Jeremiah Tolbert

Harkening back to my post about crazy uncon­ven­tial zine ideas, and all this talk and thought about relaunch­ing the Fortean Bureau, has led me to give some seri­ous thought to try­ing some­thing very very different.

Roundbottom is my core project right now, but I have a strong desire to launch a new ‘zine. At the very least, I am going to pub­lish a few sto­ries in the Fortean Bureau for­mat, but what if… what if I cre­ated a meta pub­li­ca­tion like the Surreal Guide to Botany or the Disease Guide from a year or so back–but as a kind of naturalist’s research pub­li­ca­tion.  Nothing stuffy and dry like real sci­en­tific mag­a­zines, but basi­cally pay­ing other peo­ple to write posts like Dr. Roundbottom.  I’d accept sub­mis­sions from both artists and writ­ers. I’ll pro­vide a forum for artists and writ­ers to team up, if they want to make a joint pro­duc­tion of an article/​piece.

Art would be allowed in any for­mat.  Not every­one has to do the pho­tog­ra­phy thing that I’m doing.  But the basic idea behind all of this is that each arti­cle is writ­ten by another nat­u­ral­ist in their own world, sim­i­lar or dif­fer­ent to Dr. Roundbottom, but at least pass­ably steampunk.

To start, I’d offer $50 a post (not longer than 2000 words) for the writ­ing and $50 for the art.  You’d be free to sell both any­where, and we will pro­vide a link to sell prints at your print store for artists.   We’d have an option to pay more at the end of the year to pub­lish a print edi­tion of the research notes.

Finally, and I’d be doing the same, you have to allow–and I’m not sure how to legally for­mal­ize this–references to be made to your work and char­ac­ters in other submissions/​posts.  For instance, Dr. Roundbottom him­self might ref­er­ence your paper and link to it while talk­ing about some­thing sim­i­lar in his world.  And you’ll be able to do the same with Roundbottom.  This kind of shar­ing isn’t cov­ered under any kind of Creative Commons license that I know of, so per­haps I would need some odd con­tract legal­ize.  I should talk to the Creative Commons peo­ple and see if they have suggestions.

Would any­one sub­mit to some­thing like this?  I’m basi­cally think­ing about the com­ments that hap­pen already on Roundbottom and for­mal­iz­ing a way for writ­ers and artists to par­tic­i­pate in this fash­ion and get paid for it. I under­stand that it would be dif­fi­cult to sell any writ­ing writ­ten directly for htis project to any­thing else, so that’s one flaw that i have to con­sider.  Please pro­vide your thoughts and com­ments!  Would you sub­mit some­thing to this kind of pub­li­ca­tion?  What rules do you think would need to be made?