Martian Lit, a new company that publishes offbeat fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, has gone live with weekly content.
The internet's got a lot of literary magazines, and it's easy to get lost in the shuffle. Martian Lit is dedicated to publishing quality work that's different. It has a great team behind it, great web design, a bizarre
"About Us" page and backstory, and original art to accompany every piece that's not non-fiction.
This last point makes a
huge difference in terms of making literary content visually pleasing and accessible. Online, we're used to reading quickly, and the kind of focus that literature requires can be hard to achieve, especially with email and games and everything else just a click away. Artwork is one of the few remaining ways of providing online readers with a beautiful, immersive experience. And we couldn't have better artists working for us.
The website will be running content weekly. My own serialized novel,
The Many Lives of Yelena Moulin, will run biweekly. Its
first chapter is up right now, with art by the immensely talented and professional
Doug Smock (art at right).
We're also going to be publishing books. In fact, we have already announced our first book, my own
Watching People Burn.
Let me close by saying that Martian Lit is very dear to my heart. It's something I've been working on for half a year -- and conceptualizing before that for (no kidding) a year and a half. Of course, Sequart's incredibly dear to me too, and the bulk of my time goes to Sequart. But I (and many involved with Sequart) also have a creative side that doesn't fit with Sequart's mission statement. Martian Lit's there to provide that, and I'm crossing my fingers and hoping against hope that if we run Martian Lit with the same concern for quality that we've brought to Sequart, we just might buck the trends and create something that's both literary and successful. Thanks in advance for being a part of that dream, even if it's just reading or forwarding a link now and then. It means the world to me.
