K x

Fossil is closing soon for submissions!

Hello one and all!

As Amazon is finally on its way to contributors, Fuselit Fossil will be closing for submissions on 12th October 2014. This will be the last issue of Fuselit in this format. We'll say more in due course, but the huge delay in production might give some clues as to why we're changing tack. It will be exciting, rest assured...

If you've submitted work for Fossil and are waiting to hear back, K is on it, and slowly working through the avalanche of creative responses. Some truly excellent stuff - it's going to be magnificent.


Thanks, as ever!

Submissions deadline for Fuselit 18: Amazon

The final deadline for submissions to Fuselit 18: Amazon, previously unset, is now 30th April. After this, Fuselit will be on a submissions holiday until September, when we will open up for submissions for issue 19 (spur-word to be announced).

Tickets please! Fuselit: Contraption is out at last!

After a long, long time under tarpaulin, attended by sinister figures in black, we unleash upon you, the public, not only a gorgeous new website, courtesy of Jon's tireless graftery, but also Fuselit's 17th issue, Contraption!



Available to read online, or as a free (or pay-what-you-want-if-you-like) download for your Kindle or e-book reader, as well as in its traditional paper/card/ribbon/unicorn toenail hand-made format, it's a modern marvel!

Head to www.fuselit.co.uk for a closer inspection.

Fuselit: Contraption Update

Contraption is, I swear to god, a couple of hours' coding and a session of bonus booklet printing away from being sent out to contributors and subscribers. The presentation boxes are sitting here - here, in this room! - half of them filled with completely sewn and finished copies of the main issue. The peripheries are just undergoing some tweaking. You know how it is - you did the cover to the bonus booklet six months ago but coming back to it today you're sure you can do a better job ...

The code? Oh, that's the game that we're putting on the disk. It's a text adventure! I'm an idiot who decided to write a text adventure for a literary magazine. It mostly works but it's a bit ... er ... arty.

It never ends!

As Simon Furman would say.

Last Thursday the printers told us the Fuselits were printed and would be sent with an invoice the next day. Nothing turned up. Emailed them over the weekend. Still no word.

Story of the year!

November Update!

Here's Dr Fulminare as a pumpkin. It's hard to make out, but he's even got his hat on.

So where are we, two months before the end of the year? On the Fuselit front, we are, as ever, somewhat vexed. My creative solution to our long run of failing home printers was to outsource the pages to a printing company, who would print and cut (but not bind) them and send them back to us for sewing and adding the covers. The company we used have always been reliable before, but for a reason not yet entirely clear to us (although initially it was problems with their printers!) it's now coming up to three weeks since we were supposed to see a proof. I guess I'll phone them up again after I've finished writing this update. Hopefully, the curse of Fuselit hasn't destroyed all their equipment as well.

It's fair to say we have to make some changes to people's expectations with Fuselit. So I'll say this now, and convey it clearly in the new site when it goes live: Fuselit cannot keep to a schedule. It is, as I say, cursed. Your poems may be stuck with us for a year or more while we struggle to get the thing rolling. We will get there eventually, but only though sheer bloody-mindedness.

Things are more positive and exciting on the Sidekick Books front. We're just about to launch our first pamphlet (an artist/poet team-up), scheduled at the moment for mid-November. I'm getting towards the finishing stages of a new site that will incorporate its own blog (albeit it will just be a mirror to this one!), feature a new, simpler layout and hopefully be more welcoming to newcomers. There'll be a link on the front page to whatever we've uploaded lately to our Sidekick Flicks youtube channel, which we aim to populate with readings from our books and interesting audio-visual poetical experiments. Dr F is also getting his own Twitter feed.

Bookswise, we're still aiming to realise Coin Opera 2 before Christmas, although I can make no promises. Birdbook 2 commissions are rolling in at a good rate now, which means it's on target for an April/May release next year. After that, it's all top secret but very exciting.

Besides all this, we have begun, in recent months, a very productive relationship with the chaps at giveapoem.com. If I wasn't up to my eyeballs in ... well, everything, I would have blogged a lot more about this recently. Kirsty and I are now programming the poetry content of their amazing We Eat Poets fine-cuisine-and-entertainment nights, and the recent Hallowe'en special was a huge success, with Mike West and Abigail Parry delivering blistering sets. The next one is a Christmas special on 14th December with Simon Barraclough and Niall O'Sullivan.

And that's just the start. Stay tuned for more news, including a very exciting competition we'll be co-running ...

