WisCon Chronicles 4 - Pushing Up the Ceiling

The first submission deadline for WCC4 was August 1st, and a good number of people made that. Some delayed subs. were still straggling in by September 1st, often with v. good cause, and there are still a couple of items outstanding -

BUT!

We have now exceeded the notional top cap. of 60K words for the volume, and are prodding hard at the absolute ceiling of 70K, because in fact the submissions are already up to 68K words approx. And there may be another 6-7K still to come.

Thanks so much, well done and congrats. to everybody who sent me material, and there will be some really cool stuff in this one, from Nisi Shawl's exchange of letters with her mother, who was at WisCon too, if you hadn't heard, to Elise Matthesen's account of the Haiku Earring parties, with a package of stunning poetry from people well-known and not yet known - bet you never knew Pat Murphy and Sharyn November wrote haikus, or more correctly senryu, did you?

There will also be some very strong and thought-provoking panel reports and MyWisCon impressions, particularly from POCs. The POC presence in this volume is one of the things I'm really happy about.

And now, the second round commences. The editor stops soliciting, um, requesting material and starts snipping, then sending revisions for OKs so they can go off to be typeset. Important notice here:

If you have contributed material to WCC4, you are a pearl. If you have my editing requests, be a diamond and get them back as fast as possible.

The production sked is laid out, and we are already in danger of falling behind. So this round of first-edits needs to be telescoped. This is particularly important because we have the excellent cap. fill, BUT if edits don't get back in time for me to send away by end of September - not get to me but get on past me by then - I may have to jettison those pieces to stay on sked.

The WisCon Chronicle publishing sked. is a little more rigid than most , because it has an absolute back-wall - the volume has to be ready to release at WisCon 34, end of May 2010. No delays, no failed deadlines and cancelled publication, no nothing. And while that sounds centuries away, in actual working time, it's not very far at all.

Soooo, if you've had one of Those E-Mails with a revised file attached, please open it up, run down the Mark-ups, tick or X, and send it back. Then the happy but still anxious editor will be able to get on to the more delectable worry, sorting out the Table of Contents. And will that be a dilemma of feasts, oh, yes, indeed...