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Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa
by Michael Gallant

Before I begin, let me say that this is intended as an explanation, not an excuse.

The past two years have been rough ones for the Muse. I was working full time and going to school full time. I did have a brief period of unemployment, but made up for that with a second job in addition to the school and full time job.

Ray spent much of the winters on the road, with patchy Internet access, no way to get at the books, and sporadic showers. He even had to cross a few dry counties, and that is a fearsome thing for an editor.

Throughout all this, we had the epic hubris to think that we could continue to run the site.

Lesser men, or wiser ones, may have gone on hiatus, or reduced the issues per year, or stories per issue. Not us. We never shrink from a challenge. We may show up an hour late, hung over, forget our dueling pistol and get sick all over our second, but we never shrink.

We did manage to keep QM more or less afloat. In the last 30 months, we only missed two issues, and good, solid fiction got published, bringing new voices to the genre.

Where we fell down was often not so visible to our readers. We let down our greatest asset, our authors. Payments lagged, not out of any attempt to swindle our writers, but out of disorganization and the fact that our staff, such as it is, was either on the road working out of the trunk of a converted veggie-burning diesel or trying to do bookkeeping in the wee hours between 90 hours a week of work.

We still managed to plow through the submission piles, but rejection letters went out late or not at all, acceptances were sometimes delayed, and author inquiries were sometimes unanswered, answered late, or with inexcusable surliness, even by QM standards.

Now, our ordeal is over. I have graduated, and Ray is once more staying put, so I guess the DNA test didn't implicate him. We are again able to treat the zine with our usual level of benevolent neglect, instead of the naked abuse we've been subjecting it to.

Where we go in this new year I cannot say, but we will begin it by setting things right. We will dig through the books ad resolve any outstanding payment issues, and we will gradually sort through the heaps of stories in the slushpile to inform authors of acceptance or rejection.

We hope you accept our heartfelt apology, ignore that we were ill in your flowerbed, and take us back.

 

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