Divided We Stand

Welcome to the second issue of On The Premises! Things were rocky there for a while...our premise confused a few people, and we apologize for that. As we said in our newsletter, we learned a lot about what makes a good premise and what doesn’t, and we’ll apply what we learned from now on.

(What do you mean you don’t subscribe to our monthly, very short newsletter? Silly reader! Write to
SignMeUp@OnThePremises.com and we’ll correct your error in judgment.)

What else did we learn? Our prize judges have even more diverse tastes than we thought. Opinions on the honorable mentions were
highly divided. Lots of fun and interesting arguments, which is good in my opinion, because one of our goals is to produce issues that contain a variety of stories, for a variety of tastes.

See, some fiction magazines seem to publish the same kinds of stories over and over. We don’t want to. The first issue had no science fiction pieces; this issue has, arguably, three. But three very different
kinds of science fiction! Plus a comedy and a straightforward Arabian-style fantasy. If you can find a fiction magazine that publishes five stories more different from each other than these in the same issue, let us know. We may have set a record. I believe every fan of short fiction will find something they like in this issue.

Enough blather. On with the stories! And be sure to check out the cartoons our illustrator, Francis Heaney, provided. We think he came through for us again, but what do
you think?

Keep writing and keep reading!

Tarl Roger Kudrick,
co-publisher of
On The Premises magazine