Psychedelia Gothique

Transversions and Everything After In the mid-1990s, Sally McBride and I dreamed up, published and edited a well-known and respected small press magazine called TransVersions: Literature of the Fantastic . Over the course of six years, we were fortunate to publish stories by new authors and established pros. Being one of the highest profile genre magazines publishing poetry, we received a wonderful offer from Governor-General Award winning poet and Canadian SF icon, Phyllis Gotlieb to become our poetry editor. Over the course of 11 issues, we published stories by a pretty impressive list of authors, including  Gemma Files - author of Experimental Film ; David Nickle – author of Eutopia and Volk ;  Jeff Vandermeer – author of Annihilation and the Southern Reach trilogy; James Sallis – author of Drive ;  Robert J. Sawyer – author of Flash Forward ; and over 100 others. Many of our contributors went on to great success (Sallis and Sawyer were already well known...

Having already posted my Zen of Failure, I’ve realized I can now use it to excuse all sorts of unsuccessful experiments on this blog. My last blog post came right out and asked for comments. How many comments did it get me? Zero. As a consequence, I now know something that seemed promising, that absolutely does not work – at least within the scale currently possible on my blog. The experiment was based on some advice I had read that suggested: a)     Asking questions b)     Appealing to your readership Both of these methods can successfully generate comments and elicit response. So why didn’t it work for me? It probably has something to do with Response Ratios I selected some random YouTube videos as examples of normal response ratios: ·        An album with 14,151 views has 510 likes and has generated 58 comments. Ratio of comments to views is .4 per cent. Just over 3 per cent of the viewers ...

Despite my aversion to rolling over and exposing my soft, pink underbelly, the blog posts that draw the most readers and get the strongest reactions, are the ones where I publicly fail – or at least, come close enough to failure to see the shreds of my dignity in its teeth and catch the reek of shame on its breath.   I don’t attribute the popularity of those posts to some kind of schadenfreude thing. There are very few people around who actually enjoy seeing others fail. In fact, just the opposite usually happens; a certain amount of failure brings out the best in people. It attracts and engages us, makes us want to help.   Many of us enjoy rooting for the underdogs – specifically because they are the underdogs. For those on the receiving end of that attention, it’s nice when people sit up and take notice – even for the wrong reasons. As long as we don’t play the “woe is me” card too often, it can even give us a sense of achievement and reinforce our sense of self...