Editorial Matters

By Cheryl Morgan

March has been a very funny month. It should have started off well because I was headed back to California, but in fact it turned out really bad because the hard disc on my laptop died just after I got back. Fortunately I am a good girl and take regular backups. Even more fortunately I take the main backups at the end of the month, so I lost very little. Even so, it was a real pain, and cost me several days of time I would otherwise have spent being productive.

Of course I got a bit of help, so this month I’m even more grateful than usual to our guests contributors, Karen, Farah and Scott, all of whom had good backups of versions of their articles I had sent them. Thanks folks!

Then there was a convention. Well, a holiday I guess. Several days sitting in the sun by a hotel pool in Ft. Lauderdale talking to clever people about books. ICFA isn’t for everyone, because most of the attendees are academics, and most of the programming is academic papers, but I love it.

And then, just to show how funny life can be, everything turned rosy. In the space of two days I saw Emerald City be named Site of the Week at SciFi.com and get a Hugo nomination for Best Semiprozine. I got a nomination for Best Fan Writer too. Obviously I’m not going to win either of these — I’m up against really strong opposition — but I’m delighted to be nominated and very grateful to everyone who voted for me/us.

I say "us" very deliberately, by the way, because this magazine is now very much a team effort. I could not produce anything anywhere near as good myself. So any kudos attached to the semiprozine nomination should also reflect back on Kevin, Anne, Tony and all of our guest reviewers and feature writers. I’m just the one who gets to go to the party and wear speccy dresses.

Goodness only knows how April will turn out, but I have a huge pile of books waiting to be read, so I guess I had better stop wittering and get on with reading them. The books covered will (probably) include Chris Roberson, Barth Anderson, Mike Carey, Naomi Novik, Kate Elliot, Kazuo Ishiguro, Steve Cash, David Keck, Robert Borski, Daniel Dinello and Zoran Živković.

Best wishes,

Cheryl