Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

I will not be editing and publishing Unidentified Funny Objects 8 this year.

There are a number of factors that led to this decision. First and foremost among them are the health setbacks I’d experienced in the latter half of 2018. Things are pretty much back on track now, health-wise, but two surgeries and months of recovery time put a significant dent in my writing and editing schedule, creating a deficit I’m yet to recover from. Rather than to push even harder and overload myself with responsibilities, I’ve looked to reduce the number of projects on my plate, and between crowdfunding, reading submissions, editing, and marketing, UFO is the most time-consuming editing project I engage in every year.

The second contributing factor is my work on Future SF — a quarterly magazine is about as involved and complex an undertaking as one might expect, and I felt it was only fair to give it a proper amount of attention and care, especially over the course of the early issues, while I establish the ‘zine and build staff. By this time next year I hope to have content inventory levels that will allow me to focus on UFO submissions exclusively for six weeks; right now I’m still buying stories for issues 2 and 3 with pretty much nothing “banked” in my coffers yet.

Finally, there are other projects across writing, translation, and editing fields. There are some exciting things happening on the latter two fronts and I hope to be able to share something about that relatively soon, but my primary focus is on writing; I hope to complete my third novel by summer, while my agent is shopping around the first two.

UFO series is far from canceled. I expect to release UFO6 and UFO7 in audio book format this year. UFO6 is almost done and I’m waiting on my voice narrator partners to finish editing their narration so we can announce and release it. I will also feature some humorous science fiction in Future SF to tide UFO fans over. I’ll be reaching out to series regulars to solicit material for this.

Looking ahead, I hope to resume the series in 2020. I would also consider teaming up with another publisher for future volumes, which would allow me to focus on the creative work of putting the anthology together and not so much on marketing and other business aspects of the project.

Until then, and as always, happy reading.

#sfwapro

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2019 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.