A Neuroscientist Did Our Cover Art 💅 Meet Melinda: Writer, Artist, and Neuroscientist
7 months ago
– Thu, Feb 15, 2024 at 12:11:20 PM
We are still going strong with over 200 backers and $7,500! Because we can’t say it enough, thank you all for supporting this project. Let’s make it to $10K to get pro rates for the writers (who are currently frantically revising their stories)!
You’ve probably noticed our dope cover art by now. But did you know that it was designed by one of our multi-talented writers? Well, now you do. And it’s about time you met Melinda.
Meet the Cover Artist, Melinda Smith
Melinda has a PhD in neuroscience and works as a science writer, composing articles about medical research. She writes character-driven science fiction, and her first published novella, SUM (Ellipsis Imprints) was long-listed with the British SciFi Assoc for best short fiction. She also produces albums of spoken word poetry set to original electronic music (you can find her albums here.) Two of her spoken word pieces were finalists in the Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest. When she’s not writing, she is doing art, playing guitar, composing electronic tunes, practicing karate, or driving her two daughters somewhere.
We’ve got a mini interview with Melinda to delve a little deeper into how she fits so much art in her brain.
Tell us a little about your artistic drive. How did you get started? (And what inspires you to keep going?)
When I was in grad school, I kept thinking about how amazing (and incredibly strange) the brain was: our sense of reality hinges completely upon a few pounds of fatty, squishy tissue? All my life, I thought being curious meant I was supposed to be a scientist. Turns out, writing teaches you just as much about the universe. Asking and answering questions about our characters, getting inside their heads, and learning how they’d react to fantasy, dystopia, or super advanced tech can teach you so much. Sometimes, I think it takes examining other worlds to better understand your own.
I think art helps me channel my curiosity about the universe, too. Creating (anything—music, art, writing, woodworking—anything) actually teaches you things. You can’t draw a face without studying it. And you can’t write a story without learning how humans interact, love, argue, process grief, overcome challenges, etc.
As far as inspiration to keep going—I have no choice. It’s not something I do; it’s something I am. When I’m too busy to write or do art, I miss it. I think, for me, creating is a form of therapy.
What was your inspiration behind the cover artwork?
Something about faces really draws me in, maybe because the face is the most intimate thing about a person, and yet it’s the first thing you see when you meet someone.
I always say that speculative fiction is really just empathy. It’s the ultimate way to immerse yourself in a totally foreign world, and to try to understand how people there feel. So that’s what I wanted to convey with the cover. Here’s this woman who is clearly not human, and yet we can relate to her. We can feel her. We can look into her eyes and imagine a whole backstory.
If you could be a cyborg, what's one upgrade you'd give yourself?
I’d give myself the ability to function without sleep. I mean, we waste a third of our lives sleeping. Imagine how much writing I could do in that time…
Publication Corner
We’re going multi-media this week.
From Brigitte Winter: A diceless tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) played with actual trash where you “Live fast. Eat trash. Solve mysteries.” {Psychic Trash Detectives} Brigitte is also the co-founder of Scryptid Games, a small press focused on making storytelling games for people who love books. Check out their latest project on Kickstarter: Against the Gloom, a TTRPG about pirate troubadours pushing back against a sentient gloom with the power of music.
From Chris Campbell: A podcast of his dark fantasy where sometimes the price of magic is higher than you can reckon. {Fatal Conditions—NIGHTLIGHT}
Don’t Forget!
You have exactly one more chance to get your face on a digital print from Melinda Smith! How many personalized pieces of art can you say were created by a neuroscientist, hm? Don’t regret missing the Blue Fire Jelly tier. When it’s gone, it’s gone.
Viable Paradise applications are officially open! If you or someone you know wants to apply to this incredible, week-long workshop, remember that our Lion’s Mane Jelly tier includes an application review from a member of the 2023 cohort. This would make a great gift for that writer in your life ♥️
That’s all for this week, friends. Thank you so much for coming along on this journey with us.
Love,
The Viable Paradise 2023 Cohort
Meet the Lead Editor, Chris Campbell
7 months ago
– Wed, Feb 07, 2024 at 07:57:42 AM
Thanks again for funding this project in under 12 hours! With your help, we’ve also become a featured Kickstarter project, under their category of “Projects We Love”!
Now that this anthology is definitely happening, we are working to unlock our stretch goals. Thanks to you, we are more than halfway to our first goal! Once we get to $10,000, we will be able to pay all of our writers a professional rate. If you love this project and want to show our writers some love, please tell another sci fi/fantasy fan in your life to back this anthology. Help us share this book with people who will love it.
We are so excited to bring you this collection and we are already well underway beginning the editing process for our stories. Speaking of editing…
Meet the Lead Editor
If you haven’t heard of Chris Campbell, our Lead Editor, then you are missing out.
Chris Campbell is a writer who works across a broad spectrum of speculative fiction. His words have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov's Magazine, FIYAH, the Nightlight Podcast, and more.
