Tavia wrote:
All I can say on quality is, in my personal experience of zine publishing (viz: one to date), I was lucky enough to be submitted a heck of a lot of stories of very high quality rather quickly for the premise of a 'mixed, but no erotica' zine despite being hitherto unknown as a zine publisher or even a B7 fan. I made the deduction that writers at least rather liked the idea.
Which, judging from the contents of the zine (I'm in the middle of reading it now, and am *very* impressed by the overall high quality -- there's some *darned* good stuff in there!) is very understandable. IMO, there are quite a number of stories in "ttba" that, while totally unacceptable for a "gen" zine are definitely not calculated to appeal to those specifically looking for erotica. Which can create quite a dilemma, I think, for a writer who's looking to get her story out to the appropriate target audience.
The "ghettoization" of slash does bother me a little bit, actually, because it lumps a drama- or action- based story in which it's mentioned in passing that Avon is sexually interested in Blake, say, in with a highly explicit piece of PWP erotica. There is certainly a large overlap in audience for the two, but still, there are likely to be readers who would enjoy the former without wanting to touch the latter with a ten-foot pole, and probably those who are interested in the later but are turned off (uh, so to speak) by the former.
You could try the stories Betty recently recommended to Fiona, or for that matter those I recommended for the same purpose.
Although I would be very quick to point out that several of the stories I recommended are quite explicit in nature, and probably most of them involve really *dysfunctional* sexual relationships...