The August Contraption Update + Poetry Library Event

The Good

The completion of the latest Fuselit yet, Contraption, is in our sights! Content? Ready six months ago. Display boxes? Check. Transparent stickers? Check. Bonus booklet ready for mass production? Check. Theme tune? Robin says he'll have it done in the next hour. Cover materials? All ready and lined up. Kindle and e-broadsheet editions? Just some gentle tweaking needed. I have set myself several missions in August, and this is the number 1 priority.

The Bad

This is Kirsty's still unfixed mini laptop, which, after a nasty fall, is missing a hinge and needs to be permanently plugged into a wall socket in order to function. It's also the only way we've been able to work on the main Contraption file, since the new computer I bought at the start of the year has had all sorts of problems running Quark. Since it's not the most powerful machine in the world and has a very small screen, this has made progress slow and difficult, particularly as the file needs to be transferred off the laptop for conversion to pdf and test printing.

In fact, so onerous has it been to continue trying to edit and fix problems this way that we're currently rebuilding the whole file in InDesign so that we can do it on the main desktop computer instead. So we've effectively made this magazine twice.

The Hideous

Here's a side-on view of the new printer we acquired in order to streamline the printing process. It was ghosting, so we bought a maintenance kit for it and replaced several parts. It then printed out a few pages absolutely perfectly (just to show that it could) before throwing up error messages. Investigations resulted in the suggestion that we buy and wire in another replacement part. This we have done, as meticulously as we could, and now when you turn it on, it fires up for a moment before dying completely.

I can't pretend I've dealt with this in the most patient manner. We have exciting projects on hand, books to write, causes to champion, poetry to review, bookshops to approach, attention to grab. Frankly, I kind of resent spending large amounts of time cluelessly tinkering with machines and posting on technical forums. Ugh.

Fortunately, I think I have a long-term solution. Will let you know if it works out.

The Event

If you want to know more about how Fuselit is put together, see a preview of Contraption at the stage we're at, or simply want to take us to task on our criminal delays, please come to Between the Sheets: How Poetry Magazines Get Made at the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre this Wednesday from 8pm. Alongside the editors of Southbank Poetry and Modern Poetry in Translation, we'll be taking part in a discussion on ... well, what I just said. It's a free event in extremely comfortable surroundings and all the editors will be available for merciless interrogation. Huzzah!

Early July Update

Half way through the year and not quite knocking down targets in the way we'd hoped, to put it mildly.

On the Sidekick Books front ...

We now have a distributor! Sidekick Books will be handled by Central Books, who're just down the road from us, which means we should be able to get them into more bookshops. The London Review of Books store has already sold out of their copies of Birdbook, and internet orders keep coming through. Also, the launch was a huge success, with a packed room and a jubilant atmosphere, even if I had my mouth set to 'ramble'.

We also have our first team-up pamphlet on the way. Did I mention that before?

On the Fuselit: Contraption front ...

Here are some illustrations that will go in the hard copy only, in special puzzle pages:

Did I tell you about the new printer saga? Here is the new printer saga. The printer we bought with a grant from the Forest Cafe all those years ago has long since decided to lower its quality threshold, meaning that while it's still useful for general printing, it's not up to scratch for printing Fuselit. This is something to do with the drivers. I have spent many hours replacing them with different ones, and once or twice managed to get it to return to printing high quality, sharp text, but then it rebelled and reassigned itself to different drivers. At the moment, it won't even duplex. I sent an email to Lexmark, asking for help, and was advised to go to 'Printer properties' and select 'two-sided printing'. I politely told them that of course I knew how to do this, but it still wasn't duplexing, and they've ignored all my emails since.

So for the last two issues of Fuselit we've taken to printing them at the local repro place. The problem is that the cost of this seems to vary depending on who's manning the tills. Some staff fairly take into account that we bring our own paper and knock a slice off accordingly; other ones want to charge us the full price, which makes Fuselit overly expensive to print. So we've managed to acquire instead our own high quality office printer. The catch is that we had to take one which was 'ghosting' - printing in double-vision. In order to fix this, we needed to pay a lot of money for a repair kit that may or may not fix the problem.

Guess what? The repair kit hasn't arrived yet.

Still we soldier on. Here is a corner of a mock-up we've made, sans cover, demonstrating what the stab-binding plus riveting will look like:

Six months late is our new record. What's more, like Duke Nukem Forever, I worry that progress on future Fuselits will also drag on and on as we try to keep up with newer, sparklier publications put together by more coordinated, better connected, less haggard people! We will do our best to prevent such a perennial slump in productivity ensuring.

Birdbook Launch Tonight!

