I finally announce that I’m writing reviews for Phantasmagorium, and a day or two later the magazine goes into hibernation. In these cases, hibernation often means death, but who knows? I’m not involved any more.

Then another magazine called Nine, where I’d submitted a story and was waiting to hear back, abruptly ceased publication, or went into infinite hibernation mode, or something.

I was inspired to go back through my submission records and see how many magazines have imploded while they were considering one of my stories (the implications)… it seems to be at least a half dozen. Considering the number of magazines I’ve submitted to, that’s a lot. The statistical analyst in me is tempted to assert something like the following:

If I submit something to a magazine that has published less than five or six issues, the likelihood of that magazine dying during the time my work is under consideration is at least 10%.

Let’s call this Griffin’s Law of Unestablished Periodicals. Yes, let’s.

In happier magazine-related news, during the recent subscription drive for Apex Magazine (where my story “The Lure of Devouring Light” will appear before long — don’t worry, Apex has a lot more than 5-6 issues behind it, and is exempt from Griffin’s Law) I bought a subscription. Part of the subscription drive deal was that people who bought subscriptions would be entered into raffle drawings. There’s a list of prizes here.

I won a raffle!

In particular, I won item #3, Jennifer Pelland duo: Machine and Unwelcome Bodies. These books sounded interesting to me, and I already owned a lot of the other Apex swag, so this is cool. I win!