Sam Asher and The Cosmic Background Kickstarter

By Angelique Fawns

Sam Asher writes strange, beautiful, and slightly disturbing prose. (I bought his collection of short stories Really, Shockingly Bad Things at the mass autograph session at World Fantasy Con 2024.) He also runs an e-zine called The Cosmic Background where he bought a story of mine when the magazine first launched, called “The Sentient Sea of Sargassum.”

You can read it here: https://www.thecosmicbackground.com/stories/angelique-fawns-the-sentient-sea-of-sargassum

This is my second time interviewing Asher, and I thought it would be nice to touch base again as he is running a kickstarter. 

Check it out here!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thecosmicbackground/the-cosmic-background-year-two/rewards

AF:  You’ve been buying and featuring stories for almost two years now. What kind of stories have you purchased?

SA: Fantastic ones. Our motto is typically that if it’s too weird for somewhere else, we’ll probably like it. Chris Rowe’s story, The Terrapin King is a great example. We also love work that is unabashedly feminist, queer, or anti-capitalist: The Smell of Afterbirth by Vanessa Jae, or Hearts and Minds by the gloriously transcendent Cynthia Gómez. 

AF: What do you see too much of?

SA: Honestly, we see way too many mermaids. I love mermaids as much as the next guy, but we’re gonna publish (at most!) one mermaid story a year, so we don’t become the weird mermaid stories magazine. 

AF: What is your number one piece of advice for writing hoping to sell to you?

SA: Our acceptance rate is currently hovering at around 0.4%, but that doesn’t take into account the amount of people we reject for completely ignoring extremely plainly-worded guidelines. You can up your odds significantly by paying attention. 

The other thing is that flash fiction is extremely difficult to write – you can’t go about writing flash the same way you would a regular short story. We see a lot of work with 800 or so great words, followed by a rushed 200 word denouement which betrays all the good work that went into the 800 words beforehand. You need to approach flash aware of the room you’re working with. Also, if your story makes me cry, I’ll definitely buy it.

AF: What have you learned about short story publishing since you launched The Cosmic Background?

SA:  The amount of logistical work, spreadsheeting, and time-management that go into running a magazine, even with a relatively small staff of 5, is bonkers. I spend probably 20% of my time on the magazine reading and responding to submissions, and the other 80% on logistics.  

AF: Is there anything you wished you’d done differently?

SA: Eighty or ninety different things, yes. I wish I’d launched with Moksha to begin with, I wish I’d had a better system for record keeping, I wish I’d registered as a non-profit before launch to assist with funding. I could go on for days. It’s a steep learning curve, and two years in I’m only just about getting the hang of it. I once lost the rights to a fantastic story from a writer I love and respect because I completely ballsed-up the administrative end of things, and that decision will probably haunt me until the day I die (or until I can convince them to sell me something else). 

AF: What’s in the future for The Cosmic Background?

SA: Hopefully, a great deal more flash fiction, created by humans, accompanied by art created by humans. We’re also putting plans together for audio fiction, and a compendium of the greatest hits from our first two years. All that depends on things like our Kickstarter, however. 

AF: I noticed you’re open for subs right now! How long will the window be open for? How many subs do you tend to get?

SA: We’re typically open indefinitely, although we occasionally have demographic limits – we were recently only open to writers of Palestinian heritage, as an example. I don’t want to miss out on the greatest piece of flash fiction ever because my magazine happened to be closed. Send us what you’ve got.