A note about Graveside Press and my short story

Heads up about the Graveside Press stuff. I too had a piece of fiction that was planned to be released by them. It was a short story that was part of a Middle Grade anthology. It hadn’t released yet, so I’m not suffering from lack of royalties like other authors.

I did get the rights back to my story and it will no longer be published by Graveside Press which is really just Steven now (the owner), I believe, who seems to be the reason authors were not getting paid.

If you have a work published or planned to be published by Graveside Press, you can request to have the rights returned to you. There was a FAQs that Steven made in Google Docs that addressed this, but after about a week he made it private. Not sure why. He’s kinda gone silent. Which as I understand is pretty typical behavior for him.

The email for getting your rights back or if you have questions about anything: rights@graveside-press.com.

When asked for details about what happened and why authors weren’t getting paid, Steven has chosen to not divulge. Telling authors it’s none of their business basically. He also has offered no apologies.

But he’s still planning on publishing works and taking more submissions. So authors beware of that.

Last but not least… there are many good folks who worked inside Graveside Press, often volunteers, who are good people. They have done great work and continue to be an inspiration. But they were all out of the loop on the business side of things. They are good people and it is these people who read and believed in my short story. Many of these folks have left Graveside and some are spinning off their own press @deadfoxpub — give them a follow.

Moving forward with the story.

I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do with the short story as I was happy to have it published in an anthology. It’s a Middle Grade sci-fi horror, similar in a way to Blood Frequency and even features an alien that appears in that as well. I’m open to suggestions. One thought would be to make my own anthology of short stories around Blood Frequency. I had been considering doing that. Maybe I should just make this one more piece of that puzzle. The anthology idea was to write a series of short stories that take place in Rolla, Missouri, during the 1990s. This was where and when I came of age, which is what makes it a lot of fun for me. There’s a lot of nostalgia in it.

What do you think? Should I roll with the YA sci-fi/horror anthology idea? Submit this story somewhere else? Publish it here on my own? Sound off in the comments.

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Updates: Steven at Graveside Press moved the goal posts since I made this post. He is now requesting emails be sent to rights@grarveside-press.com — this change has been made above. Also, after having the FAQs unavailable for a while, he has made new ones available that are completely rewritten.

Publisher Robin Taylor on growing up trans in the Midwest during the 1990s, queer representation in media

Under Donald Trump’s second term as president, there is a movement to remove or restrict LGBTQ+ literature and knowledge from the public sphere, which can lead to making it difficult for younger generations to have access to the literature and resources they need to learn about such topics as gender and gender identity.

Previous generations have had similar knowledge gaps when it comes to information about gender. Owner of GenderWild Press, Robin Taylor, a transgender man, discusses what it was like growing up in the Midwest in the 1980s and 1990s, and the lack of literature that was available to him, where he found representation, and how he’s trying to preserve the voices and stories of transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer, and intersex writers.

When Taylor was just six years old, growing up in Indiana, he had a comfort blanket in the form of a sleeping bag. He remembers wanting to give it a name, but didn’t want to choose a gender for it, because he somehow knew that would be wrong. That the sleeping bag would have to discover its own gender someday, so he gave it the gender-neutral name of Sam.

“It could be boy Sam or girl Sam,” he said. He went on to explain that he knew then that he was different, “I knew I really wasn’t a girl, but it wasn’t acceptable to be a boy.”

When asked what sort of LGBTQ+ literature or media was available to him in the 1980s and 1990s, Taylor initially said, “None.” But thought about it some more and found that he did find some queer representation in strange places, “It’s actually not entirely true that there was none, but everything that was presented was done so in a negative fashion.”

He found queer representation in the characters of Radar and Clinger of the TV show “MASH,” as well as “Xena,” which he said was “queer bating” the queer community and that, “we loved it, because it was all we had.” He also found himself wanting to know more about the men on “Jerry Springer” who had transitioned to women.

“Those were the little places we lived,” Taylor said, “there were no books that I had, that I was aware of. There were certainly no medical books. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know transmen existed until Chaz Bono came out.” Chaz Bono is the only child of Sonny Bono and Cher, who came out publicly as a transman in 2009.

Taylor started his publishing company GenderWild Press this year, and has signed his first writers, though he hasn’t released the first book yet. The goal of his company is to focus on authors and poets who are transgender, genderqueer, nonbinary, and intersex. He wants to tell their stories, so people still struggling to find themselves can find their stories in others.

“There were just no stories to parallel my own,” he said of his own journey, “I felt a sense of direction, something I needed to do.” That’s when he realized he wanted to start a publishing company for queer voices, “I had a bit of an ah-ha moment, ‘Oh, I need to tell these stories.’”

“What we need is a conduit for those stories to be told and be readily findable by a community of people who need to find them,” he said, “including people who are not trans, who are not queer.”

When asked if he thought the current political climate could take us back to the knowledge drought of the 1980s and 1990s, Taylor thinks that we can’t undo the progress that has been made in his lifetime, “It was leaking through then, because it can’t be contained.”

“The truth is you can take the T out of Stonewall but it’s too late,” he said. “The genie is out of the bottle; you can’t put it back. I think we are a little too wise to our history. You can’t make these things go away.”

You can find and follow Robin Taylor on Substack, where he publishes multiple newsletters.

New micro-interviews incoming

I’m going to be adding something new to this microblog. I’ve got one smallish interview in the can and planning several more. I’ll be interviewing primarily writers (for now, for sure) to discuss writing and other topics. My hope is that each interview will be cross-intersectional with writing in some way. For example, my first guest is a publisher of queer books and we discussed what it was like growing up trans in the Midwest in the 1990s.

I should be dropping two of these interviews this month. The first one, I mentioned above, I’m aiming to drop tomorrow. I’ll share them here and in full on Threads and Facebook (since they suppress links).

I already have seven in the lineup and a few others I want to reach out to. I hope these short interviews can help shed some light on different perspectives and topics from a plethora of writers.

Let me know what you think of the idea in the comments and if you have any ideas for interview topics or even writers you’d like to hear from.