RFM will begin publishing again on January 21st at 11:00 a.m. US EST with the short story “Rowan” by Irish writer Naomi Elster. Naomi’s bio reads:
“Naomi Elster’s writing has been published and performed almost 30 times, including in Imprint, Crannóg, and Meniscus, and at the Smock Alley Theatre. She has campaigned for reproductive justice and pay equality. She has a PhD in cancer and leads the research department of a medical charity. Originally from Laois, in the Irish midlands, she now lives in London. “
This evening I established a GoFundMe account for RFM. Check it out some time. Within the near future, I will be exploring other avenues for people who wish to support RFM’s mission of supplying fiction and poetry celebrating the beauty and drama of rural life around the world, a retreat where people can go when the post modernist world becomes overwhelming.
I try to keep RFM apolitical. However, regardless of anyone’s political leanings, I think most people would agree that troubling times likely lie ahead.
Troubled people often seek relief from their worries by escaping mentally to a better, more peaceful world. Therefore, I believe that RFM will become not only more popular but also more important to people psychologically.
Accordingly, you may gradually see some minor or subtle changes to RFM. The intent of these changes will be to offer people an avenue to a better, although fictional, world.
This might affect what I accept in a slight way, but as always in the past, I will be open to all genres and topics so long as they meet the submission guidelines. The only statement I can make at this point (this is just a vague, raw, undeveloped concept) is that RFM might lean a bit more towards publishing stories about the basics of human existence that unite us worldwide.
What basics do I mean? I mean whatever you see as basic or elemental to human nature. If you’re lost as where to start, I recommend checking out Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or some other psychological or sociological principles. Those could be starting points, but what really interests me is your ideas based on your observations of humanity. After all, isn’t that where all great literature starts?
I still have no hard date for when RFM will be wide open to submissions, but I may gradually publish more and more of what has already been submitted (I have a tremendous backlog).
I intend to increase my YouTube visitation (some of which will hopefully spill over into the website) by conducting and posting interviews and podcasts. Today, I have been exploring setting up a podcast for RFM.
Podcasts have a couple of advantages for someone experimenting with increasing his YouTube visitation. First, they can be audio only, which will alleviate a lot of worries about personal appearance that some interviewees may have. Second, they should be at least a little easier to produce than a video, because there is no need to worry about visuals such as appearance, background, lighting, etc.
I am also developing a different strategy from that I used previously with The Chamber and RFM. A quick bit of research shows that while Google Search has the highest visitation of any website, YouTube has the second. Ergo, instead of primarily attracting people to the website and then provide YouTube videos as a sort of sideshow, why not use videos and podcasts on YouTube to attract people to the website? Of course, the website will draw its own following, but this might generate more visitation than I previously had (granted, I did not take advantage of YouTube’s full capabilities). I am thinking most of the videos and podcasts will consist of interviews. These interviews will be considerably more in depth than the simple written ones I did in The Chamber. There are a few more things I am taking into consideration as I develop this new strategy, but these are the primary considerations for now.
At this point, I am probably going to start by using Audacity software, not only because it has a decent basic plan for free, but also because the files are mp3 and mp4 and so can be used almost anywhere, such as on YouTube and it can be used (with the download of Linux) on a chromebook, which is what I use for website building. Unfortunately, it can only be used on a desktop, but I can record videos on my phone or audio on another device and download them to Audacity.
If you have any suggestions, recommendations, cautions, or warnings you think I should heed, please provide them in the comments.
I may be bringing RFM back to life. Unfortunately, I had to close it down suddenly because…life intrudes. I was not making any profits anyway and it is a serious time commitment. Time was an increasingly hard commodity to come by at that time.
Now I am contemplating bringing RFM back. I am not ready to take submissions but stay in touch. When it is ready, I will be announcing it everywhere. It may be a little while, but I will be making preparations a few at a time. I have serious things going on in my life still, but I do miss publishing. It suits an aspect of my character I never knew I had and it was lots of fun reading all your submissions. I miss the publisher’s life greatly.
