…ok not really. Sometimes it feels like that though.

What a busy couple of days! Sorry about the lack of posts, but it’s been pretty crazy. A short refresher:

1. Issue 10: Child Fiction is out! The reaction has been very positive. A lot of people have been drawn to the brilliant cover art by Carl Pearce:

Yeah, we love this one. 😉

2. Yesterday was Outer Alliance Pride Day, and it was amazing; membership to OA climbed over 200 (214 currently), and over 80 people made Pride Day posts (here is the Crossed Genres post, announcing our LGBTQ issue, which is currently accepting submissions.) I highly recommend following the Pride Day link and reading some or all of the listed posts – there’s some wonderful, insightful and inspiring stuff there!

3. Speaking of Issue 12 – that’s right, we’re open for submissions! We know this is kind of a tricky genre, but we’re still hoping for a ton of submissions. The issue is shaping up nicely – so far we’ve confirmed:

– Cover art by the amazingly talented Julie Dillon, whose work has appeared in Wizards of the Coast, Paizo Publishing, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, amongst many others.
– Nonfiction editor for Clarksworld Magazine and two-time Hugo Award winner Cheryl Morgan will be providing an article for the issue!
– The issue will also contain an interview with Kate Bornstein, author, playwright, performance artist and friend to gender outlaws everywhere!

(We have some other things hopefully lined up but not confirmed.)

We’re looking for the usual – short stories (1000-8000 words), artwork (black-and-white) and essays and articles (500-3000 words), all related to the LGBTQ theme. We’re planning on having this be an oversized issue, as much as twice the size of our regular issues! So even if you don’t feel up to submitting, please help us by spreading the word to other writers and writing groups, so we can produce the best issue possible!

4. We’ve just finished making our final decisions about which stories to accept for Issue 11 (Horror). As usual it was a tough choice; we received just 3 fewer submissions than for the previous issue, which was our highest submission total yet. I’ll be contacting writers about that tomorrow.

The final tally was 26.4% of submissions from women, well down from our usual, which is around 50-55%. However, after we chose our favorite stories we looked and saw that 2 of them were from women (out of 5). Once September is over, I’m going to tally up all the submissions from our first year of issues and see where the percentages are; I suspect that August will skew things pretty significantly.

Speaking of our first year of the magazine – holy crap, we’ve been around almost a year! Actually, it depends on where you start measuring – we signed paperwork making Crossed Genres an official company just over a year ago. But I don’t really count that… that’s just the legal side. You could also argue that it all “started” when our website first went live, which was September 14, 2008. So in less than 2 weeks, it’ll have been a year. But I think for us, it’ll really be REAL when we released Issue 12 and have a full year’s worth of issues behind us. And let me tell you, the 1-Year Wrap Party is going to be KICKING! (Or we’ll just sleep for 48 hours solid.)