This blog is for planning the establishment of a new speculative fiction magazine to be called Elegant Lich. We intend to publish "refined fantasy for a more civilized age." We are developing our plan publicly and we invite you to follow along and comment using Mastodon. We welcome your participation and we hope you'll join us on this journey! We're having fun and we hope you do too!
Last night, I finished updating my template for the cover and started trying to make an epub. I'm not perfectly satisfied yet, but I made a good start.
The updated cover template has a border with runes, an updated wordmark, and a region for the contents. I updated the cover for my test Issue 0 Q3 2026 if you want to see what it looks like.
I tried using Libreoffice for making an epub. I copied-and-pasted the webpages for the editorial and stories into a document, stuck in a section for biographies, put the cover image up front, and added images for tailpieces at the section breaks. (I found a cute series of woodcuts by Hermann Paul of demonic faces that are in the public domain and go along with our style.)
Libreoffice has a tool to export as epub. I hadn't used it before, but it didn't seem very complicated. I played around with the settings and formatting a bit to get things to show up the way I wanted.
The results are not very pretty. I also couldn't figure out how to add a table of contents or to get the tailpieces to appear centered. I've looked at some other epubs that do have those features, so it may just be a limitation of the tool.
We've been going back and forth between whether to start up Elegant Lich as a hobby or try to make it an actual business. Having it be a hobby means paying for it out of our own pockets (and whatever tips and donations we might receive). To make it a business, we explored incorporating as an LLC and running a kickstarter to be able to hire an artist, pay SFWA pro rates, purchase pro hosting, offer printed copies, etc, etc.
After weighing the pros and cons, we've decided to start Elegant Lich as a hobby. This means, We'll do the cover art ourselves and we'll pay less than pro rates. But it also means way less "business-y" work and more fun stuff.
As we've made the decision, we've started setting up the actual Elegant Lich website. We hope to start accepting manuscripts on Oct 1, 2026.
We still have a lot of decisions to make, so we'll continue to blog about our planning here. And we welcome your feedback and suggestions.
The young Lady Sparks returned to the stable after her morning ride with her escort. The stable door was standing open and the stable hand nowhere to be seen. She swung down from the saddle and stuck her head in to look around. He was asleep in a pile of hay near the door.
"That slug! That #sloth!" she muttered. "There he lays, that worthless thing."
"Huh?" said the guardsman. "Again!?"
She tied up the horse outside, hung up the tack and blanket, and began to rub down the horse as he stood, steaming in the early morning sun.
The stable hand cautiously opened an eye and exchanged a wink with the guardsman. They both knew how much she loved to do this part herself, but that she never would if someone was there to receive the horse. So they had made this arrangement to give her the excuse to do it herself.
The stable hand closed his eye and took care not to move.
"Well," said the Captain. "I guess it's time to go talk to the King." He opened his desk drawer, pulled out a bottle, and tucked it into his cloak.
"The King?" asked the Hero.
The Captain motioned and led the Hero across town.
"Isn't the castle that way?" the Hero asked.
"This way is shorter," the Captain said, leading him into a warren of narrow alleyways.
They eventually arrived in a dark space among the back side of buildings where the alleyways converged.
Pallets and crates were stacked up among garbage cans and piles of trash. Amongst them, a shadowy, unshaven figure reclined. He wore a boot on his head.
The figure emitted a wracking cough, then spoke in a booming voice. "Who soever approacheth the King?"
I've been having fun with blog.sh and have wondered if we could use it for the Elegant Lich publication itself. I think if we create content types for EDITORIAL, STORY and ISSUE, we can post an editorial, multiple stories, and then add an issue that includes a cover graphic, with links to them that we can pin to the top of the front page. I thought I would try it out here to see how well it works.
Update: Ah. It turns out that setting the "type" does not generate a top menu with that content type. I wondered if that was the case. I'll need to think about this a bit more.
Update 2: I tried hacking on the code to add in the content types I want. I've only touched one line of code so far. Maybe more is required.
