hypnagothic magazine

a proper announcement this time, instead of it being tucked in a random post between two aphorisms about my mental health. that means nothing, i swear

all issues here: hypnagothic.art

since time immemorial, man has dreamed of a magazine with short stories that he could take to the toilet instead of his smartphone. or at least i have, since early june this year.

that’s when i became conscious of it. not long before that, i went to the lulu website to check on the state of the proof copy for my last novel, and i noticed something on the projects page. it was a draft for a magazine, and it had nothing except the title, hypnagothic. i remembered thinking of this word but not why, and did not remember opening that project, or having an idea for a magazine at all.

but the idea kept gnawing at me. i talked to Sean Gois, John Gois and Wawrzyniec to see if they liked the idea of putting the stories we’d published online in it. we had enough to put out a few. plus, we’ll keep writing, so we’ll have more still. and they agreed. the visual style, and the rules, appeared in their own time. oh, yeah, and the name, tracing back its roots, means something like pouring sleep. i like that for many reasons, but i won’t bore you with symbolic analysis, just hear the word and feel it, it’s better.

and now we’re here and it’s happening. it's going to be simple. and as cheap as we can make it. but i would rather people print it out themselves rather than buy it, cause it's more fun that way. that’s what i’m going to do.

it will be fiction only, preferably short stories. no poetry, no essays. other than the front and back cover, there will be no images, or only very sporadically, for the right story. and it will only include people that first published something, even if only online, because it shows willingness to finish things and put oneself out there.

we’ll mostly include stuff already online anyway. i know it’s counter intuitive. why publish something that's already out there. but everything is already out there. so what. is it cool. and can you use it to level a table. swat some flies with it. you can't swat flies with a story published online. think about that. those are the real questions.

speaking of flies. on thursday i had the day off and my wife and i had an unexpected adventure that involved having to walk along the basin of a stream for three hours or so. it was very tiresome, but it was also beautiful, and one aspect of that beauty was that lots and lots of damselflies flew everywhere around us all the time, and they landed on branches bending over the water and we got to see their delicate features up close, and sometimes it seemed like they were posing for us, languidly flapping their wings, just showing off really.

and the next day i was still thinking about damselflies, and then it hit me that the magazine needed a logo to go with the name, and i knew what it should be. that was the final touch that was missing to really put this thing together.

so yeah, first issue is coming rather soon, and we already have other issues and other stories from other authors in mind.

this will probably be the cover for the first issue