Alright, I have my gloves on, my mouth guard in, and my protective eye-wear. I'm all set for the rumble that's sure to happen.

Paul Raven, who currently runs Futurismic, posted a response to Gary Gibson's response to Richard Morgan's essay about the bickering within the genre community.

Ok maybe not. John over at SF Signal has a great post in regards to this post from Matthew Sanborn Smith.

Hello everyone.

Things seem to be working out well. I've got a few new people helping me out (who will be listed below), and I will be able to accept submissions starting on the first of June. We'll be switching to LuLu for our printing needs, though some tweaking needs to be done for the subscription part of things. We'll get it figured out, though. Download purchases (the .pdf) will still be available on the website with a bit more ease. It's being worked on now.

Here is some other news.

This should have come a long while ago. Over the past few weeks, I've looked over stories again and again, and I've picked a number that I enjoy, and I truly wish to promote; however, I've also looked at the sales of the magazine, the cost of printing, and the payments of the authors, and it's just too much. Also, it's a lot of work for one guy with a full-time job and six freelance gigs at the moment. So for now, Sheer Spec will be closing down. Here's the run-down:

Volume 1, Issue 2 is available for download on the site. For those of you who have a paid digital subscription, you can simply click on the link in the right-hand navigation bar (after you've logged into the site), and it'll automatically begin the download. For those with a print subscription, please email me, and I'll send the pdf over to you. I'm working on compiling the files to send to the printer, so as soon as things are worked out there, everyone who is owed a print copy will get one.

I was trained in college with 'The Classics' - those being the canon of books deemed worthy of study in 'Literature' courses for university by some all-knowing body back in the 60s. They're good books for the most part, but they're not all stellar like my professors tried to convince me. They're also missing a lot of books on their list that aren't on there because of their 'genre' classification. Some slim few slip through the cracks, though, because of their subtlety or good marketing.

I'm sure many of you are wondering about the massive delay on the magazine. My apologies for the delay in my explanation.

1. As pointed out by Deven D Atkinson on her blog, we've had some issues not only with our printer by my layout person. I'm working on getting a replacement of the later.

2. I'm in serious need of a business partner more administratively-minded than I. There are a lot of things left undone that I'm continually having to go back and fix after I realize I've messed up.

I'm sure many of you have noticed the lack of an Issue #2 on the site. It will be up shortly. We're just waiting on contracts to get back. Issue #3 may be a bit delayed, as well, as we've had a pretty small selection to pick from where stories are concerned. We hope to get a few more before the end of the year to allow us to put Issue #3 together quickly.

The folks at Mundane SF are at it again with their derision. Here is my response to the post that was made about Sarah Hall, the winner of UK's John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

You were building up to something that I would have agreed with before you made your massively hasty generalization about "Science Fiction" as a collective unit.

So I tried diligently at NaNo this year, having completed it successfully last year, and I am throwing in the towel. That's not to say that I've stopped writing; I just know that I won't be able to write 25,000 words by the end of the month. I still have a substantial piece of work done, though, and that is always nice.

In other news . . .