NYRSF Issue 352 Editorial: Opens Up One Eager Eye

Well, that was a while, wasn’t it?

Around the time our last issue came out in April of last year, my day-job company announced that it was purchasing another firm. My work involves supporting a stock trading desk, and we acquired a smaller trading firm to move our trading operations onto the smaller company’s proprietary technology. This was the largest professional project I’ve ever been involved in; the number of people involved in just the aspects that directly affected me was several times the number of people who worked for Crossover Technologies/Unplugged Games, the computer game company tht employed me through the 1990s. The main project lasted six months, from the end of March to the middle of September, with long days and few breaks. I was off balance and worn out for the entire time. When that project was done there was a great backlog of household tasks that carried me into the next big work project....

We did manage to hold a Work Weekend back in July, which was tremendous fun, and that left me with a sizable pile of material ready to fix and lay out. Which brings us to the issue you see here! I hope you find it worth the wait. It’s a good issue, and I’m particularly pleased to have Ian Campbell’s in-depth look at ’Aḥmad Sa‘dāwi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, which he delivered as a paper at MythCon, the annual convention of the Mythopœic Society, in 2018. The good news is that we have almost enough material fixed and ready to go to lay out another issue, so I hope #353 will be out into the world about a month after this one.

As I write this, there are now six known cases of COVID-19 in New Rochelle, about five miles from my house. I came home from work early today with a cough and apparent fever, but it seems that the fever was an inaccurate reading from an old thermometer and the cough was just a slightly amplified version of my usual allergy symptoms. So it’s back to work for me tomorrow, washing my hands every time I think of it. Take care of yourselves and we’ll see you in April.

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors