Happy Holiday Half-Issue!

It’s that time of year again. Halloween has come and gone, so it’s time to bust out the ornaments and the awful music. Thanksgiving? What’s that? Corporations are spending millions of dollars to convince us to buy billions of dollars of crap, all in the name of whatever religious holiday they can appropriate. And if you try to fight this rampant capitalism, people call you things like “scrooge” and “grinch” and “get a job, hippie.” It’s almost like people want to go into debt to prove they haven’t forgotten their friends exist.

Well, we haven’t forgotten you exist, dear readers, and we’re going to prove it without dropping a dime. This is the 2011 Holiday Half-Issue, our gift to you.

We’ve got a new Thanksgiving-themed story, “Almost Every November,” from Eirik Gumeny; the delightful and uplifting “The Resurrection of Old Saint Nick,” from Samuel Snoek-Brown; “Chinese Take-Out,” from Stephen Schwegler, a mouth-watering, Christmas-flavored semi-sequel to “November;” and, from Laura Garrison, “The Long Happy New Year of Dora Wellington,” which is either about a Kwanzaa celebration that goes terribly wrong or the long happy New Year of Dora Wellington. You’ll have to read it to find out.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get in line at Walmart. I hear they’re selling a giant TV for slightly less than they normally do.

You can download the Holiday Half-Issue by clicking here, or read it online here.

Two Years, Suckas!

Hello and welcome to the twenty-fourth, and last, monthly issue of Jersey Devil Press. That’s right, we’re going quarterly from here on out.

When I started JDP, I told myself I’d give it two years. And while I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, it’s also taken up a lot more time than I thought it would. Time that I – we, all three of us – have less and less of nowadays. So rather than force ourselves to finish twelve issues a year, we figured easing off a bit on the journal part would be the best thing for Jersey Devil Press. And for us. The last thing we want to do is get completely burnt out and close up shop.

That said, if anyone’s interested in signing on as a reader or taking over as editor of the online journal, let us know.

But this is not a time for being maudlin. This is a time for the September issue, with vikings, llamas, and space Nazis. Oh my.

We start with, as Stephen Schwegler put it, “the saddest story I’ve ever read that had ‘balls’ in the title,” also affectionally known as “Where Did My Balls Go? or, The Story of Oliver: A Canine Memoir,” by Shannon Derby. Next is the writer free-for-all “Colony,” by Samuel Snoek-Brown, followed by Christian A. Larsen’s “Projekt Gesichtskreis,” the aforementioned, and incredibly hard-hitting, story of astronauts and Nazis. After that is Rowdy Geirsson’s essay on the modern-day Viking movement, “Fear and Loathing in Western Sweden.” And bringing up the rear is Vincent Purita’s tale of alpacas, drugs, and idiot hipsters, “We Love Lucy.”

Have at it. Online issue is here and the .pdf can be downloaded here.

See you in December.

Or, you know, before that. What with the books and the Brilliant Disguises and the First Twenty-Twos and all.

Issue Twenty-Three is No Match for a Good Blaster at Your Side, Kid

may the force be with youFor some of us, Star Wars was – and is – kind of a big deal. It was an integral part of our childhood, of who we are now. Friends could be discerned by whether they knew the bounty hunters’ names, by a strange gear tattooed onto a bicep, and good friends could be singled out by which movie they believed was the best. (Personally, Return of the Jedi was the first movie I saw in a theater and it will always hold a special place in my heart. Yes, the Ewoks were a little too cute, but, come on, the rancor was fucking awesome.)

At some point, though, George Lucas decided to mess with perfection. He decided he was better than us. He laughed in our faces and changed our movies into something hideous and ugly – Darth Maul being the exception, of course – until we were left crying in dark rooms, convinced there was no longer anything good in this world. On some level, we knew what we had seen as children was still there, but it was hard to make it out through the noise and the pod races and Jar Jar fucking Binks.

But we had – have – faith, and that belief in our childhood, in our memories, though it differed from Mr. Lucas’s increasingly inconsistent canon, from what he wanted us to believe, was enough. We have what we remember, and no amount of CGI can take that away.

Or, for the rest of you, they’re just some pretty good movies.

In a wacky coincidence, we’ve got some stories tackling those very issues this month, though most of them don’t dwell on the Star Wars part quite so heavily. Or, you know, at all.

First up is “Exposure,” by Claire Joanne Huxham, followed by “The Toad and the Butterfly,” by RCJ Graves. Next is “Pentecostal,” by Lauren J. Barnhart. Then, finishing up the issue, is Mike Sweeney’s magnum opus, “CPA of the Sith.”

I’ll give you three guesses which one’s about Star Wars.

You can read the online version here or download the .pdf here.

And, don’t forget, you’ve still got almost a week to donate to Jersey Devil Press’s Danger_Slater’s Love Me Pre-Order-Donation-a-Thon.