Thank You to All the Cool Cats Who Made Chill Subs Possible in 2023
Our 2023 acknowledgments and thank yous.
Shel and I recently moved from our home in Mtskheta, Georgia to a little town in the south of Portugal because we're little babies who hate the cold. The thing we miss most is the absurd number of cats that used to live around our little cabin. Our two favorites were a pair of cross-eyed brother sister twins named Fuckhead and Shovelface. They were always coming in, jumping on the counter, crawling into bed with us and by the end it felt like they were our cats. But there were loads of others. Bed Shitter (who you know), Nipple Sucker, Handsome Red, Meow-Fuck, Meow-Fuck's Brother, Mini Charlie, Skinny Charlie, Orange Cat, Carpet, LinkedIn, Little Red (RIP), Tumor Cat (RIP), and Little Black Cat (RIP). (We learned very quickly that nature gives precisely 0 fucks about which cats we liked and killed indiscriminately.)1
Anyway, thinking about these cats and how much we miss them, remembering how Fuckhead and Shovelface would always insist on being the center of attention, I realized that Karina and I are the Fuckhead and Shovelface of Chill Subs.
So, today I wanted to talk about the LinkedIns, the Carpets, the Nipple Suckers, Meow-Fucks, and Orange Cats who have helped us out along the way. You know Kailey, Shel, & Nikita pretty well. And yes, Nikita is LinkedIn.
But there is also Marcin, Miley, Willem, Art, Zach, Jacob, Erica and more.
Marcin is our second developer who, with an egregiously discounted salary is the highest paid Chill Subs employee. We found him on the 129th page of a LinkedIn Job search. When you go to Chill Subs and see all of Nikita's beautiful designs flowing together, that's a lot of Marcin's handywork. Every day he gets better and better and one of out main reasons for growing Chill Subs is to prevent Marcin from outgrowing us.
Mariam - Mariam is the artist who illustrates everything for Chill Subs. She is brilliant and fabulous and we've all become good friends after moving to Georgia (where Mariam is from).
Miley & Willem - These two saviors started out as interns who offered to help us out over the summer and have slowly but surely become a part of our team working as researchers. They founded a lit mag this year too! Concord Ridge
Shelby, Tamar, Brittany, and Suzanne, Kailey’s editorial team for Write or Die who have been straight-up killing it. It makes us so-so proud to be married to this beautiful magazine.
Sean was our business daddy who was an enormous help getting Chill Subs off the ground by advising us on everything from taxes to filing all of those random documents we didn’t understand (and still don’t).
Mikita helped us manage our database for 7 months before going off to start his own hiking business in Poland. He was brilliant and we miss him.
Zach is a data engineer and analyst and grown adult human with very reasonable goals who constantly has to tell us, “Woah…woah……woah, hold on.” And then we get organized and he does some incredible work with spreadsheets and pythons and is helping us get our room cleaned up and installing shelves for all of our bullshit.
Art is a designer and developer who created the Rejection Whisperer and worked with us for months to help develop our tools. He has been a valuable source of expertise and kept our wacky ideas in check, guiding us toward creating the tools you see on Chill Subs in a way that best serves writers.
Erica is a new addition to our team from Australia who has volunteered to help us out with revamping our indie press listings.
Jacob is a dev and writer who answered one of our calls for help and came in at a huge discount to help us optimize our browse…you know, the main thing we offer that was getting slower and slower with more and more users. He is migrating us to new (multiple) servers and doing a load of stuff I don’t understand to make our whole website faster in 2024.
Andrea Firth from Brevity has helped us loads with beta testing tools, writing guest posts and advising us on our workshops.
Becky Tuch - From the beginning Becky has been a huge help and is the reason Karina and I met. She puts out endlessly valuable content on her Substack Lit Mag News
Erik Harper Klass from Submitit Now has advised us on so many different aspects of the submissions process when we weren’t sure. He is a damn expert on everything from craft analysis to the minutia of proper formatting.
Shannan & Karan - The editors of ONLY POEMS who have helped us with guest posts, feedback, formatting, and any weird little question we have only about seventeen times a day.
Andy Brown, the editor of Scrawl Place has advised us several times about industry-related stuff and advised us on tools we’re building for editors.
Barbara from the Baltimore Review has given us loads of advice and helped with beta tools, finding time while running one of our favorite lit mags in the indie space.
Conor was our longest running volunteer who helped build our database with us.
Kyril! Karina’s husband who is a hella-experienced developer and professional bug finder who helps us out in so many ways I can’t even begin to list.
And none of this would be possible without our mascot:
I am 100% sure I forgot some people here. There are too many who’ve done so much for us, it is overwhelming. It probably is little consolation since I remembered a dumpster fire but not you…so, sorry.
Thank you to everyone (even the rude ones) who email us when something gets buggy or we get something wrong with our data.
Thank you to everyone who likes, shares, and subscribes to receive the content we create. And, of course, thank you to those who are able to support us financially. So many of us work for free or with very small salaries to keep Chill Subs going. Every penny goes toward making it a reality,
And thank you to everyone’s parents for going through the trouble of raising decent people in an increasingly indecent world who would grow up to help our little project succeed. Or if you’re a decent human in spite of having real shit parents then fuck your parents. You’re the best and they didn’t deserve you.
Hell, thank you for just being here.
If you’d like to support us in 2024, the best way is through our Premium or Supporter Tiers on our website. We’ll be developing loads of useful tools AND beautifully designed customizable new Writer Portfolio and Profiles to make writer websites a thing of the past with their outrageous fees and over-kill features. That’s priority # 1 this spring for writers with our submissions manager, Slushpile, as priority # 1 for editors. All of this costs time and money, so if you have the means, we greatly appreciate it.
Look, we’re not cruel in how we name cats. It just happens. For example, we are in Portugal right now and Shel lured in a neighborhood cat with turkey. Turkey, in Portuguese, is Peto. But when Shel told her parents about it, she forgot and instead wrote “Pinto,” which is slang for penis. So now we have a cat named Penis. This leads to several unfortunate situations like when I’ll spot the cat outside and yell, “Shel, Penis is outside!” And she’ll come running.
Proud subscriber 😁
I'm so glad you have a cat in Portugal. Keep on keeping on what you do.