Featured

Where to get RIDE 2

Which edition of RIDE 3 is right for YOU?

Click for Kindle

Click for Paperback

If your Kindle does not have a protective case, we strongly recommend the print version, which is RSFAB-approved for use in all panniers and saddlebags. Trust us on this one. We once cracked a Kindle screen because we thought it would be nice to have it to read on the train after a brevet. Or perhaps you are less oblivious to intra-bag stresses than we are, in which case buy the ebook. Or you could spend an extra two bucks and get the Amazon thing where you get both versions, but if you’ve got both versions, why would the ebook ever be in your pannier? You keep your panniers completely clean, right? You’d never forget you have a paperback in there and bring the Kindle along too. Although if you did, the additional weight would be a handy excuse for getting dropped.

Both versions submersible to a depth of 5000′. You won’t be able to read them after that, but you can absolutely submerge them as often as you’d like.

Coming any day

Tags

Anthology, Bicycles, Bikes, Cycling, Fiction, Short stories

Announcing the authors of RIDE 3!

…which I could conceivably end up calling

 

if no one talks me out of it.

Mechanicals, bonks, dogs, wrong turns, and bonus miles have delayed RIDE 3 since the submission deadline, and sometimes friends and family couldn’t find it on the GPS page, but it always knew it was out there pedaling.

The authors of RIDE 3 are:

L.S. Bassen
Next of Kin

Jennifer Brown
Domestique

L. Nicol Cabe
Pearls in the Aftermath

Chris Chaney
All You Haters

K.I. Hope
The Daily

Jesse Keating
He Rides Alone

Ang Lay Leng
Toufu Bicycle

Jay Gallera Malaga
My First Bike

John Mannone
Tricycle

Rita McDermott
Over the Rainbow

Vandana Rao
Chandu’s Cycle

Souradeep Roy
The Rickshawala

Sarojini Sahoo
Bicycle and Me

C.E. Snow
In for Service

Maya Sokolovski
The Bike

Dara Syrkin
Stranger’s Blessing

Cindy Velasquez
A Bottled Coke

Anne Whitehouse
Cyclist

And as always,
cover art by bicyclepaintings herself,
Taliah Lempert

Congratulations to all who buy it and read them!

---

RIDE 3 will be out in time for the holidays, though not in time for “Holiday Bike Books” articles. To hear when it’s available (print and ebooks, both), follow @ridebikefiction on Twitter or subscribe to this blog.

RIDE 3 update

UPDATE: ACCEPTANCES/REJECTIONS BY MAY 31, AND THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE

If you submitted a story to RIDE 3, you should have received a couple of update emails. In case you didn’t:

I received more submissions than I expected to (60–70, depending on how you count the poetry) at the same time as business and personal stuff both took over all my waking hours. As of today, I’m about 2/3 through the submissions.

I’ve been consistently wrong about when I would notify submitters, so rather than set up bad expectations, I’m just saying my waking hours have stabilized, and submission review is back underway and getting there. Very sorry for the delay—if I’d been willing to read your stories while sleep-deprived, I could have been a lot faster, but then you’ve have gotten email with the wrong story title in the subject line and a note that said it was great except I didn’t get the part with the monkey.

I know it’s been longer than expected. Thank you very much for bearing with me. It’s coming…

(And if you’re a submitter and have not received those emails, please let me know. Thanks.)

RIDE 3 submission update

If you submitted to RIDE 3 and did not receive this email, please let me know.

---

Thank you for submitting to RIDE 3.

Submission response time is going to be longer this year, both because more submissions were received and because my book design business has grown, but I’m still the only one doing all the work. (I also learned from the previous two RIDE books that it’s a mistake to rush to hit a publishing deadline that I just made up in the first place.)

I’m aiming to get responses out by November.

Thank you again!

Best,

Keith Snyder
Editor, RIDE: Short Fiction About Bicycles

RIDE 3: Call for submissions

Last updated: March 23, 2013

Deadline: August 31, 2013

RIDE 3 will be published in print, as well as Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, and whatever other format seems like a good idea.

The only requirement is that a bicycle or bicycle subculture must feature prominently in the story.