Most of his work fits within the Afrofuturist artistic movement. "I believe in recontextualizing the past as a space where Black people exist at the center of their own narratives and using my art to craft yet unimagined futures as part of the necessary work of bringing them into being."
Chris is one of the first readers of Apex Magazine and has been an instructor for Wildchild Artdoors and the Metro West Writing Guild. Sara Megibow of kt literary represents him.
Get to know Chris a little better with this mini interview!
Tell us a bit about your editorial experience and how you plan to bring that to New Year, New You.
Chris: The single experience that has shaped my approach to the editorial process the most is being part of the Apex Magazine crew since 2022. Lesley, Jason, and Maurice are all very generous with sharing their process and helping everyone on the team develop as part of putting the best magazine out issue after issue. I was also lucky enough to have a chance to work with DaVaun Sanders of FIYAH Magazine as the editor of my first professional short story sale. DaVaun is one of the most talented editors in Speculative Fiction, so the bar he set as an example was sky-high for me from the start. He showed me that the process is at its best when the editor comes from a place of internality with the piece. The focus is on bringing the writer's vision to the front rather than shaping a story to some preexisting aesthetic.
What are you most excited about for this anthology?
Chris: I came into this knowing how talented these writers are, so initially, that drew me to this project. Now that I've gotten a chance to read the anthology, what is exciting to me is all the bold, weird, and wild places everyone went with the New Year, New You theme. These are the types of stories that crawl into the back of your head and just stick there.
If you could clone yourself, would you? Why or why not?
Chris: Considering the stories in our anthology, I think the concept of what a clone is needs to be expanded on a little bit and perhaps include other forms of duplication. Would I make a straightforward genetic copy of myself to raise as a child? No, I wouldn't see the point of that. However, whether I would duplicate myself if the process resulted in a continuity of consciousness is a different question altogether. Some of the formative stories that have stuck with me since I was in middle school, and falling in love with Speculative Fiction were Butler's Wild Seed, Simmon's Hyperion Cantos, and Sheffield's Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Stories that explore the idea of living on, through one form or another, and watching history unfold. The chance of seeing how the story of humankind plays out would be too interesting to pass up.
Publication Corner
We’ve got a lot of talent in our group, and some of us have a few stories in the wild already.
Here’s a couple to get a taste of the quality of writing you can expect in our anthology:
From Trae Hawkins: A group of young teens born in a dystopian future fight to reclaim autonomy—even if it means rending their world apart with rebellious, magical rocks. {“Justice Rocks” – Augur Mag}
From Ash Howell: A heart-rending conversation between a sword and its wielder. {“Forte/Foible or At the Center of Percussion”— Baffling}
New Reward Tiers!
Thanks again for all of your amazing support. We’re now hoping to meet our stretch goals so we can pay the writers a professional rate, compensate the publishing and editorial staff, and publish a second anthology featuring even more stories from Viable Paradise alumni.
To achieve these big dreams, we’ve expanded our reward tiers to include two new reward options: For $200, you’ll get the anthology as a print and e-book, a limited print bookmark, your name in the book credits, AND New Year, New You writer and cover artist Melinda Smith will incorporate an image of you as an android into an original digital art piece inspired by the anthology cover! For $300, Melinda will send you the same personalized android art as a signed physical art piece.
Please share this Kickstarter with your circles to support a diverse group of sci-fi and fantasy writers breaking into the game.
Love,
The Viable Paradise 2023 Cohort
You did it!
8 months ago
– Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 07:31:55 PM
You did it!
Thanks to you, this little dream of ours–to publish an anthology of diverse and queer speculative fiction exploring themes of reinvention, transformation, and the self–will now be a reality.
We are so, so very grateful.
This campaign funded fully in less than twelve hours, exceeding our wildest expectations for this project. We will be publishing New Year, New You, and our writers will all be paid a modest fee for their creativity. Cybernetic implants and robotic appendages are expensive!
With your pledges, you’ve told us that you are hungry for stories like this, and we hear you. We are hungry to write stories like this.
Over the next 29 days, we’ll be raising funds toward even bigger android dreams. We want to pay all of our writers a professional rate. We want to pay our publishing and editorial staff $$ for their hard (and thus far, free) labor. And we’ll be fundraising toward our biggest dream of all: to publish a SECOND anthology featuring even more writing from Viable Paradise alumni.
To achieve these big dreams, we’ve expanded our reward tiers to include two new reward options. For $200, you’ll get the anthology as a print and e-book, a limited print bookmark, your name in the book credits, AND New Year, New You writer and cover artist Melinda Smith will incorporate an image of you as an android into an original digital art piece inspired by the anthology cover! For $300, Melinda will send you the same personalized android art as a signed physical art piece.
Act fast if you want to snag these new rewards to augment your reality. There are only three available at each tier.
Thank you, from the bottom of our fabricated hearts, for believing in this project. We can’t wait to share this book with you!
Love,
The Viable Paradise 2023 Cohort
