# Hearth Stories (3) / Astral (1)

This is in regard to my previous post about starting a sci-fi
and fantasy magazine...[1][2]

I have lagged in announcing this here, but the first issue of my
science-fiction/fantasy slice of life magazine was released on
December 21st. Which was quite a relief. I stupidly updated one
of the tools I use to produce the final ebooks and it broke. Or
I thought it did. It turns out the problem was with some shared
library that Calibre uses (Calibre is called under the hood of
the tool that I use). The problem seems to exist within the
versions available in debian for me... In any case it broke the
generation of azw3 files. Epub generated fine, so I used a web
converter to go from epub to azw3. It seems to have worked ok.

I had a problem with a php script that would track download
counts (but no data about anything other than `$count++` for
the file version. I fixed it a week or so in when I realized it
was not working. So I lost some early numbers. It has been
downloaded around 60 times as of this writing. I also had a web
based epub reader running on the site (javascript :-/). I got
an e-mail from one of the authors today that they and some
friends had errors and buggy experience using the reader. It
worked fine on all devices I tried it on. However, it was a good
excuse to ditch it from the site. After all: I wanted to make
books not blog posts for people to market around. So that it
what I did. Technically the reader is still there, but I no
longer link to it.

If you are interested in checking it out there are ten stories
ranging in topic but loosely in the slice of life speculative
fiction space. I think there are some great stories in it. It
is free to download here:

https://hearthstories.org/issues/1.html

Just pick your format and go :-D If you encounter any issues
please reach out and let me know (sloum AT rawtext.club)... or
just to say you checked it out and like/disliked it.


## Astral

While I was riding high on the fun parts of creating 
Hearth Stories I decided to do a second magazine with a very
different vibe and focus: "Astral: Alien Fiction". It has a
focus on stories told from or deeply rooted in alient
perspectives. For the purposes of the magazine alien means
non-human and non-humanoid. Yoda is not alien enough. However,
a bacteria or a tree or bird would potentially be. So would a
lot of alien creatures from the H. P. Lovecraft mythos and all
kinds of other cool stuff.

I start taking submissions for this magazine on the 7th (Sunday)
of January. It will be released on the equinoxes (where Hearth
Stories releases on the solstices).

You can check out the bare bones page here:

https://astral-af.org


## Other

The holidays were super busy. Immediately following xmas we went
on a trip to Death Valley National Park. It was awesome and we
had a great time. We stayed in a motel in the park rather than
camp this time. As such, I had time at night when my partner and
child were both asleep. So I coded up a stack based vm. I wrote
the assembler when I got home. Now I am done enough and super
tired of looking at the codebase (which is a mess). So I am glad
to be moving back to magazine stuff. Just before the holidays I
wrote a php-based blogging system/cms. Super bare bones, with
markdown as a first class citizen. I have not started using it
yet as I dont really blog, but often intend to. So I may start
using that. I am also wanting to get back to working on getting
better at palying the concertina.

It snowed yesterday, but is already mostly melted. I like winter
and am looking forward to more snow.

____________________

 1. gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~sloum/phlog/hearthstories.txt
 2. gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~sloum/phlog/hearthstories2.txt