Any genre, any gender, any length up to about 12,000 words, any setting, any country, any time period, any kind of cycling. The more diversity—of locations, cycling cultures, story genres—the better. Don’t look at the previous two books for an idea of what I’m looking for; all I’m interested in is the best eight or ten stories or poems I can find, regardless of genre or style—and there are plenty of genres nobody’s sent me yet.

LENGTH: While I will consider anything up to around 12,000 words, it’s easier to take a chance on shorter work—so if you haven’t published much, your odds are probably better with flash fiction than with a multilayered epic.

EDITING: If I don’t think it can be improved, I won’t give you any notes. If I do, I will.

PAYMENT: $75 above 4,000 words; $50 for 2,000-3,999 words; $20 for 1-1,999 words.

PUBLICITY: Please be up for minor publicity stuff, which shouldn’t involve more work than suggesting places where I can send review copies and participating in the recent “Three Questions” series at this blog.

DETAILS: Previously published is OK; previously unpublished is OK-plus. World rights must be available. If it’s at your blog, I’ll ask you to take all but a few teaser paragraphs down when the book goes on sale. Fiction and poetry only; no essays, no travelogues. Submit in Word or RTF, using standard manuscript formatting (Courier 12-point, double-spaced, 1″ margins all around).

Questions and submissions: noteon | at | mac | dot | com

DEADLINE FOR “RIDE 3” SUBMISSIONS:
August 31, 2013

Nigel Greene asks Taliah Lempert THREE QUESTIONS

Where to get RIDE 2

Introduction to

Taliah Lempert’s art in RIDE 2

When I was putting together the first RIDE (Print! Kindle! Nook! iBooks!), I got to the point where I needed cover art, and mused aloud on Twitter. Another #bikenyc cyclist said, What about Taliah Lempert? She’s right over in Brooklyn.

I hadn’t paid much attention to bike art at that point, but when I went and looked at Taliah’s site, my reaction was immediate: These!

So I wrote to her and asked, and she wrote back and accepted, and now she’s provided the cover and interior art for both RIDE books.

As well as the series emblem that appears on both covers:

Which, as far as I’m concerned, is a head tube badge.

I’m still experimenting with the interior art for the series. For the first RIDE, I gave each story its own mini-cover, with its own bicycle painting, plus a Lempert-created header on the first page of the story. When I got to that stage with RIDE 2, I was so busy with print and ebook work that I knew I couldn’t get the book done by year’s end if I waited until I had time to do the mini-covers again. It doesn’t take that much time to choose art for each story, crop, place, design, tinker, but even if it comes out to an hour per story, I didn’t have the day and a half to spare.

So the art side of RIDE continues to evolve. We’ll see what happens in RIDE 3 (call for submissions coming soon; deadline will be August 31).

Oh, and she sells STUFF, too. Go buy a mug:

---

Nigel Greene (“Passing Thoughts”)

asks three questions of

Taliah Lempert

Nigel: You have a Masters in Fine Arts from New York Academy of Art and, it seems for the last 10+ years your work has featured bicycles. Why or how did bicycles become the focus of your art?

Taliah:  Bicycles became the focus of my art when I started riding for transportation.  Before then I mostly painted pictures of people.  I bought a bike on a whim. It caught my eye, in front of a bike shop on Smith Street.  I had not been thinking of commuting by bike but once I got one, I had to use it. Riding through the city was more awesome than I expected and the bike so beautiful. I became inspired!

Nigel: The gallery of your website shows a range of bikes: fixed gears, tourers, tandems,  mixtes and children’s bikes, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a current carbon fiber racing bike. Is that an intentional choice and if so why?

Taliah: There are  carbon fiber racing bikes.  I can think of 5 without really looking. One was fresh from the pro peleton.  I like the shapes that carbon can take.  It is true that there are more steel frames, both in my studio and in the world.  It’s not  a conscious choice.

(Editor’s note: One of the things that really drew me to Taliah’s work is that while you can find racing bikes in there, she paints BIKES. Kids’ bikes, city bikes, bikes with dents, scratched bikes, bikes with questionable handlebar positioning…in that sense, her work very nicely reflected what I want to do with RIDE.)

Nigel: I like the contrast of the detailed images on simple, often monochomatic backgrounds. Is there a particular detail of a bike that you feel portrays its individual nature best?

