DIRTY BIRDS PRESS

After just a few hiccups in production, UNDERCITIES has safely arrived at our editor’s house! These books are absolutely beautiful and next steps will be to start packing up Kickstarter rewards, so sit tight!

Because it has been asked a few times: We will have extra copies for sale after fulfillment is complete. We were ordering extras for our contributors and to use in approaching indie booksellers regardless, but we definitely ordered at a higher quantity than people purchased through the Kickstarter. Notice of that sale will go up in a few weeks.

The UNDERCITIES Kickstarter is drawing to a close! We’re currently gearing up to send the final copy off for (gold-foil!) printing, which means that the end is finally in sight. Since we’re so close to being able to call UNDERCITIES done, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on the process as a whole and the kind of journey it’s been for us at Dirty Birds Press.

UNDERCITIES is truly a labor of love. For the past five months, our team of two editors and one editor/designer have been working nonstop to bring UNDERCITIES to life and to make it as great as it can possibly be. We’ve spent long hours revising, editing, and working closely with our authors to get at the heart of the stories they want to tell and the experiences they want to share—and now we’re finally ready to share those stories with everyone else.

We can’t begin to explain how much of an incredible—and, in the spirit of honesty, challenging—learning experience UNDERCITIES has been. From coordinating and organizing an 11-contributor project to launching and promoting our first ever Kickstarter, each phase of the project has been eye-opening. It’s helped us (and hopefully everyone involved, too!) learn how to be better as editors, as consumers of media, and as creators in our own right. The lessons we at DBP have learned with UNDERCITIES are lessons we’ll carry with us into every project we create in the future, and we’re infinitely grateful for this experience and for the people who have made it possible. That includes everyone who supported us when UNDERCITIES was just taking shape as a concept, all of our contributors, everyone who promoted us at every step of the way, and everyone who supported our Kickstarter. From the bottom of our collective heart: Thank you.

Soon UNDERCITIES will be printed and on its way to our lovely backers and supporters. And while UNDERCITIES as a project will be over, we’ll forever be grateful for all of the support we’ve received and the things we’ve learned along the way.

Sincerely,

Femi Managing Editor

Caroline Editor/Designer

For Feritia, magical heritage is a hasty whisper on the wind, a tug on her heart that pulls her in directions she does not yet know. For Hyacin, magical heritage is an expectant and oppressive force, one that stunts her ability to work towards her own end. There are different roads that lead home.

When Pryce was twelve their stepmother began showing them how she practiced Wicca. She was a lone witch, never part of a coven, but she always seemed to unfurl around people who, like her, had the desert sitting in their bones. Much of it she kept to herself, largely because it was incredibly personal, but she let them read all her books on inner power and psychics and mediation, taught them the basics of charms and spells and respect for the earth. They were enamored. They spent years participating in a myriad of religions and traditions, but they always came back to the quiet singing that resounded a harmony between the desert and their stepmother’s home. Though Wicca’s cissexism and homophobia would drive them quickly into the arms of a messy neo-pagan mosaic, their altar always looked remarkably like the one they grew up with.

Now when they write about magic, it’s to Nevada’s tune of ninety-eight degree summer days with the smell of wildfire in the air, to the crisp winter quiet of fresh one-inch snowfall broken only by quails’ early-morning pattering, and to the thrashing of petulant dust-devils against a steady chain-link fence.

Pryce can be found on Twitter at @lithropanic.

Claire Sturham, a college student by day and a pizza delivery driver by night, is unfailingly, unflinchingly normal. A chance pizza delivery to a witch one night marks a turning point in her life. This one coincidence sets in motion a chain of events that will cause Claire to examine her relationships, motivations, and worldview in an entirely different light. And if the witch herself is an enigma hidden behind a cute smile? Maybe that isn't much of a problem at all.

At the tender age of nine years old, Roan discovered storytelling, humankind’s most time-avowed method of self-reflection. Through this relationship with stories, she began to explore her identity, especially the queer facets therein. 

Writing and storytelling have helped her discover herself as a queer person, a bigender person, and a young adult. She intends to keep writing for audiences the world over—but if there’s a purpose she can cite as to why she is writing, and why she will never stop, it’s that she wants to write the same sorts of transformative stories that helped her come to terms with who she is. She wants to help people who haven’t had her experiences to find the same fulfilling relationship with writing that has taught her how to survive and thrive as her own person. And she wants to write stories that reflect the diversity of the world, because people like her deserve to see themselves in places other than “LGBTQ+” or “Diversity” bookshelves in libraries. People like her deserve to have kickass weapons and cool cars and prophecies. They deserve to be witches. They deserve to be gods. And they deserve to have happily-ever-afters.

