Dimensions And Me

In the midst of the high-stress fiscal chaos that put this blog on hold for over a month, your ob'd't servand recently did some heavy re-evaluating of his volunteer commitments. As a result, after umpteen years of editing and uploading stories to the Dimensions story site, I've recently given up the position of Weight Room Librarian. To be honest, I probably should've resigned from it at least a year ago. What began as a fun pastime devolved into a chore over time: nuthin' like reading file after file of unedited prose to make you despair over the fruits of the American public school system. . .

I announced my departure on the site's Weight Board and have since received several offers to take over the job, though to date only one guy has been persistent enough to take it very far. I've passed all the unedited submissions his way and the last I heard from him, he was plowing through 'em. For all the talk about the speed of Internet publishing, there's a human bottleneck in the process – if you're gonna edit this stuff (and I really think you need to do at least a minimal amount of editing when you're aligning your material with a professional print mag), you need an editor reading it first – so it can take months before a submitted story appears online. My successor has a huge pile of fiction to read: hopefully, it won't throw him.

Though I've withdrawn from the position of Librarian, I do not intend to fully sever my relationship with Dimensions: the magazine has been a part of my life as an FA writer for too long. I still plan to submit my own stories to the Wilson Barbers Fat Magic Page as long as the site'll have me (have a fantasy submitted to the mag itself at this writing, which is being held for the as-yet-unseen day when a new print version of Dim comes out) and I'm committed to getting more good FA graphics up on the website's Weight Room. But because my work for the website has been a non-paying gig and because my life has shifted to a place where I need to be devoting more of my creative time toward bringing in more dough, I've felt the need to curtail my time in the Weight Room. A big part of me is saddened by this decision, but another part is admittedly relieved. . .