Bewildering Stories News

Fore! sight

Just calling “Fore!” here so nobody will get conked by our Readers’ Guides’ “In Times to Come” department when it goes astray.

Let me make it official: “In Times to Come” is unofficial. All it tells you is what’s on the schedule. And the schedule is subject to change.

One can make a preliminary estimate of scheduling based on the number of titles per issue. As a rule we allow seven in the categories of short stories and longer. After that, two titles each in flash fiction, poetry and essays. We have pushed the unofficial limit of thirteen titles on occasion.

A baker’s dozen is not necessarily an unlucky number; it’s just too big. Ye Copy Editor can’t handle all that work, let alone do it well. And if I do a good job with a large issue, then I fall behind in answering e-mail from contributors. I hate having to apologize for late replies; I suspect they aggravate me at least as much as the contributors.

Jerry and I also want to avoid overloading issues. Too many titles in an issue, and our contributors may feel crowded and our readers, overwhelmed. And it’s not just the number of titles that counts, either: we don’t have an exact formula yet, but if several multiple-part short stories or essays coincide in one issue, we may be forced to move one or two titles to the following issue, and so on in a cascade effect.

There is no quick fix. If we make like Procrustes in thinning out issues, then the current waiting time of about five weeks will soon balloon to ten weeks, and the shorter works will be delayed most. Maybe contributors would be cool with that; I don’t know. We need both contributors and readers to tell us how they feel about it. You can use e-mail or our forum.

There’s a double upshot here: a few titles have had to be moved back an issue, and from now on I’ll use the phrase “provisionally scheduled” in acceptances. At least we can say this is official: the schedule isn’t engraved in stone; it’s what seemed like a good idea at the time.