So we're finally there. The official launch of Birdbook 1: Towns, Parks, Gardens & Woodland is tonight at the Phoenix Artists Club on Charing Cross Road, from 7.30pm. We have a raft of poets reading, free pin badges to give away, some early proofs to display, a slideshow of the artwork to project, and the full range of books to sell. Lots of the artists are coming too, so looking forward to chatting with all the various contributors who came through for us on this truly collaborative project.

In other words, we've printed out a dummy Fuselit: Contraption and found that - yes! - the rivets and ribbon go well together. Slowly we inch our way towards rolling out the new, triple-format Fuselit for all to see...

Early April General Update!

The next Sidekick Books release, Birdbook, should be arriving at our HQ in boxes tomorrow or Monday. Sorry it's taken so long but only two weeks ago, we were *still* discovering errors that had crept in between proofs (including, unfathomably, the replacement of a whole poem with another one - who is sabotaging us, and why?)

(EDIT - Birdbook now due next Friday (April 15th) as corrections need to be made to the spine)

This weekend's project: press releases!

The next issue of Fuselit, Contraption, is still badly delayed by a minor breakage of one of our computers. It's been to two repair shops already - one said they couldn't fix it while the other said it would cost £100 but they couldn't repair it *completely*. The manufacturers want proof of purchase if they're to repair it, which we've been unable to locate.

Why not just use the PC I'm typing on at the moment? Because it's new and doesn't like our old version of Quark. We're switching to InDesign but all the work we've done on the hard copy of Contraption is in Quark, which still runs off the broken laptop (when it's not broken).

Upshot: still hoping to finish it and have it out this month. Digital versions are more-or-less finished, but want to launch all three together. Fingers crossed! We will still aim to get two issues of Fuselit out this year so that we don't slip beyond the roughly biannual schedule.

Thanks, everyone, for your patience!

Fuselit: Contraption previews

I've become paranoid that you all think this talk about finishing Birdbook and Contraption is all lies and distraction while we make off on a train with bulging suitcases of imaginary money. Here's some proof of what I've been doing nearly every evening for the past couple of months, a little at a time:

End of February General Update!

Those of you who read January's 2011 plotorama entry might be getting a little concerned. January was supposed to see the release of Birdbook and February the release of Fuselit: Contraption. The former has been delayed by a manic hunt for the right printer - the large number of images meant that our usual printers, reliable and efficient though they are, didn't have the right kind of paper, so we've had to do think carefully about where to head next, bearing in mind our limited budget. The good news is that we think we've settled on one and will be taking them the files this week.

Fuselit: Contraption, as well as being pushed back by the extra work needed on Birdbook, is in equal need of care and attention, since this time we're attempting to properly coordinate and balance an online edition with the printer version. We're at the advanced stages of both, but still wrestling with such things as embedding audio tracks, sourcing containers (the print edition will come in either a box or some kind of wallet) and Kirsty's vitally useful laptop suffering cosmetic damage.

In short, we hope to have both out in the next month. The plans for everything afterwards have been somewhat tossed about by recent revelations about how to save costs on printing, but I'll save posting on that for when we have these two beasts ready to go.

But why does it take you guys so long?

That's the question I'd be asking if I was on the outside looking in, and in many respects it's the question I ask myself anyway, watching the days fly past while I fight the limitations of technology and my own competence. Two simple answers, which I'm sure I've hinted at before:

1) Both Kirsty and I have full-time jobs. We're both working on plans that will allow us to devote more time to literary projects while still paying for bread, board and internet connection, but these plans are long-term and difficult to orchestrate. If anyone were to invest a couple of thousand pounds a month in us and our mission, why, that would undoubtedly speed up matters.

2) Producing a lit journal and books is effectively doing the work of a much larger team of people, each with specialist skills. I started off very gung-ho about the whole affair, but the more I go on, the more respect I gain for disciplines such as copy-editing, copy-writing, illustration, graphic design, web management and web design. These are all areas I could merrily spend all day attending to and still fall short of the general standard. The best I can hope for in each area is to fool non-experts. Undoubtedly the pro graphic designer would find my graphic design sloppy, the pro web designer would stare in bafflement at my rickety html, and so on. But that's what you get for following your dreams. Just ask Justin Bieber.

2010 Retrospectacular / 2011 Plotorama

Happy new year to everyone, particularly those to whom I have not yet wished it.

I don't think I've had good reason to write a retrospective of a year before because nothing very much seems to have happened. But some time in mid-December, I started miserably trying to account for all the months that had drifted by, and realised that actually, it's been quite a good year for Kirsty and myself, as poets and poetry activists if not so much in our professional capacities. So I'm going to do a quick run through 2010, and then talk a little about our plans for 2011.

