Now that #137 is finished there are a few issues that have been brought to my attention.

Why didn’t I get a rejection notice? Some of the rejections are apparently getting caught up in the spam universe and not making it through. We don’t understand why or where they’re going but we apologize and are working to fix it.

In the past submissions were answered individually but that started to be too much work for a small team of volunteers to keep up with. We get a lot of submissions each open read.

I would love to use Submittable, but at $84 a month with a 300 submissions cap it won’t work. This period we received 300 submissions in fiction alone. Submittable would run us over $1,000 a year and we would have to limit how many submissions we could take and how many readers could access them. The magazine costs money to run and is a labor of love. When love cuts into groceries, the romance runs thin.

But, we have found another option. We would love to empower our submitters so we are looking at another system called Moksha. This costs $42 a month with unlimited submissions and we can pause it in months we aren’t reading. Even if we kept Moksha going all year it would only cost the magazine $504, and in theory, we could pause it for our non-reading months dropping that to a total of $168 a year. Unlimited submissions, unlimited readers and a permanent archive so we can go back to find previous work.

We will be testing this out, post what we decide and answer any questions. And speaking of questions, to the nearly 100+ messages I have through my email, the blog contact form here, Space and Time FB messages, Angela Yuriko Smith Facebook messages (both personal and public), both Instagram accounts and Twitter… hang on and I will answer.

I usually don’t have time to answer when putting the magazine out. Deadlines get intensive at the best of times… which this isn’t. I also usually don’t get so many questions and comments all at once so please be patient and understand I’m not ignoring you… there are just a lot of you.

I heard you aren’t printing the magazine now. I don’t like PDFs! This is just a weird rumor. Lucky for you, we are still publishing a print version of the magazine and it is available on Amazon right now. Go here to find #137 Summer 2020. We are working on the audio (read by Ryan Aussie Smith) version of the magazine right now and that will be available on Audible. Past issues we’ve published will also be loaded to Amazon so back issues are easy to access. All previous back issues (we call them the waaaayback issues) are being digitized right now and archived. Those, sorry, will only be available as PDFs.

I am a subscriber—when will I get my #137 print issue? Print issues will be mailed to your address as soon as I get them in my hands. This will be in July, of course, unless any new disasters pop up and waylay the USPS further. Because we have switched to print-on-demand, there is an extra step waiting for KDP to print and ship. As soon as they are in my hands I will be turning around and sending them to yours.

Image by Manuel Darío Fuentes Hernández

I didn’t get my last magazine. The United States Post Office killed us this last issue. Many of our international magazines are still in transit. We were shipping replacements, assuming they were lost, and now have been told many shipments have been turned back or held. One of the benefits of going POD is that now we will be able ship from within countries that have Amazon. A magazine costs from $13-20 to ship overseas. We just can’t afford to have them lost.

This issue seems bigger than usual. It is! With this issue, we doubled our page count accepting twelve stories as opposed to our usual five, seventeen poets instead of ten, and took on a new regular column feature: Graggon Speak by Austin Gragg. We managed to use every illustrator on our list.

Image by klimkin from Pixabay

Was it a good idea to take on more than twice the material when I was working with half a brain? Absolutely not, but if I was a wiser, less impulsive person I wouldn’t have taken on a magazine at all.

The mass acceptances were an emotional response to the chaos and fear of March. Every yes we could give was a way we could give someone a good day. Compared to the mass of negativity we were all/are all mired in, it was barely a drop in the bucket. But it was the best we can do.

And that sums this up. From scanning the messages as they came in, many of you are not happy that you didn’t receive notice of a rejection this time. Again, we apologize and thank you for sticking with us while we have searched for an affordable system. We will be testing that later this month.

This magazine, for me personally, has been a miracle. I found it almost impossible to focus on fictional stories that seemed tame in a lot of ways compared to reality. Besides the global drama we all shared, there was plenty of personal drama going on here as well. I won’t go into the details because it’s in the past. We—you who are reading this and me writing it—we all survived so far and that’s all that matters. Let’s keep that up.

Now, back to answering all those messages.

By Angela Yuriko Smith

Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Ryukyuan-American, award-winning poet, author, and publisher with 20+ years in newspapers. Publisher of Space & Time magazine (est. 1966), two-time Bram Stoker Awards® Winner, and HWA Mentor of the Year, she shares Authortunities, a free weekly calendar of author opportunities at authortunities.substack.com.

One thought on “Issues from Space and Time About Issues”
  1. Sounds like you are juggling a lot and rocking it. I just received the print copy of Issue #137 and it looks amazing!

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