Okay, I'll admit it: We're late.
See, I usually try to get each issue of RACC Presents out no more than halfway into its respective month, so that there's still a sizable chunk of the "cover date" yet to go. Of course, I could simply release an issue at the -end- of a month and date it as being for the -following- month, but that's never seemed right to me. (Nor has the practice that Marvel and DC have had that dictates that cover dates are -two- months in advance, but I digress.) So I decided to release new issues early in their months, as that made a lot more sense to me.
I kind of figured the Christmas and New Year's holidays would slow things down somewhat, as people would be too busy celebrating and being with their families to get something written by the beginning of the year. This I could deal with easily enough: I simply placed the deadline ten days into the month, figuring the requests for slots would start coming in right after New Year's.
And then Real Life came in and knocked the wheels off of my wagon.
I started the month with three writers lined up for this issue. Then I lost one. Fortunately, Dave Van Domelen volunteered to write something if he could come up with something quickly enough (which he did), and K.M. Wilcox and Andrew Barnett answered my second call for writers. A few others contacted me just this past week, but I'm going to slot them in RP4.
In the end, I had five stories for this issue, with a few slots in RP4 already filled. Not bad. And I see this as growing pains for the series -- there was a great flurry of writers wanting slots in the first two issues, but now that things are starting to settle down, it looks like most issues will have -less- than seven stories. So I'm changing the maximum number of stories per issue to six, as that'll probably be a bit more manageable for most of us.
Besides, what would we do if we used up all the good ideas now, leaving none for the future?
In other news...
Last issue, I talked about the titles sequence you see at the beginning of each issue of RP that's posted to RACC, and how I was having trouble trying to fit the imprint names into the table of contents. For this issue, I decided to try fitting them in, anyway, and figured it was worth taking a few extra lines to do so. I'm glad to say it worked better than I thought.
Of course, I never had an excuse for the web edition...
You'll notice that I've started writing brief introductions to each of the stories in this issue, to let you know things about the writers and/or the stories that you wouldn't find out, otherwise. Let me know what you think of these, as they might be a good regular feature.
I'm also thinking about no longer running the writers' biographies in the posted edition, especially since some of them have already been included in previous issues. Let me know what you think of this, too, but keep in mind that the biographies work well on the website. (Or, rather, they -will- work well; as of this writing, I still havn't gotten that page done...)
Finally, it occurs to me that February is almost upon us, which means that Valentine's Day is almost here. So why not celebrate with a love-themed issue of RACC Presents? If you're interested in writing a story that's appropriate to the Day, let me know by February 1st, and if there's enough interest, I'll proclaim RP4 to be the first-ever themed issue of the series. (The stories themselves will be due on the 8th.)
Oh, and Happy New Year. Let's hope it's a good one.
-Mike Escutia
1/24/98