If you haven't yet seen a copy of Paradox, you should seek one out. Published twice annually, it is a polished, professional, literate effort with lovely covers and excellent design aesthetic. One of the few magazine markets for historical short fiction and the only one solely dedicated to the genre, it features work by both professionals and newcomers: straight-up historicals, alternate history pieces, speculative historical fiction, reviews, interviews with writers of historical fiction. . . in short, it's a nice little package, and one of the few places today you're likely to find a historical swashbuckler.

Recently the editor and publisher of Paradox, Chris Cevasco, was kind enough to respond to a number of questions about the magazine. To read what he had to say, look below. Here's the online home of Paradox.

Howard Andrew Jones

I guess my primary motivation in creating Paradox was a perception that there was a gap in the short fiction market that needed to be filled. As a writer, although I do write some science fiction and high fantasy, I tend mainly to write stories that are very steeped in history—historical fantasy and horror, Arthuriana, and pure historical fiction with no speculative elements. The later category of writing was always the hardest for me to find a market for, and often even my historical fantasy work would come back with a rejection slip indicating that the story was just a little too heavy on the history for the magazine's target audience. I figured that if I was experiencing this problem, other writers must be as well, and that's when I first started thinking about creating a magazine that would cater to those writers.

And I hoped it would also cater to a readership that enjoyed reading historical works. Historical novels abound and there's always one or two of them floating around on the bestseller lists. But there were no print magazines I was aware of dedicated to short historical fiction in either its mainstream or genre forms. Some excellent history-related webzines existed—Would That It Were, for example, which publishes historical science fiction stories set in or with ties to the 19th or early 20th century. In print, the Historical Novel Society was publishing Solander, a biannual magazine for historical fiction enthusiast with interviews, articles, and one short piece of historical fiction per issue. And of course, magazines such as F&SF, Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, etc. occasionally include alternate history, historical fantasy, or time travel tales. But there was no print magazine to which fans of these types of stories could turn for a regularly occurring fix—at least not in the English language. Now there is.

I'm a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft, and what often tends to get glossed over is how steeped in history many of his best stories really are—for example, stories like "The Rats in the Walls" which draws on Roman and Medieval British history as well as Far Eastern mythology. Many of Lovecraft's stories are also chock full of references to Native American history/mythology, the social and economic history of New England (i.e., the history of that part of the country even before Lovecraft's time), architectural and art history, natural history, etc. These references and plot elements blend seamlessly with the fantastic elements of Lovecraft's imagination to create a sense of verisimilitude that heightens the terror in his stories. If he were still alive and writing today, I'd love to publish some of his work.

Bernard Cornwell's one of my favorite historical fiction novelists today, and I'd love to publish one of his stories, but alas, as he mentioned when I recently interviewed him for Paradox, he hates writing short fiction.

I get a whole lot of stories in which characters from classical mythology—usually gods and goddesses—are transplanted into modern society, and unfortunately, those rarely grab me. First, because it's been done so many times before, but mostly because those tales rarely focus on history or even mythology as something that is integral to the plot; often the writer has a few references to the time and place from which the character originally hails, and then it's off to downtown 21st-century Chicago or London without ever looking back again. A variation on this, which I also get a lot of, is the classic ghost story—but just because the ghost may have originally lived in a different historical time period doesn't mean the story is historical fiction...

I also get a good number of time-travel stories, where in the end, the protagonist realizes that he/she has managed to cause the very historical events he/she's gone back in time to prevent. This has been done to death, and unless there's some really original new twist, I'm not going to be interested in publishing it.

Surprisingly, I don't get nearly enough alternate history tales sent to me. I think this might be because writing that sort of tale is actually very labor intensive if it's done right. The writer not only has to understand the historical period in which the point of divergence takes place, but he or she has to research any number of political, religious, and social trends that took place in the decades or centuries following the point of divergence in the real timeline so as to come up with plausible ways in which the divergence event impacted those trends in the alternate timeline. Then, on top of that, you need to have a good story to tell—and that means something beyond simply showing the reader the divergence.

The best thing is probably getting to spend my time immersed in a creative process that focuses on history and writing—two areas that have long been near and dear to my heart—and having the satisfaction of seeing a finished product with each new issue of the magazine.

Well, to put it bluntly, money. That's always the biggest underlying obstacle. And that takes many forms—having to build a subscriber and distribution base, performing an ongoing cost/benefit analysis of advertising and marketing, soliciting advertisers to run ads in Paradox (which is ultimately the way any magazine stays afloat), keeping accounting records, dealing with extra tax-return forms, etc. I hate dealing with money and finances, and I wish I didn't have to think about those sorts of things at all, but unfortunately, it’s a reality that has to be dealt with.

I certainly admire those pulp magazines for being trail blazers of their time, but when I was coming up with a design image and layout ideas for Paradox, I wanted to create something that had a look and feel all its own. So I strive for a finished product that is accessible to the reader and meets their expectations but which also bucks certain conventions and doesn't really look like anything else out there. I want people to remember each issue not only for the fiction and other content but for the way the magazine looks, so I spend a lot of time on layout and artwork.

It's a real hodgepodge. I have a regular day-job from 9 to 5, so the magazine is like a second job that begins each night when I get home and spills over into the weekends. It's sometimes hard to find time to sleep. Generally, during the two months leading up to the publication of each issue, I have to focus on the magazine exclusively in my time off from work, but the rest of the time, the only Paradox work I do is handling e-mail correspondence received through the Paradox website and reading and responding to submissions to keep up with the slush pile—something I can mostly do on the train as I commute to work each day (I've got about an hour train ride in each direction, which is ideal for reading the slush).

Juggling the magazine and my day-job with my writing career is quite a balancing act, but I manage it somehow. Some of my stories have recently been published or are forthcoming in The Leading Edge, The Horror Express, and Lovecraft's Weird Mysteries, among others.

I've also recently been asked to be a judge for the historical/western/other category of this year's SouthWest Writers Contest, and I'm really looking forward to that. More about the SouthWest Writers organization and the contest can be found at http://www.southwestwriters.org.

Well, to a certain extent I suppose it's true, and I certainly considered that when I created Paradox. But I can't let myself get too distracted by it. And fortunately there are still plenty of people out there who enjoy the written word, and I don't think that will ever be entirely supplanted by technological trends. Also, I think it's important that the magazine market endures. The works that originally appeared in the pulps of the early 20th century continue to be read and inspire a new generation of writers today. I'd like to think that much of the work being printed now will inspire future generations. Speaking of the first pulps, from the time of their first appearance, society has seen the advent of television and motion pictures, and neither of those phenomena meant the death knell for literary magazines. I can't imagine video games will do it either.

Unfortunately I don't have nearly as much time as I'd like to read anything these days—books, magazines, etc.—given my busy schedule and the fact that I have to read all of the submissions coming in. But I do try to read some magazines. I enjoy the various Lovecraftian magazines that continue to be published. And I try to read as much as I can from F&SF, Weird Tales, and Realms of Fantasy, which always include some great short fiction. I also like seeking out old copies of pulps like Weird Tales or Astounding Stories from the 1930s and reading some of the gems therein which are often hard to find anywhere else.