Café Wednesday: N.E. Lilly

It is sometimes said that every person has a novel in them. Others have scores of magazines in them!

Our last guest was the indie publisher M.C.A. Hogarth, a big supporter of crowd-funding and related patronage models.

This week in keeping with the microfiction theme, I’d happy to welcome Nathan E. Lilly (@nelilly), who — amongst his various other projects — set up one of the first-ever paying Twitter fiction magazines, Thaumatrope.

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AMH: How would you convince a web-sceptic that Twitter is a boon to literature rather than a depreciation of it?

NEL: I don’t think it’s possible to convince anyone of anything that they don’t want to be convinced of. On the one hand I think that twitter fiction is the literary equivalent of M&Ms: small, sweet, and great when you’re craving 500 of something. On the other hand, Ernest Hemingway felt that his infamous six-word story was the best thing he’d even written. It seems a little silly to rate something’s literary value based on how short or long it is. There must be something to short forms for them to exist. You don’t see this preconception existing in poetry so much. Haiku, couplets, and limericks are the poet’s equivalent of drabbles, 49ers, six-word stories, and twitter fiction. There are good and poor examples of literature in all lengths and formats.

AMH: Thaumatrope was the first ever twitterzine. Two years down the line, have things developed as you expected?

NEL: Well, it hasn’t been quite two years yet (not until December 12 of 2010), and when I first developed the site I had, literally, no expectations. It just seemed like it was something that needed to be done. So I guess you could say that it’s going better than expected.

AMH: If you had no expectations, why did you set up Thaumatrope? Do you have any hopes or goals for the magazine?

NEL: Because deep down inside I have no self-control–I think it’s Obsessive Complusive Attention Deficit Disorder. I latch onto a bright shiny new idea, and I just have to see it come to fruition.That’s why I run two other magazines aside from Thaumatrope, and several other websites aside from that. My current hope is for the
magazine to publish an anthology and a few other yet to be completed print projects. My overall hope is that the magazine becomes self-sustaining.

AMH: Tell us about your Thaumatrope Fiction Relocation Project. What is it, and where did the idea come from?

NEL: I do a great deal of work with and for science fiction conventions. One of the things that I noticed that conventions often need is little bits of filler content for their program books, to make their layouts line up and even out. Typically they’ve used illustrations, but sometimes it’s hard to find an appropriate illustration in the right dimensions. With text, you could alter any relevant story using text size, leading, letter-spacing, etc. to fit any space. I figured that the authors and the magazine would get exposure, and conventions would get free content: win-win-win!

AMH: When it comes to the stories you’ve accepted, do you have any favorites?

NEL: Yes, but there are far too many too name. I’m quite partial to all of the serials.

AMH: I find it interesting that Thaumatrope is a paying e-zine. How is it funded?

NEL: I receive pennies-a-day from advertising, and the occasional donation, but payments for the most part come from me. Luckily the expense, in and of itself, isn’t that great. That just goes back to my goals, to make Thaumatrope self-sustaining.

AMH: You briefly mentioned some other magazines — what else are you running?

NEL: I edit Space Westerns Magazine (space western short fiction) and Everyday Weirdness (weird flash fiction).

I also run several other science fiction related websites, most importantly a geek-event finder that’s searchable by postal code.

You can find links to other sites that I’ve developed at www.greententacles.com.

AMH: What about your own writing? Where can we have a gander at some of that?

NEL: Outside of a few stories in my university literary magazine and one story published in 2000 on a now closed online fiction market I haven’t submitted any fiction that I’ve written anywhere. I have non-fiction in various places on and offline. The Emancipation of Bat Durston on Strange Horizons, a non-fiction piece in Science Fiction Trails about why the trope of aliens in caves exists.

AMH: Outside of your projects, are there any other Twitter fiction accounts you’d recommend?

NEL: @outshine and @nanoism stand out.

AMH: Great, that’s everything from me. Do you have any last words for our readers?

NEL: I’ve just started a personal blog at http://nelilly.greententacles.com/ for anyone who’d like to be kept up
to date on my various projects, stalk me, or just generally poke fun at my hubris.

Thanks for the interview. Keep up the good work with ErgoFiction.

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