what a delight

You know the feeling when you read an amazing new book by an author you'd never read before? And how excited you get to realize that this writer probably has an entire body of work just waiting for you? Are you like me, that you either log onto your library's site and reserve everything written by that author or, if you have money, go on an Amazon spending spree?

Well. That's one of the truly wonderful parts of editing a literary magazine. In addition to submissions from the folks whose writing I've already come to know and love, we receive submissions from a number of people that are entirely new to me. And once in a while, one of them just dazzles me. We've had a couple submissions like that lately. This makes me swoon and sigh contentedly.

To give you an idea of what it takes to make me swoon, of the 108 submissions for our March issue that we've decided on, we've accepted 4. Wow. We sure have gotten picky. Our ratio used to be closer to 1 in 20. When we started out, it was about 1 in 10. So you just know that the stuff we accept is completely swoon-worthy.

And that's why the past week or so has been especially sweet: there's been some great stuff that's come in. And some of it has been from authors I'd never read before, so I have whole new worlds of words opened up to me. Yay!