Well, we’re back.
We didn’t intend to take a break after the Hartwell Memorial issue, which was complete in February (though released in mid-March). But I underestimated how much David’s death would hover over the magazine, leading me into a cycle of guilt-avoidance where any time I tried to sit down to do the work of finishing this issue, my brain found every possible excuse to not get anything done. But we’re here now with what I think is a simply terrific issue.
I don’t know that I’m completely out of that cycle yet, but I will do everything I can to fill the gap and return the magazine to its monthly schedule.
One of the characteristics of work avoidance is that it sometimes drives one to get other things accomplished. I’m happy to say that in this case, it means that I uploaded clean copies of all of our recent issues to Lulu.com, including the Memorial. You can find them at <bit.ly/NYRSF-POD> and I recommend them highly. And if you check Lulu’s twitter feed <@Luludotcom>, I’m sure you’ll find a nice coupon. Buy now! Buy many! Buy without thinking!
I’ll close with a Hartwell anecdote I shared at Tor’s memorial. Early in my career as Kitchen Staff Supervisor of this publication, I asked David why he had 5 or more bottles of mustard in his refrigerator. He explained that when he was a grad student struggling to make ends meet, one of the staples of his diet was his lunchtime baloney sandwich. Baloney was cheap and easy to make. But he discovered that good bread and exotic mustards, in the quantities necessary for sandwich making, were not much more expensive than plain white bread and yellow mustard. So every day he would vary the bread and the mustard on his sandwich, and he went over two years without eating the same sandwich.
This struck me as a quintessentially Hartwell idea, combining frugality and clever footwork to solve a sticky problem. In later years, I realized that there are ways in which this is an allegory to (one approach to) genre fiction: Vary enough details of the sandwich and you can cheerfully eat baloney every day for lunch and never get tired.
Lunch well, everyone. See you within a month.
—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors
I LOVE the baloney sandwich metaphor! I'm going to keep it in mind as a way to prevent taking my own writing too seriously.
Posted by: Karl | 06/17/2016 at 03:52 PM