In January and February, we were still working on getting Cut Out & Keep off the ground as a regular online journal, as well as promoting the first two Sidekick Books micro-anthologies and putting together Fuselit: Tilt, in much the same way as we begin this year putting together Fuselit: Contraption. I found out a poem of mine had placed highly in the National Poetry Competition (although the ceremony wasn't until March), and after a lightning-quick weekend editing session involving (possibly) dozens of emails exchanged between me and Helena Nelson, my debut pamphlet, Scarecrows, was ready to go. The reception it received, coupled with the prize, doubled my confidence in a very short space of time and created some much-needed momentum. I was offered more readings in the next few months than I had been in my full and awful 27 years up to that point, and I still feel genuinely thrilled to have been able to do sets at events like The Shuffle, Days of Roses and the Torriano Reading Series. It all feels rather jammy, in fact.

National Poetry Awards ceremony. I'm the smuggest one.

In March, we were finally able to make Tilt available to buy, and reams of positive feedback followed, with initial demand far outstripping our ability to make a paltry ten or so copies a week. Kirsty appeared for a reading and interview on Sydenham Radio, while articles we published on Dr Fulminare's Irregular Features included ruminations by K on the endings of poems, and Chrissy Williams on her new job at the South Bank Poetry Library. We also dusted off our guitars to play a one-off gig called Suffering Jukebox, alongside other bands, including Dec Ryan's The Shingles, and it was there that a plan was hatched to put on a Leonard Cohen tribute night.

In April, said tribute night came to fruition, with poets and songwriters a-plenty, as well as NME/Guardian journalist Gavin Martin giving a short talk. But we spent most of April writing a poem a day in the much-maligned tradition of NaPoWriMo.

In May, Kirsty read at The Golden Hour in London, as part of its nationwide tour and we both took part in Roddy Lumsden's Lardermania event, writing and reading poems about food (I chose um ... 'tongue' and K went for ... 'ants').

In June, we went to Edinburgh for Happenstance's 5th birthday party and to be special guests at Rob Mackenzie's Poetry at the .... Happenstance, who published Scarecrows, went on to win the Michael Marks Publishers' Award, the only prize in this country for a pamphlet publisher. K had a poem published in the first issue of George Ttoouli and James Brookes' sumptuously produced Polarity and something of mine turned up in Dwang 2. I was also the Friday Feature poet one week in Todd Swift's well known Eyewear blog, and he said some flattering stuff about me.

So far, so good, eh? In July we went on holiday. Not for the whole of July, but that was the main achievement.

In Conwy with chums. Cheap hols ahoy!

August was something else. In August, we joined up with Days of Roses (Dec Ryan and Chris Horton) to celebrate Fuselit's 5th birthday (apparently a lot of stuff was being birthed in 2005 - Eyewear was also 5 this year) and to launch the 16th issue of Fuselit, Jack. It was a free event with cake, and we sold out of almost everything we'd brought to sell. Silkworms Ink published my e-pamphlet Thra-koom and Mercy's Twelve Angry Zines project included extracts from past issues of Fuselit, as well as new poems by Kirsty and me.

In September, Kirsty read versions of her poems in English and German to an audience of ninjas in at the first Kunoichi Taikai in Hannover. Then she went on to sell copies of Coin Opera and Obakarama to them at a little stall. She also read at Roddy Lumsden's Broadcast Old, New, Borrowed, Blue event, while I did my first of three talks about the more cerebral side of 1980s cartoons at Camden School of Enlightenment. After a lot of tinkering, we uploaded up a brand new site for Fuselit in anticipation of the coming change of format.

Technically, it's 'bujinkan', not 'ninja training' or 'ninjing'

October saw the release of the third Sidekick Books micro-anthology, Pocket Spellbook (which was originally supposed to be out in April/May). Scarecrows was reviewed favourably in Poetry London and Kirsty and I both contributed to the Liverpool Biennial Audio Guide released by Mercy. I made my third appearance in under-30s poetry e-journal Pomegranate, and both of us read at the insanely popular Clinic Presents.

November was almost too much for us. It was back up to Edinburgh for an experimental night of poetry, art installations, computer gaming and ... some sort of music (dubstep?) under the banner of Golden Hour vs Plastic Forks, while a weekend of intensive writing produced our collaborative, pseudonymous pamphlet No, Robot, No! There was also the second Camden School of Enlightenment, and we managed two in two months with the release of a fourth micro-anthology, Korsakoff's Paper Chain. Best forget we also nearly lost our luggage at Gatwick.

