Introduction from Far Orbit by Bascomb James.

“The Vringla/Racket Incident” is an epistolary story—one told through documents, diary entries, and/or letters. As a form, the epistolary story was quite popular in the 18th century at a time when letters were an essential part of everyday life. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is probably the best known epistolary novel while Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Helen Fielding’sBridget Jones’ Diary (1996) are more contemporary examples of this form. Bridget Jones’ Diary originally merged epistolary storytelling and serialized fiction, as the early diary entries were published as a weekly column in the British newspaper The Independent. Within the SF genre, recent epistolary works include Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War(2006) which describes the Zombie War through a series of interviews collected by the United Nations Postwar Commission. In “The Vringla/Racket Incident,” author Jakob Drud introduces us to Johanna Wilborough, a government employee looking for a babysitter, through a series of hard-sell letters she receives. The creepy babysitter prospects and final twist made me laugh out loud.

Jakob Drud lives in Aarhus, Denmark, where he writes advertising copy for a living and science fiction and fantasy for fun. He writes in English because of the many interesting writers and people involved in the SF web community. His stories have appeared in more than 20 webzines and anthologies, including Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Online. Visit his blog at jakobdrud.livejournal.com or read his tweets at @jakobdrud.

We've dug in. February has brought with it a deluge of queries and some serious winter weather. Holy hell, is it cold in the Midwest! I'm in full-on hibernation mode. Leave the house for anything other than an absolute necessity? I think not. But that sort of physical digging in is good for digging into query letters in this, our first open submission period of 2015.

Our new assistant editors, Sarena Ulibarri and Laura Harvey, are -- dare I say -- frolicking in the slush. And I completely understand. I love reading query letter slush. I open the inbox and see not a coming storm, but a tidal wave of possibilities. What will catch my interest today? What will tick all of my boxes? What project will be just the thing I was hoping for? What project will intrigue me that I didn't even know I wanted? 

Of course, the majority of what arrives in our submission inbox can't be kept. Either it's not right for us, the writing's not yet at a publishable point, the construction's almost-but-not-quite, or we just don't have space for it. All those projects that we have to decline do wear me down over time, which is why I'm quite happy that our open submission periods are only a month at a time. And three of the four shortest months of the year, as it turns out. (No, that wasn't the original reason for choosing those months, but it works nonetheless.)

Our rate of request to consider the manuscript is up from last year. Understandably so, as our assistant editors are seeking out what will be the base of their editorial lists. For them, possibilities are wide open. I am reading queries, but I'm not requesting pages this month as my own list is pretty full. Not requesting is furthering my sense of hibernation: I'm not venturing new paths through the snow, I'm curled up, snug and happy in my editorial nest . . . den . . . whatever.

It'll be intriguing, once the weather turns, to see what blooms from our collective efforts.

Regarding #AdPit: If we request material from you during #AdPit today, please follow the directions in our request/Tweet. We have multiple editors participating in the event, Editor-in-Chief Eileen Wiedbrauk (working from the @WorldWeaver_WWP account) and Assistant Editors Sarena Ulibarri and Laura Harvey. If we double-request your query, don't worry -- we're all reading from the same inbox, so we'll all see your query regardless. 

All of us  are requesting a query letter and the first 5,000 words of the manuscript sent to submissions [at] worldweaverpress [dot] com.

If we favorite something WWP has previously passed on, please forgive the redundancy and ignore the request.

Additionally, we remain open to unsolicited submissions until February 28.

In 2015 we will accept unsolicited queries for novels, novellas, serials, and collections during the months of February, June, and September only. 

Our romance imprint is also looking through #AdPit today, but more generally, Red Moon Romance is open to unsolicited queries in April, May, August, and October of 2015.

Back to #AdPit . . . You can use the information on our submission page to help format your requested query/5k -- paste it into the body of the email, no attachments please! -- but you might also like to read our previous posts and notes from the Editor on how you get to know an agency/press and Dahlia Adler's brilliant essay On Querying and Submitting Simultaneously.

Rhonda Parrish, editor of the highly anticipated Fae anthology, interviews contributor Sara Puls.

What was the inspiration for your Fae story?

My inspiration for writing this story was something pretty mundane--I had a bit of an ant problem at my house. Somehow, that got me thinking about a fairy infestation...

Was this your first foray into writing fairy stories?

I have written one other fairy story of sorts--about a lady that works as a "matchmaker" for the fairy creatures, where fairies are loosely defined as "creatures that exist because we believe in them. Because we talk about them and write about them and dream about them." That story is available here.