So much to do… so much to talk about… I’m barely awake after staying up past 1am to deal with the website issues and then actually get the new issue released. But there is much to blog about, so here I am again.

First, congratulations to SirDayWalker for winning the Submission Guesstimate Contest! He guessed 22 submissions, which was almost spot on – we had 21 Fiction and 2 Art submissions in the time period, making him just 1 off either way. Well done! He’s already gotten an email with instructions for his free subscription.

Yes, you read that right – 21 fiction submissions in almost exactly 24 hours. They totalled about 100,000 words. *DIEZ* We’re feverishly reading our way through them now, but um… it might take a while. And then we’ll have to make our shortlist, go through them together and whittle it down. So don’t expect to hear anything immediately… sorry about that, no real choice.

To repeat from last night: if you have our ad calling for LGBTQ submissions on your site, please take it down! We’re very grateful for all the people who posted it, but since we’re no longer accepting submissions to that issue it’s not appropriate to keep it up there. If you want an ad minus the call for submissions, I’ll be happy to provide one! 😉

One of the problems that I encountered last night was that Amazon was dragging its feet. As of 1am when I went to bed, neither the print nor Kindle editions of Issue 11 were up on Amazon. As of right now the Kindle is up, but still no print edition. They are really dragging their feet this month. But now I can create the Kindle item in the store, at least.

As of today, submissions to the magazine (starting with Issue 13, Action/Adventure) will go through our new slush reading process. We have 5 wonderful volunteer slush readers who will help us streamline the process. This MAY (I make no promises) mean faster response times in the future. No guarantees on that, but it’s possible. Please read our slush readers’ bios to learn more about them, and welcome them to CG!

Late last night we got an almost-finalized version of the cover art. It is STUNNING. There’s a couple tiny little things to address about it, but OMG is it ever incredible. Julie Dillon really put out all the stops on it. Er… I’ll stop teasing now.

The next day or so will be pretty much nothing but reading – we can’t proceed much further with Issue 12 until we’ve decided exactly what we’re going to publish after all! Good thing we got far ahead on prep work for the issue.