The Good Break – An Update from the Editor in Chief

Happy Leap Year, everyone. And I have an announcement for you all.

I wanted to start with: I can’t believe we’re still a thing.

Literary magazines aren’t easy. Usually, they’re run by writers, for writers, which means the only people who read them are the people who submit to them. I don’t need give you the profit margins on that, but being so underground comes with another issue: even getting submissions is tough.

A lot of writers are scared to submit. I would know because I’m one of them. We sit at our computers, and perfect our stories and poems because that’s easy. Changing one word here, or one sentence there, there’s no need to be self-conscious because you can fix everything. All the problems of your work come down to things that need to be improved, and you can improve it.

And then you submit, and all that goes out the window. No more editing. If there was a typo on the second page, it’s a typo someone will see, and one they’ll judge you for.

I’m saying I get it. It’s hard. And thank you to so many of you for overcoming that hesitation that can manifest as outright fear. We’ve been going six months with no breaks.

Until now.

As it becomes clear that this is going to remain a thing, and not just some Post-Grad experiment, we’ve been seeking ways to legitimize ourselves. Obviously, a simple wordpress blog does not rate high on the legitimacy scale. In the coming month, we’ll be looking into making ourselves sleeker, more presentable, more official, basically the kind of literary magazine that gets featured in Writer’s Digest, or so we hope.

I won’t tell you officially what changes we’re going to be making, but I can tell you what I want, eventually: I want us to have a sleeker appearance. I want a domain name better than themetaworker.wordpress.com. I want a motto and logo that people recognize. I want artists to actually want to submit to us, instead of us having to find pictures on flickr. I want over a thousand followers. I want thousands of followers. Hell, why not even a print version?

I believe that these things are all possible…eventually. But to do any of them we need to concentrate our energy on improvement. And that’s what our next several meetings will be about. For at least the next month, we won’t be publishing any submissions. We will still be accepting them, and we will still be reading them. Please keep submitting, especially because we want to come back from this break with a swath of new accepted submissions.

That being said, we have no intention of missing next week’s Monday update, or the update after that. Keep following us, because there’s more to come. Expect some surprises down the line.

Thank you, again, for helping us get this far.