Finally, in December, About a Minute, the inaugural exhibition at The Gopher Hole opened, featuring six new poems by me as part of a piece called Staring Into Space. It's running until early February, so there's still a chance to catch it! Kirsty and I also turn up in the much anticipated Stop Sharpening Your Knives 4, edited by Jack Underwood, Sam Riviere, Nathan Hamilton and Emily Berry.

Retrospectacular over. Plotorama begins.

NOW, what of 2011? First of all, we'll be booking a venue for the official launch of the two micro-anthologies. That's priority 1. Priority 2 is getting our first full-size anthology, Birdbook I, to the printers. It's huge and scary, and no doubt still needs the last few errors knocking out of it by a thorough proofing. We want it out this month, since many artists and poets have been waiting nearly a year to see their work on the page.

At the same time, we're working towards a February release of Fuselit: Contraption, which will be brought out simultaneously as an e-broadsheet, and in a limited edition of 100 print copies. There's a whole truckload of extra stuff going into this issue, fingers crossed, that should see us increasing its cross-medium appeal and readership, while keeping the old spirit going. What's more, there'll be badges. Or stickers. One of the two.

In February, we're also appearing at this event, which means we're going to have to scrabble around for anything that might be considered 'love' poems. Some time around, before or after then, there'll also be the rescheduled Orbiting event, which sees poet Richard Evans coming up to London to headline a fundraising literary auction event. Kirsty and I will both be reading at that too.

After that, we'll be pushing to finish and print Coin Opera II, the full-size sequel to our first micro-anthology. Some amazing poems lined up for this one, some of which (as with those in Birdbook I) are already finding their way into collections and other scheduled publications.

Rather than continue with micro-anthologies, the next set of books we want to aim towards will involve full collaborations between poets and illustrators. Not a case of illustrations based on or inspired by the poems, but something more even-handed. I'm envisioning intense talks - editor, poet, artist - about the structual integrity of each pamphlet, deep into the night.

There are a couple more projects, as well as personal missions, that I'm going to keep quiet about for now, at least until they're set in motion. We've certainly got plenty to keep us busy, but I'm hoping there'll be a few more surprises along the way as well. Cheers!

New Fuselit Site!

It could probably use a few improvements still, but the new Fuselit site is finally up! The new look will aid in a smooth transition towards supplying an e-copy of the magazine alongside the printed version. These will start with issue 17, Contraption, but I'm also putting one together of our first issue, Demo.

Return of the Rice Planting Songs

August was far too short. Back to work means back to trying to write a haiku/senryu-type thing every day. Here are the first two of the new term:

Rice Planting Song #24
Templeton Strategic Emerging Markets Fund 06.09.10

London's autumn moan
through the walls, like a gagged man.
"Well, shall we begin?"



Rice Planting Song #25
Templeton Strategic Emerging Markets Fund 07.09.10

Enough time to drink
cold water like it's whisky.
Glass and bottle clink.

Regarding the new Fuselit site, it's structurally all in place. Kirsty wants it to be more colourful though (it is rather bare), which means I'm been racking my brains for visual ideas for a huge new logo. Hmm.

Fuselit is 5!

As of this month, Fuselit is five years old. Thanks so much to all the people who came to our birthday/Jack launch last night and helped eat the cake! It was absolutely ram-packed and the atmosphere was warm and welcoming. All of the readings went down a treat and lots of people bought a copy of Jack. The only negative is that now we only have six fully made-up copies left to send to contributors and subscribers! So I've been to the print shop today (my last day of a summer break from regular work) and ran off more pages so we can get cracking on more copies. I'm also making great progress on a new Fuselit website that will sit better with an upcoming shift in the format of the journal. Stay tuned!

Thra-koom & 12 Angry Zines #7!

We're back from a week away! And here is the weather:

Silkworms Ink have published a new free e-pamphlet on their website. It's called Thra-koom and it collects eleven poems about comic characters (mostly Marvel, I must admit). The introductory blurb goes like this:

"In which we explore superheroes and comic characters – as myths, monsters, invalids, metaphors, stereotypes and human beings – using the only medium that doesn’t require a license."

Meanwhile, #7 of Mercy's 12 Angry Zines project is out. This is a project based around the film 12 Angry Men and #7 (themed around the salesman juror) features new poems from Kirsty and I, as well as work from Fuselit and our soon-to-be-released Sidekick Books micro-anthology Pocket Spellbook, courtesy of poets David Floyd and Ian McLachlan. You can read the entire issue here.

Fuselit 5th Birthday Event Update

All the details you need should be on this poster:

Fuselit on Eyewear

If you head over to Todd Swift's popular blog Eyewear today, you can read a cool little retrospective on Fuselit in honour of a shared (Fuselit and Eyewear, that is) fifth birthday.