It’s very hard to struggle back into a rhythm of work after being flung out of it for so long. To anyone who says 5 days isn’t a long time, I say: clearly you have never truly been in this kind of rhythm.

But we are clawing our way back to production. We got back the story rewrite we were waiting for, and the results are excellent, so we’ve decided on our selections for Issue 13. I drew up contracts for all the issue 13 content (except for the cover art, which we sorted out a couple of weeks ago), and have sent a few emails. Still more to send.

Last night I did a bit of work on formatting the cover art; I cropped it down a bit to fit the print edition, and added the title info. Looks brilliant! Still need to drop it into the template and convert it to PDF, and then I’ll have to go back to the original art and do it again for the PDF edition, and then format the image for online too.

We also did some editing today: specifically, the article that’s going in the issue. And when I say “we”, I mean that Kay went through it, sent it back to the writer, he sent it back to her, she forwarded it to me, I went through it and made some additional changes/suggestions and returned it to Kay, who sent it back to the writer. Whew! But it should be about done now.

We also have spent a good deal of time talking yesterday and today talking about various sales we want to offer. We’ve got a few in the works, but there’s one that’ll be available within a day or so, as soon as I sort out the items in the store: Any 5 issues (in PDF or PRC format) for $5. That’s more than 35% off the cost of buying them separately! Get anywhere from 112,000 to 160,000 words of fiction (depending on which issues you select), plus all the articles, interviews and artwork, for only $5! Not bad, right? I’ll do an announcement post as soon as I have it set up. (This offer will exclude issues 1-4, as our contracts don’t allow for digital editions of those issues.)

While figuring out the wordcount numbers in the previous paragraph, I discovered that we published 311,000 words of fiction, and 355,000 words overall, in or first year of issues. That’s a LOT of writing… my editing brain hurts just thinking of it. Hey, over three hundred fifty thousand words we’ve provided for all of you for free, with more to come! If you appreciate it, how about showing your support by preordering our anthology or buying the current issue?

Tomorrow we’ll send out the rest of the emails for Issue 13 submissions, and start editing the fiction. In the meantime, please enjoy the LGBTQ issue, and send us your SFF/Folklore submissions!