Taliah:  It depends on the bike.  Different things stick out. Sometimes the drive or the seat… But I’d say that it is often the bars that show the most character.

---

Next (and last) up: Taliah’s three questions for SJ Rozan.

Where to get RIDE 2

Jan Maher asks Nigel Greene THREE QUESTIONS

Where to get RIDE 2

Introduction to

Nigel Greene’s poem in RIDE 2:

“Passing Thoughts”

 
I didn’t go looking for this, but there are three randonneurs (ultra-distance self-supported endurance cyclists) in the pages of RIDE 2. I’m the least impressive of them, but what I lack in mileage, I make up for in…uh, book editing, I guess.

I first checked out Nigel’s blog because of the rando connection—we’d met on a couple of his early brevets—and kept reading it because he posts good stuff. In addition to “Friday Writings for Randos,” a regular literary excerpt that resonates with the exertions and rewards of randonneuring, even if there’s no bicycle in it, he posts accounts of his brevets, the odd lighting system review, stuff like that.

One day he put up a brief original poem about one moment on a training ride, and I went, “oo,” which is really my main criterion for story selections. But I wasn’t sure I was going to use poetry, so I just copied it into a text file and put it with the story submissions.

Turned out I did use poetry, and Passing Thoughts was the perfect last page of the anthology.

 

---

Jan Maher (“The Persistence of Memory”)

asks three questions of

Nigel Greene

 
Jan: Have you ridden continuously since you were a child on your first bi- or tricycle?

Nigel: Continuously? Hmmm. My first “ride” was a Big Wheel. I L.O.V.E.D. the Big Wheel. I’m pretty sure I still do. I was the right age at the right time and it was the right ride. The power slide with the hand brake. The furious pedaling of young legs. I wore holes in that wheel.

I have ridden continuously since then but not always under my own power.

After riding a bike through my teens, I rode a motorcycle for years—a 1972 BMW twin-cylinder that I rescued, rebuilt, then rode across country and into Mexico.

Then, when life became adult and the motorcycle had sat unridden for so long that it and I were no longer in the same place, I rediscovered the bicycle. Its subtlety, range of experience and variety spoke to me in words that I could hear and appreciate in the moments between thoughts. Its limits were my limits and on it, I could seek both.

Jan: How do poems occur to you? A word or phrase first that gradually accretes? All in a not-fell swoop? A picture looking for its caption? Or….?

Nigel: My piece in RIDE 2 is a “poem” but I am no poet. I just write stuff down and try to say it honestly. Typically, it’s all one fell swoop. I write my blog under the influence of the thing about which I am writing, be it a ride or whatever. I write about rides while my legs are still aching and before I have recovered so that one day when I look back on it, the words mean something because they arose from the thing itself.

Jan: Two parts to question 3: What is a question you would like to answer that I haven’t asked you, and what is your answer to it?

Nigel: Why do you blog about randonneuring?

I blog about randonneuring because every rando-ride is a once in a lifetime experience. It is big enough and bold enough and odd enough to merit a memory and a post. Try it—you’ll see what I mean.

---

Next week: Nigel’s three questions for artist Taliah Lempert.

Where to get RIDE 2

THREE QUESTIONS: Jon Billman asks Jan Maher

Where to get RIDE 2

Introduction to

Jan Maher’s story in RIDE 2:

“The Persistence of Memory”

 

I’ve tried to make it known, on social media, that I’m actively looking for stories outside the “racing hardman” genre, outside the male gender, and outside the straight-white-young-male genera generally. That’s not because I’m trying to avoid that kind of story—on the contrary; I’d love to get more of them—but because it’s harder for me to find the other ones. Post a notice for “bicycling stories” without saying anything else, and you’ll get stuff about young men racing.

But to most people who ride, bicycling isn’t about racing; and to most bicycles, what rests on their saddles aren’t the Lycra-cupped jewels of Vuelta aspirants.

So it was with absolute confidence in her muscle memory and abilities that Marie confronted her great-granddaughter’s bicycle, kept in the garage for Celia’s occasional visits. She’d been told she was too old to be on the road, and had her license taken away. Not by the state, mind you, but by her own child. Her son Matt had actually hidden it from her. He knew she was too crafty not to have a spare key, and he knew she was a stickler for obeying the law. Without that, she wouldn’t dare take her Hyundai into traffic. California had no problems with her abilities: they’d issued her most recent license good through her hundred-and-first birthday.

