Hello! I'm glad you've come!
It's my guess that the idea of the Internet reinventing itself each year is not surprising to anyone reading this. Maybe each week might be more accurate, depending on the newest technological breakthrough. Given that, though, the idea of a magazine's staff reinventing it's publication might not be all that far-fetched, either.
And in that spirit, I'm happy to present to you, on behalf of the staff, The Blue Moon Review; a literary magazine produced and edited by the very same people who put together, but did not in the end own, (something made clear to us when we resigned from the publishing company we were working for) The Blue Penny Quarterly.
What can I say? You make your life choices based on many factors. You make job decisions similarly, and when it's clear it's time to leave somewhere then it's time to leave somewhere regardless of possible consequences.
There are things that I know, things that I do not know but may someday know, and things that I will never know. In the end, I expect, what happened with BPQ, despite a verbal agreement, will remain one of the last.
BPQ is still there, and I've been told I'm legally obliged to make that fact clear. And hey! It's still good stuff. We helped to put it there. I have heard the magazine plans to continue; and what's the harm to that? More literary magazines online cannot be a bad thing. But to be honest--when is a literary magazine a financially viable thing? If you were a Company, concerned only with lawyers and the bottom line, would it be something you'd pursue? When is an online magazine a viable thing, anyway?
I can't answer the first question--my suspicion is that there isn't a financially viable literary magazine, that they're in the end all labors of love, all done for the sake of their doing more than for any other reason. I'll be surprised to see a company do that.
I'll skip the next two questions. The answer to the last question is easier, however. An online magazine is viable when there's a community around the publication, of course--when there are active readers and writers, active editors interested in producing a publication of quality regardless of the cost--whether it be money, personal time, whathaveyou. When it's a place people, and by that I mean real people, the ones behind corporate facades and computer screens, feel at home.
I'm happy to welcome you to Blue Moon's community, one that has been going strong for some time now! Please make yourself at home. I can't tell you this publication is in its third year of publication. What I can say is that I hope you'll find things here you like and things here that you do not like. I hope you join our discussion group to talk about them. I hope you'll find Blue Moon a small place to call yours here on the Internet, and that you'll choose to join us: to take part, in this small way, in a movement that is still in its infancy--a movement that will change the way we exist with our stories and our words, a movement that is fundamentally changing the world as we know it to have existed.
Blue Moon is produced by writers and artists for writers and artists as a not-for-profit venture. We're doing so because a) we feel the need to bring good material to the Internet, b) because we feel there's a demand for good material FROM the Internet, and c) because we can. And we can do it better then we've ever done before.
We're not going anywhere this time around.
Won't you stay awhile, too?
For the staff...
-Doug Lawson.
