Meg Frank on the Mermaids Monthly Kickstarter

Posted on November 25, 2020    Posted by John Scalzi      4 Comments

Meg Frank is an artist and one of the Scalzi family’s Favorite People on the Planet™, and as such we are delighted to give them a little space here today to talk about their latest project: Mermaids Monthly, a magazine that you can help Kickstart.

MEG FRANK:

Asking for help makes me breathtakingly uncomfortable. I’d rather walk on hot coals or sprint through Times Square. But here’s the thing: Julia Rios and I want to make a really cool magazine about mermaids and to do that we need your help.

So, this magazine: Mermaids Monthly. In August of this year, Julia called me to talk about a “medium sized passion project” they had been chewing on. You know those people that you get in a car with even when they don’t have a set destination because you know it’s going to be good? Julia is one of those people. I knew before the phone call I was going to get in the car – when they said “mermaids” and the names of some of my favorite creators I realized I had a full tank of gas just for this project. Magical merdudes, murderous mermxs, and mermaids of every shade, shape, and size. Short stories, flash stories, comics, poetry, art, and more.

Cover art by Nilah Magruder, Dianita Cerón, and John Picacio. Julia and our assistant editor Ashley Deng will sail the Editorial Ocean filled with content by Alberto Chimal, Ali Trotta, Amal El-Mohtar, Bogi Takács, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Brandon O’Brien, Brett Massé, C. S. E. Cooney, Caitlyn Paxson, Carlos Hernandez, Debra Goelz, Elsa Sjunneson, Fran Wilde, Gabriela Damián Miravete, Jessica P. Wick, L. D. Lewis, Layla Al-Bedawi, Libia Brenda, Lisa M. Bradley, Patty Templeton, Seanan McGuire, and Sheree Renée Thomas. And more. Twelve digital issues of mermaid magic launching in January of 2021 with a bonus issue out in December of 2020 because we like making cool things so much that we already started making one. We want to work on something fun. Something that makes our heart sing. This is it.

To do this thing right we need to raise $24,000. Last week we launched a Kickstarter campaign and 250 backers have helped us raise over $9300 in 9 days. We still need to raise $14,612 and we have 17 days to do it. Over on our campaign page, I go into specific detail about how we want to spend the money we’re raising. Please support our campaign. I know that “It’s gonna be cool” isn’t always enough of a reason but hear me out: it is gonna be cool and we know what we’re about. Julia is an award winning editor (the Aurealis twice, the Ditmar, the Hugo – also twice, and the Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award) which they hate me mentioning almost as much as I hate when they mention that I’m a prolific Hugo-nominated artist who works in every medium available.

Our Assistant Editor, Ashley, is a writer who studied biochemistry so they could figure out how to translate the world of science and medicine into something a little less cryptic. Our Logistics Wizard, Lis, is the Fiction Editor at Wizards in Space Magazine and she works at the post office, which I happen to think is one of the coolest things ever. We’re gonna do a heist, except it’s a magazine. And everybody gets paid and nobody gets robbed and some very, very good art gets made. We’ve got a schedule and we’ve made a plan and if we need to deviate we will let you know.

We’ve created a range of backing rewards for a wide range of budgets: stickers, enamel pin, pet pictures, jewelry, hand bound zines, and much, much more. And you can definitely give a subscription of Mermaids Monthly as a gift – if you buy two, we’ll send you a card you can give! Back our campaign at any level and you’ll receive that bonus issue once the campaign closes on December 12th.

So that’s it – that’s the shell. Thanks for reading, please back our Kickstarter campaign, and if you’d like to keep current follow us over on Twitter at @MermaidsMonthly.

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Meg Frank is a Hugo-nominated artist based in New York. In the before times they traveled a lot and spent a lot of time putting makeup on people at conventions. Currently they are keeping themselves busy with art school, two cats, and the Kickstarter campaign referenced above.