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(Click on the cover to the right to read a pdf of the issue – or you might find it easier to right-click and then save it to a safe place to read at your leisure. Click here to see the cover in full.)

From next issue one of my oldest friends, the person who first alerted me to Nanowrimo’s existence, John Greenwood, will take over as editor. He has already played a part in both issues to date, having proofread each in full, and would probably have been editor from the beginning, had he not set off on a grand tour of the world immediately upon finishing his Nanowrimo 2004 novel, The Foundling, being serialised in these pages. I have quite a bit on my plate, with Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction on the go, and as municipal liaison for Birmingham, but I will still be present, as publisher (and sometime typesetter).

This issue, then.

There was no room to include the submission guidelines this time, but they can always be found on this website, along with a list of publication dates and back issues. Just follow the links in the magazine section.

From this issue onwards, we are pleased to offer a series of cut out and keep hints and tips to help you out with your November novel writing. The original plan was to have an article or two on the subject, but the more we thought about it, the more monolithic and prescriptive it seemed – sort of “take it or leave it”! So instead we’re sticking to lots of little hints from a variety of viewpoints. Tips from readers will be gratefully received and published. The first of them appears on page two.

Readers should note that these hints have been sprinkled randomly throughout the issue, with no thought given to the nearby text. Hence I will apologise in advance for any possible embarrassment they may cause to authors. Please be assured that if the hint says something along the lines of “don’t care about the quality, just get some words on the paper”, the fiction on that page is not supposed to serve as an example of work done in that way!

Two of the stories in this issue feature thumbs that come off, as noted by our future editor on the proofs.

Two of the stories in this issue feature characters called Jack. That is probably a bit less interesting, but I have a whole page to fill here.

As mentioned in issue one, we are in a peculiar position this year, having two full novels to serialise, and only a few shorter submissions, as the journal gets started. So in this issue we have more of the increasingly alarming Being an Alien, going further into areas I wish it had stayed out of, and more of the much more friendly (so far, at least, despite our rather violent cover artwork), Foundling. There’s also a bit more of the Ephemeral Homunculus (there he is, above and to the left). In addition to these regular stories, we have a great short extract from Conaire Milne, full of furry future fun, from his novel Future Amethyst. – SWT

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