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A little jetsam to go with your flotsam

Well, then. It seems that somehow, against all reason and common sense, Fiction Inferno has arrived at Issue #1:002. No one is more surprised than we. Here are a few observations on the absurd comedy of publishing an internet magazine.

There are a lot of writers out there. And a lot of them are pretty damn good. We've read 360 or so stories in the last three months (and have another 50+ waiting in the slush pile). Of those, we bought ten. At least 100 of them were good enough to publish, but we really can't do it all. The world needs more magazines.

There is a lot of interest in speculative fiction. If you count each visit as a circulation count of "one," FI's circulation after one issue is 3,855. Of course, that doesn't take into account the fact that many of those visits were repeats by the same person. So let's just say, for the sake of argument, that something like 1,500 have read this magazine. That's a lot of people--pretty good circulation numbers for a literary quarterly of any sort.

Publishing is a lot harder than it looks. We have a whole new respect for Gardner Duzois, Ellen Datlow, Algis Budrys et al. Through their efforts, the literary landscape is a much weirder place. We will die happy if we manage to contribute a single quark's worth of value to the specfic universe.

Thanks. Thanks to everyone who read the first issue of FI, thanks to everyone who dared to send us a story, thanks to those whose contributions make this thing worth doing, and thanks especially to all those who have yet to visit, but will do so in the future. Because the future, dear reader, is where it's at.

Interested in Very Short Fiction? Click here for details on the First Annual Fiction Inferno Very Short Fiction Competition!

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