Roan can be found on Twitter at @gayprotagonist.

Arik Weber, the youngest son in a long line of strict and brutal magic users known as the day-trainers--one of two warring families in modern day Chicago--is tired of being nothing but a means to an end. He was raised to collect trust like others collect rare coins, to do whatever it takes for the betterment of the family. Whatever the family needs, Arik has no choice but to give. 

Enter Talbot, a shadow-weaver and the first son of the Weber family’s rivals, the Fischers. To Arik, Talbot is almost a myth, existing corners of the city that Arik has never been able to find. Talbot has magic so powerful it makes Arik’s skin crawl. Arik knows Talbot is dangerous, but he can also see freedom in Talbot's cold stare. 

This isn't a tale of fated lovers--it's a tale of fated rivals. Two men fighting for pride and profit in their family's war, discovering too late that there's a heavy price to pay when picking a side. 

Jordan is a writer in her twenties who graduated from college with a slew of degrees all centered around her love of storytelling. She enjoys sarcastic conversation, well-characterized women, and writing about characters who would not be out of place if they were ever found in a jail cell. As a queer woman who was born and raised in a conservative midwest suburb with churches littering every street corner and nuns still teaching some of her high school classes, diversity and representation were hard to find. Disappointed with the lack of diversity in her community, Jordan turned to literature. She decided to make it her goal to only create stories and main characters that filled this void. When she’s not writing, Jordan spends far too much time on Twitter, reads questionably-worded fan fiction, and posts excessive amounts of pictures of her two ridiculous dogs.

Jordan can be found on Twitter at @jordwriteswords.

Check out a couple of our last extras! The tier offering our enamel pins is unfortunately all sold out, but our bookmarks will be included with each of our printed extra tiers. All illustrated by cloven!

Hi! We haven’t gotten together a big announcement post yet, but this as good a time as any to let everyone know that we are planning our next project! It will be an illustration anthology, and we’ll be opening applications in the next few weeks. All our editors will just need a little break after the UNDERCITIES Kickstarter wraps up.

Aaron Hale is haunted by the living and the dead alike. A wealthy scion in a world of secret superheroes and hidden arcane powers, he guards the city of Queensbrooke by night as the ominous hero Raven, a figure of solitude and isolation. But when an anonymous young boy turns up dead wearing a hero's costume, the Raven must reach out to the sidekick he once drove away, while still maintaining the secret he's kept from that sidekick for years. 

Laura is a thirty-something cultural anthropologist seeking stories in unexpected places. She hasn’t been writing her entire life, per se, but close enough, thanks to early forays into fanfiction and the like. She loves fantasy and science fiction, horror, comics, and video games, and the queering thereof. She tries to build literary worlds where “white” and “straight” are not default, and she will happily chat your ear off about the diversity of cultural norms and the human experience. Laura writes mainly about things like superheroes, ghosts and monsters, complicated character relationships, life and death, and other similar topics, and loves trying to turn genres on their heads. Laura was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up in North and South Carolina. She graduated from North Carolina State University, and currently lives in North Carolina with her wife Emily, their three cats, and a rotating variety of small animals. She enjoys Korean food, anything strawberry-flavored, tragic superhero sidekicks, drawing and painting, horror movies, and Overwatch. She has met more astronauts than she can count, and once provided the full singing soundtrack for a children’s instructive video about trains. Maybe don’t ask her about that last one.

Laura can be found on Twitter at @laurajmoody.

In a world where getting blood is as easy as delivery from hospitals, vampire Rita Yang does not have much to worry about--except, of course, the growing existential dread of watching her partner and her adopted son grow older without her. In need of a change, she moves into a spare closet in a flat she now shares with Lei, whose mind is not entirely contained in their body and who connects to the world through an android. As Rita and Lei's relationship develops, the two begin to figure out how to live when the world is moving at a different pace than their own. 

Xian Mao was born in Chicago and grew up in Salt Lake City. Their parents were Chinese immigrants from Beijing, and most of their mother’s family now lives in Xi’an. As a queer non-binary Chinese American, Xian has not found many stories they could relate to. Silk Moth, their first published work, explores the incorporation of Chinese folklore within the larger vampire mythos and examines how race affects the portrayal of a classical monster. Xian’s writing also focuses on issues of interpersonal and familial connection, and is written with consideration of the politics in confronting one’s family as a queer person of color and being pulled between racism on one end and homophobia/transphobia on the other. As someone on the asexual spectrum, Xian also enjoys writing relationships that focus on nonsexual forms of intimacy. 

Xian is currently finishing their last year of college in Connecticut, and plans to pursue a biomedical career. They hope to continue writing stories that they wished they had read when they were younger.

Xian can be found on WordPress at bluecatwrites.wordpress.com.

In the city of Brasília, a pyramid-shaped temple offers a very peculiar opportunity: the chance to find the answer to your most important question through a bizarre hallucinogenic potion. Elias is a tenacious young man who seeks out the temple to discover what happened to his mother, who disappeared after being arrested by the dictatorship. There he meets four others: Mariza, a middle-aged housewife who wants to know if her husband is cheating on her; Karol, who was expelled after someone in her class snitched on her for illegally improving her grades; Teófilo, a spineless deputy seeking spiritual guidance to justify his upcoming corruption; and Jean, Elias’ ambitious co-worker and ex-boyfriend. This is the story of the one hour they spend together, and the magic therein.

Dante is a Brazilian illustrator, sequential artist, and occasional writer who never lived in Brasília (but stole a girlfriend from there once). Dante has a degree in fashion design that was never used, and shares a bedroom with said girlfriend in the extreme south of Brazil. Besides working with art, Dante is a general enthusiast of Latin American history and folklore, and has a wealth of extensive telenovela trivia.

Previous publications include Dates Anthology, The Dream Cluster, La Raza: Unidos y Fuertes, and a number of other forthcoming comic anthologies.

Dante can be found on Twitter at @menellaos.

Introducing the first of the art features of this week! 

cloven is an illustrator, graphic designer, and comic artist. She’s a frequent contributor to Shousetsu Bang*Bang and has been a part of a number of illustration anthologies, including Ladies of Literature volume 2 and Purity. She will be publishing her first paid comics this year.

cloven will be contributing art for UNDERCITIES, including three 8.5x11 prints, previewed here! More to come this week, so watch this space.

UNDERCITIES, an urban fantasy short story anthology featuring stories about and by LGBTQ+ people and people of color, at the halfway point in its Kickstarter campaign—and already we're fully funded! It's been a busy two weeks of editing, compiling, and adjusting our goals, and we'd love to share our progress with you.

UNDERCITIES in review:

We're honored to have been selected as one of Kickstarter's Projects We Love, and also to have been chosen for Project of the Day!

Four of UNDERCITIES' stretch goals have been unlocked! This means that not only will all backers will receive a foil-printed hardback over of UNDERCITIES complete with a custom-printed bookplate, but also that we can keep increasing pay for our contributing authors! We're excited to be able to give our authors the recognition—and the payment—they deserve, and hope to be able to give back more as our Kickstarter campaign continues and we unlock more stretch goals!

We've been updating our Tumblr regularly with information about our contributing authors. Check out our author features tag to learn more!

Editing isn't the only thing we've been working on! Take a look at our past posts for our mission statement, recommendations for other diverse creators and projects, and other updates from the Dirty Birds Press nest.

We've made some really exciting progress, but we're not done just yet! Keep an eye on this space during this week for a sneak peek at UNDERCITIES' artwork, and check in with us next week for the cover reveal!

After receiving a hand-delivered invitation to host a booth at The-Carnival-That-Comes-After (an otherworldly gathering of supernatural beings that take over St. Thomas' Carnival Village after dark) chocolatier Talia Bachaan is worried that she'll be just another human lost amidst the chaos of the festival. When a golden-eyed selkie named Samira decides to take Talia underneath her metaphorical wing after saving her from an embarrassing fright, Talia doesn't even imagine saying no to the help. 

Zina Hutton is a first year Masters student of Literature at Florida International University (FIU). She currently works as a freelance editor and writer with publication credits in Fireside Fiction, The Mary Sue, ComicsAlliance and Women Write About Comics. 

Much of her writing centers on the need for the increased visibility of women of color in fiction, raising awareness of the media’s lack of meaningful diversity. In her fiction, she works at giving representation to marginalized people that lack it, centering queer characters of color in narratives and genres that they are largely held at a distance. “The Carnival That Comes After” draws from and reinterprets mythology across the Caribbean, especially her home island of St. Thomas. The setting, one rarely seen in fiction outside of historical works or an exotic stop in a piece of contemporary fiction, was chosen as as a way to remind people that Urban Fantasy as a genre should be more aware of the fact that there are other cities aside from New York and New Orleans and more to the supernatural than werewolves and French vampires.

Zina can be found on Twitter at @stichomancery.