Oh, wow, yawn. I've spent the past two hours going over Flytrap fiction submissions. I read the last few I hadn't read yet, then responded to the whole bunch of them. It took a while. Then I looked at my "Maybe" pile, which held easily twice as many stories as I could actually accept, and began to cull. One excellent story got cut because I had another story very similar to it, that was shorter. A couple of stories got cut because the authors were in Flytrap #1, and all other things being equal, I wanted to publish new people. (There is one fiction writer from the first issue who will have a story in the second one, because it was too good and bizarre to miss.) Then I had to get into the whole balance-and-mixture territory, and figure out what went together well, which thematically or tonally similar stories I preferred, and so on. It was hard, and I rejected some stories that I'd love to publish, because there were others I loved slightly more.

Anyway, I did it. The fiction line-up for Flytrap 2 is set. There's some fabulous stuff here, by names familiar and unfamiliar. If you submitted fiction, your reply is winging its way through the ether as I type. Unless you submitted by mail, in which case your reply will be dropped into a mailbox sometime in the next day or two.

Of course, this is something of a tease, because I'm not going to post titles or bylines yet. People haven't even gotten their acceptances yet, after all, and it's possible stories will be withdrawn, or whatever. We'll wait and post the whole Table of Contents at once, probably late this month. Heather hasn't gone through poetry yet, and there's still some non-fiction under consideration, and etc. It's shaping up to be a good issue, though.