A literary magazine that focuses on a particular genre of fiction. These typically publish short stories and novellas, but sometimes serialize longer works. (e.g., Dune was serialized in Analog magazine.)

The blogger, Neil Clarke, runs a science fiction genre magazine called Clarkesworld. Other science fiction genre magazines include Asimov's, Analog, and F&SF.

Other genres, including so-called "literary fiction," all have their own magazines. Apparently none of them are doing particularly well, because short stories are now out of fashion. The trend right now is to make everything as long as possible: Don't write a novella if you can write a novel, and don't write a novel if you can write a three-part (or seven-part!) series.

It's a shame literary gigantism has become fashionable or at least marketable.

Novels are ok, but I've come to despise "book series". It seems everything wants to grow and, if possible, become a Netflix show.

Short fiction is a marvelous art form, which requires a precision with plot and/or words that is hard to match. Novels have room to breathe and grow, but there's no such luxury with a short story: every word matters.

Few things are as enjoyable as a well-crafted short story.

I think the long term trend is less about fashion than word processors with grammar etc making longer works more viable. They just assist longer works far more than short ones.

Let’s say a word processor saves 1 minute per word in the writing/editing process over a typewriter as you’re not messing with paper, ink, and moving stuff around, or thumbing through a thesaurus etc. I am not saying it’s always constant round number just that it does provide some automation that’s scaling with the number of words.

For a short poem it’s handy, but not that critical compared to inspiration etc. But our hypothetical 1min per word adds up to a sold month for a 120k word and a full year for a 1+ million word multi part epic that’s going to make many projects more viable. This becomes more pronounced the less effort per word people are putting in, which opens the door for someone to entertain a small group of fans with lots of low effort words on Patreon etc.

Notably word processors have been around for decades, but there have been a steady drop of improvements over time. Writing a novel on your cellphone isn’t an ideal work environment by any stretch, but it fits some people’s lifestyles very well etc.

Edit: Not that you can’t find people writing short stories on Patreon, but it’s easier to hook people on advanced chapters of a work. And after its written publishing on Amazon is so easy even a few sales make the effort worth it. Thus a flood of longer written works showing up.

I think they mean something like say, Lightspeed Magazine is a genre magazine, and the genre is scifi.

However, we seem to have saturated their database connections (friends don't let friends have connection pools without bounds/with the wrong bounds, especially not to serve static content), so I haven't read the article. [ETA: Did read it, am now positive.]

Friends don't let friends serve static content in a way that involves a database!

It's not static, it's Wordpress, and that's something we can complain about once there's an actual alternative in the niches WP fills.

I was more replying to:

> friends don't let friends have connection pools without bounds/with the wrong bounds, especially not to serve static content

No, friends just throw a static cache in front of their friend's static content.

In the same way that friends throw a rug over their friend's dirty floor? Caches are at best a stopgap, and usually cause more problems than they solve.

"Genre" here means genre fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre_fiction, the sort of mass-market books like romance, fantasy, science fiction and horror. Compare with literary fiction like classics and poetry. It can be used derogatorily to separate commercial literature from "real" literature since genre fiction were usually printed on cheap trade paperbacks, sold in volume and read for entertainment compared to more serious literary and artistic fiction, but I don't think many people today would make that distinction.