Via Douglas Cohen:

Hi Everyone,

I’m about to ask for your help with something. As I noted when I announced that Shawna and I would be coming back, there are a number of submissions that were in various states of consideration when the magazine announced its closure. The only right thing to do was release these manuscripts from consideration. Now, the manuscripts I had that were going to be passed along to Shawna were discarded. In the interests of goodwill, I’ve subsequently contacted all of these authors and invited them to resubmit their manuscripts to me via email if they’re so inclined. (PLEASE NOTE: this is a special exception made just for them under the circumstances–we’re still at this time just accepting submissions via snail mail).

However, there are also quite a number of submissions that are sitting with Shawna, enough that I thought it would be a good idea to post this note. Here’s the thing: Shawna is going to have a lot of reading ahead of her as we build the magazine’s fiction inventory back up. Since I don’t have the manuscripts, it would drive me rather insane to hunt down all of the email addresses to all of the authors who have stories with Shawna. And it would be rather time consuming for Shawna to email all of these people to see if they’d like their manuscripts to still be considered. Then she’d also still have to wait to hear back, which eats up more time. I’d rather Shawna be able to use this time to read stories as we get the magazine caught up. Some folks have already told me they still want their stories to be considered. But I’d like to hear from the rest of you. If you had a story that was with Shawna and would still like it to be considered, please email me (slushmaster@gmail.com) and tell me the name of your story. It will save Shawna the trouble of reading a story that has since been withdrawn. It also wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to let me know you’re officially withdrawing your story or that you’ve already sold it elsewhere.

So here’s where you come in, Internets. Blog about this. Tweet about this. Facebook about this. Help us out. As Picard would say, “Make it so.”

Thanks all.

ETA: Please don’t contact me regarding general slush submissions. Not that those stories aren’t important, but it will just create too much confusion. We’ll figure this out a little later, thanks.

My story “Desaparecidos” will be in the June 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy. You can see the cover here on facebook, via Doug Cohen (although “Desaparecidos” features angels, the cover is actually an illustration for the Bruce Holland Rogers story).

I finally get to share a TOC with tlmorganfield–which is so completely made of awesome. This is going to be a collector issue 🙂