August 2020
I think most people can agree that it's been a long year. At least it's over halfway through.
. . . except that's not really a helpful measure. We tend to divide things by years, but calendar years are ultimately rather arbitrary when it comes to measuring a period of time. Will the pandemic be over by the end of the year? Probably not. The US election should be over--unless there's something similar to the 2000 election and it drags on for months. But everything that make politics so acrimonious will still be there.
However, there's not a lot we can do about that (except, perhaps, resist the temptation to post our own acrimonious comments about politics on social media). What we can do something about is our fiction submissions pile, and that, at least, we can get done by the end of 2020. Judging by past performance, we tend to finish reading the submissions and selecting stories about three and a half months after submissions close (so, mid-November). This is less…
. . . except that's not really a helpful measure. We tend to divide things by years, but calendar years are ultimately rather arbitrary when it comes to measuring a period of time. Will the pandemic be over by the end of the year? Probably not. The US election should be over--unless there's something similar to the 2000 election and it drags on for months. But everything that make politics so acrimonious will still be there.
However, there's not a lot we can do about that (except, perhaps, resist the temptation to post our own acrimonious comments about politics on social media). What we can do something about is our fiction submissions pile, and that, at least, we can get done by the end of 2020. Judging by past performance, we tend to finish reading the submissions and selecting stories about three and a half months after submissions close (so, mid-November). This is less…