Read On About Radon

Today we'll chat about a slew of journal-related happenings and behind-the-scenes deliberations. Also attached is the world's tiniest teaser for the issue 5 cover art. 

There's a lot to get into, and no set path for this post. So let's start with the good news:

1) Seize the Press (StP) has their next issue expected this month. All $4+ patrons will get the PDF and Epub sent to their emails once the issue is live. StP doesn't like to announce their issues ahead of time, but they are shooting for around mid-July, assuming no delays. 

2) Two days ago we made our pay increase official. No longer at the bottom-rung of the semi-pro journal category, we're solidly in the 2¢/word and $20/poem realm. We hope this added pay will help poets reach the SFWA $100 threshold for membership when they begin accepting poets this year. Every person reading this post had a direct hand in making this a reality. To be "fully funded" and expand rates again would require us to need $216/month. So we expect to be at this respectable pay rate for the foreseeable future. 

Neutral things to announce:

3) Yesterday we posted an opening for Fiction Editor on CLMP's "Jobs with Publishers" webpage (clmp.org/programs-opportunities/jobs-with-publishers). Our fiction submissions remain higher than poetry, and Renee and Teague have had to lower the amount of work they can do for Radon due to day job demands at APA and their research lab, respectively. Through our 2022 posting we found Kelsey and Eden, now two integral team members and hope to find one more. With Radon's now consistent content creation schedule, another hand would be welcome. 

4) We're messing with a redesign of our homepage. Likely using a full-screen carousel to direct the visitor to various parts of the site. Now that we have a handle on creating Canva graphics we figure a more visual front page might be prudent, rather than the old text-based one that simply says our four genres in big text. We also hope it will drive additional traffic toward the issue and interview pages.

5) We've gone nearly a month now without a new acceptance. It's just one of those moments, it seems. We've had this scare before, but the stories always eventually come. With the pay rate increase we're doubly sure it will happen in its time. We read until August 15th so no rush, though we do like to get an early jump to do developmental editing.

6) We've stopped issuing authors "Revise and Resubmit" decisions for now. We've tried a number of these in 2023 and sadly they never quite worked out. There's nothing more disheartening for both the editor and the author to get an interested letter and have it ultimately fall through, especially after additional work was done. We tried to give detailed commentary and what we would like in a revision, but what was returned never quite matched what Radon was going for. 

7) Speaking of "what Radon is looking for," we continue to receive a large number of dystopian stories where we often tell them would be better off in a dedicated horror or dystopian magazine. We receive a number of torture and child death stories that lack any accompanying redemptive notes or reason for their horrific storytelling. 

Radon, we've found, wants dystopian stories that are not simply sad or acquiescent to the powers that be, but actively show a way out of the situation, show people fighting back, show somehow the characters working to break the bonds that bind them.

Dystopia has always felt like our black sheep, the fourth genre we added after the others, the one that never gets quite pinned down properly. Perhaps that is our own fault for not giving more details in our sub guidelines, or maybe it's a problem with the word itself and its associations. Anarchism itself is an optimistic ideology (though not utopian, we would argue) which might be causing some of the friction in submission and editorial direction. 

8) We've been a bit disappointed that more explicit anarchists submissions are not finding their way to us. What we mean by that are stories and poems that are not science fiction, but simply political-esque stories or poems from an anarchist writer. The last one that comes to mind is issue 3's courtroom poem Ste-nog-ra-phy. (radonjournal.com/issue3/ste-nog-ra-phy)

We wonder if we have not been successful at advertising our existence into the anarchist circles, or if by their nature most anarchists trend toward writing non-fiction rather than poetry and fiction. Leftists love reading and making zines (hell we did in the past ourselves), so we're not sure where the problem lies with the journal.