| The second year of the Adelaide Literary Magazine started with the bang. It almost feels like the new beginning. Past November we were included into Literary Magazines Listing in the “Tools for Writers” Section of the Poets & Writers online platform (http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/adelaide_literary_magazine).This was followed by the inclusion into Duotrope database, which is a subscription-based service for writers and artists that offers an extensive, searchable database of current fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art markets, a calendar of upcoming deadlines, a personal submissions tracker, and useful statistics compiled from the millions of data points they gathered on the publishers. (https://duotrope.com/listing/21736 ) Finally, by the beginning of January, our magazine was listed in the Firstwriter.com magazine listing. Inclusion in the listings of these important US and international writer’s resources certainly testify to the prominence that our publication gained only one year since its foundation. This makes us proud of our publication and gives us so needed boost for future work. All of these resulted in an avalanche of submissions of short stories, poetry, essays, translations, book review requests, news and artworks. Just going through submissions and selecting those for publication was a project in itself. Large number of quality submissions which have been accepted filled our Winter and Spring editions up to its limits. Both printed issues will have on average around 250 pages. This gave us a good head start of the year, so with two issues completed, we can focus our attention on social networks which we have been neglecting during last year and on the kickoff of the book chat live. We are also planning short story and poetry writing contests to be launched in Spring, but we will give more details about them once our Winter Issue is out. Personally, I am very excited about authors and writings we are bringing to our readers in the Winter and the Spring Issues. It is hard and it may be unjust to single out any of the particular works, but I was especially impressed by the collection of poems FAULT LINES by Gary Beck, COULROPHOBIA & FATA MORGANA, stories by Jacob M. Appel, and translation of the POETRY OF LEE YUK SA by Sekyo Nam Haines. These writings represent real mastery in its respective categories and deserve every attention by our readers. One of the issues that gave us a bit of headache and slowed down finalizing of the Winter edition was the practice of simultaneous submissions by some authors. We do not accept simultaneous submissions and that was clearly stated in our submission requirements. Nevertheless, some authors ignore this rule. In several cases, we accepted submission, edited and formatted for our print, digital, and online issues, just to find out after informing authors about acceptance that the same work was already accepted elsewhere. I know that simultaneous submission gives higher probability to be published, but authors should be more considered about the time and work we put during selection process. Stick to rules, please. For the end, I would like to quote Haruki Murakami: “I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That’s why I want to write a book.” |
