The October 31, 2014 update of Silverthought Online includes short fiction from John Brown Spiers, Javier Cabrera, Jill Corddry, Robert Earle, Iain Ishbel, J. M. Strasser, and David Wright, and an excerpt from Counselor, the forthcoming novel by Victor Giannini that Silverthought will be publishing in limited hardcover, paperback, and digital editions in early 2015. These are some remarkable pieces of writing and it is my pleasure and honor to present them to you.
It is in many ways difficult to write this summary of the update because so much has changed since our last. The Silverthought community recently lost a cherished friend in Lawrence Santoro, who came to us as a participant in the moonshot A Dark and Deadly Valley anthology and stuck around to publish the stunning collection of short horrorDrink for the Thirst to Come. His warmth, kindness, and raw talent, his willingness to take a chance with a nobody like me with a project of that magnitude, his polite decline of the shitty cover I mocked up for Drink, his Christmas cards and being "chuffed", his Just North of Nowhere--one of the best books I've ever read, and I've read a few--and that voice, that voice. I wanted to include a tribute, a short story of his, a link to a podcast, an anecdote, a something, but nothing can summarize. What I can do is give you Drink for the Thirst to Come for free this weekend, available in a Kindle edition on Amazon right now, all yours if you want it. People like us don't just leave books, we leave the stories of how those books came to be, and it is my honor to have had the opportunity to work with Larry Santoro and count him among my friends.
In putting together this update there was a sense of finality in it, in that I know Mark has academic obligations that severely reduce the amount of time he can devote to Silverthought, and with my family adding a third child next spring in addition to the exhausting flux of academia, I know that I won't be able to devote my full attention to this endeavor. We will be closing submissions to our online division for the time being, just as we stopped accepting print submissions earlier this year. But digging through the slush pile, reading the work entrusted to us, reaching out to writers, that is one of the hearts of me, and I know I'll return to it. So think of the coming changes not as an end but as a pause--Silverthought still has several books ready to publish next year, and 2015 is the twentieth anniversary of the completion of my first novel. Although for a time we're not going to accept unsolicited writing, we'll be working behind the scenes to make this site better and follow the mission we laid out in 2001: to provide readers the finest intellectual, experimental, and speculative fiction we can.
Thanks for reading.
—Paul
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