Update 3: I modified several sections of the build_blog.rb file and needed to add a bit to en.yml but I still haven't gotten it working. I think I'm close, but that's enough for tonight.
Update 4: I switched from content types to using tags. This seems to work pretty well, and I've set up Issue 0 Q3 2026 as a test example. See what you think!
Note: This is a first draft of the submissions process.
Submissions are currently closed.
Submissions will open for a two-week period to publish on a quarterly basis. (Jan -> Mar, Apr -> Jun, Jul -> Sep, Oct -> Dec).
If you have a completed manuscript you would like to submit, please format your document using the Shunn Manuscript Format. We personally prefer the Classic more than Modern format, but either is fine.
Save your document as an ODF, DOCX, or RTF file.
Email a brief cover letter with your document as an attachment to submissions@elegantlich.com. Your cover letter should include the genre and title of your manuscript, the word count, and a brief biography of the author.
We will reply to acknowledge receipt of your manuscript and again when we have made our selections for the current issue. We aim to review manuscripts within two weeks.
Note: This email address has not been turned on yet.
Before we can start soliciting manuscripts, we need to write our guidelines. We've already nattered on just a bit about what we might we looking for. This post is about what goes in the guidelines more generally.
We plan to spend some time looking over other magazine's guidelines, to get a better idea of what they cover. And, of course, we've looked over many, many guidelines over the years, in the course of submitting our own stories, so we've got some idea. But still.
Here's a first pass as to what we think a set of guidelines needs to cover:
Each of these posts gets tooted to the Elegant Lich mastodon feed. That is the place to comment on these posts, and that is why we're doing our planning out in public. We're pretty sure our potential contributors (and potential readers!) have both strong feelings and good ideas, and we very much want to hear them all.
So, do please comment on these posts when you have a good idea (or even a mediocre one), and especially when you see a place where you think we're doing something wrong, or even just less well than we might.
We started with the title of our magazine; just the title did not make it clear what sort of stories we might want to publish.
There are some hints there. If liches are involved, there probably needs to be magic or sorcery or wizardry. (But actual liches are certainly not required!) If elegance is involved, well something in the story ought to be elegant. (Check this blog in the future for perhaps an extensive discussion of what elegant means to us in this context, but expect that sophstication, high culture and the like might be included.)
Most important, of course, the story should be something we want to read, and that we think other people will want to read.
As we were talking about it, one of us mentioned something that we thought would be cool: epic stories. As a possible example, Twenty Epics, edited by David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi. It was explicitly an anthology of "epic" stories, none of them over 10k words. (We don't actually own a copy. One of us was following its creation, blogged about by the various people involved in the early 2000s, and there was a single copy at one booth at probably the 2004 WorldCon in Boston, but there weren't any copies for sale, and we never ended up getting one.)
When we began Elegant Lich, we knew we wanted — in the long run — to hire an artist to develop a graphic identity for our publication. But to do that, it will require money and time. So, for the moment, I thought I would look for a public-domain image that we could use to get started.
I went to Wikimedia Commons and started off by looking for medieval images of death — I was originally thinking of one of those dancing skeletons. But then I saw — or was reminded of — the Danse Macabre and so I searched for that. And a few images down, I saw La Danse Macabre by Hermann Paul. I knew I had found what I was looking for.
Earlier today I read a funny toot about the word "eigentlich," which is just German for "actually." But my brother and I both thought it looked like "Elegant Lich," which we agreed would be a marvelous name for a fantasy magazine.
And then we thought, "Hey! We could publish and edit a webzine with that name!"
And then we thought, "You know, if we're going to do this, there's a lot of work to do, besides just buying a domain name. But one way to start would be to create a blog where we sort out what we're going to do.
Our initial thoughts are a quarterly fantasy magazine with a reasonably short reading period, so we can read the slush, buy the stories, edit them, and then have some time to publish the magazine.
But don't send us anything yet. We don't even know what we're looking for yet.
Maybe we should have some elegant tag line to add at the end of posts? So much to do.