I don’t give preference to any genre or gender; my only hard-and-fast criteria are that a bike or bike culture be featured, that it holds together as a work of fiction, and that some definable thing about it makes me go: Yeah, this one! So I don’t bias toward non-white-male stories; but I do try get as diverse a submission pool as I can, and then pick the ones I like best from that. I don’t know how well it’s worked—I have no idea which of these stories I’d still have received if I’d just said “Bike stories wanted!” a couple of times, and left it at that—but five women and five men contributed to RIDE 2, and there’s one more female protagonist than male. (And to date, the youngest character has been seven, and the oldest—”The Persistence of Memory’s” Marie—is in her nineties.)

Diversity in every direction. Bicycles don’t care whose freedom they serve.

And just as a side note: I’ve never been sent a women’s racing story.

 

 

---

 

Jon Billman (“Dert”)

asks three questions of

Jan Maher

Jon: I just taught my daughter to ride recently and could vividly relate to the opening of your story in a fresh way. What was your own experience in learning to ride?

Jan: The Christmas I was not quite seven, my sister and I wanted bicycles for Christmas. We’d been told in no uncertain terms that our parents couldn’t afford such extravagance, and steeled ourselves for cheaper, more practical gifts like sweaters and socks, yet there they were on Christmas morning. They were shiny and green, hers a 26”, mine 24”. I wanted training wheels, but my parents said I didn’t need them. I vaguely remember my father huffing and puffing, running alongside the bike till I got the feel of balancing it. I believe this must have been when I was first assured that once I learned to ride, I’d never forget how to do it. I have borrowed and tweaked these details for my story. We got an off-brand, not Schwinn; my father didn’t have the lung capacity to shout encouragement because he smoked too much; and it was undoubtedly my mother who scoffed at training wheels.

Shortly after that we moved to a rural area and I spent many long hours riding the dusty country roads, sometimes in the company of friends, but also often alone.

Jon: The title “Persistence of Memory” of course alludes to the Salvador Dali “melting clocks” painting. Dali was a big cycling fan and even did some graphics work for the Tour de France in the ’50s. Why do you think the Surrealists were so drawn to the bicycle?

Jan: I’m delighted to discover this about Dali, and must confess that prior to your question, I’d never given a thought to why Surrealists were so drawn to the bicycle. Thanks to the miracle of Google, I can, however, note that Dali wrote in his autobiography, “I should have liked the whole of France to get on to bicycles, everybody pedalling and dripping sweat, climbing inaccessible hills like impotent fools, while the divine Dali paints. Yes, yes, the Tour de France on bicycles produces in me such a persistent satisfaction that my saliva flows in imperceptible but stubborn streams.” I found this quoted in several spots, including this blog. I also discovered this bicycle blog, which offers several images of surrealist bicycles, including Dali’s “Sentimental Conversation.” “The Persistence of Memory” was not my first or even second working title for the story. It came to me after the story was written. I think the title appealed to me because, in addition to the way it recalls the old saw that once we learn how to ride, we never forget, it alludes to the melting, mangled shapes of post-crash bicycles. I note in my Google research that this is indeed a theme in the work of some Surrealists.

Jon: I certainly hope to be riding when I’m Marie’s age! What place does the bicycle have in your life as you mature?

Jan: The secret to bicycling for me at this point in my life is the mountain bike. Their wide tires are the bicycle equivalent of sturdy walking shoes. I try to go for a ride at least once a week when the weather permits and I’m in upstate NY, which is where my bicycle resides. I’m helped in this effort by my husband, who routinely commutes via bicycle and is happy to accommodate my very non-Marie pace in order to see me pedaling. I’ve had some hip alignment problems, and bicycling helps. I’d not ridden in decades when I bought my bicycle five years ago, and I’m happy to report that since then, I haven’t crashed at all. I know where the brakes are and I’m not afraid to use them.

---

Next week: Jan’s three questions for K.I. Hope.

Where to get RIDE 2