I recently picked up my collection of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazines. I was visiting my parents in Oregon, and for once I was both checking a bag and had some extra room inside it. Side note: my parents gave me an EXCELLENT Christmas gift—a “disposable” piece of luggage they got at a yard sale and $25 for the checked bag fee. So the total value of the gift was $26 (can you tell how much the yard sale luggage was?). It sure beat using the USPS price-wise, and everything got across the country in just a single day!

Anyway, I’ve wanted to get these back home with me for quite a while now. Fantasy & Science Fiction is the magazine that first made me want to write. Since I was very young I knew about novels, of course, but I didn’t click immediately that the realm of short story composition is vast, and in pretty much every genre. It wasn’t until I started reading F&SF that I realized short stories are constantly being published; they aren’t a thing of the past, but rather a thing of the now. And magazines like F&SF always need authors willing to send in submissions. Though writing at this point is only a hobby for me, I hope that one day I’ll be able to send a story off to a magazine that played such a formative part of my life.

After discovering F&SF I started to read the other giants of scifi short story publishing, including Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction. If you were curious, all of these predate me by quite a bit; F&SF started publishing in 1949, Analog in 1930, and Asimov’s in 1977. Now there’s other giants like Clarksworld Magazine, which came out in 2006, and so many online-only publications that I couldn’t begin to list them all. I like almost every single one of them, and in the future I’ll have to detail why I’m interested in them and how they vary. For now, however, I’ll be content to have my F&SF print collection back, and in the coming days I’ll be thumbing through them and re-reading stories whenever I have the chance. Maybe I won’t post on the blog because of it, he he!

–Jeff and Leah