From the Editor

by Jude Feldman

I was already knee-deep in personal complications before March 16th, when San Francisco's shelter-in-place order came down. It's pretty exciting (read: harrowing) to move your 78-year-old father and his two cats from Los Angeles to an assisted living place in Northern California in the middle of a torrential rainstorm.  It's even more exciting when they announce a shelter-in-place order just after you've passed The Grapevine.  We had planned to overnight in San Francisco, and then drive the remaining 60 miles and move Dad, his cats Nicky and Parker, and all his stuff in the next day.  When we heard about the order, we determined we had to go straight through, lest we get stuck in an untenable situation in SF.  Sixteen absolutely exhausting hours after we left LA, he and the cats were both safely installed.  The next day, the assisted living place folks told me very politely I could finish moving him in and then I needed to leave as soon as possible and not come back, since they were no longer allowing any visitors, and closing to all non-essential personnel immediately.  Given the givens, everything is as good as it can be right now but everything's also REALLY complicated.

My collected complications are now feeling closer to neck-deep.  While I'm thrilled that we're going to be able to serve our customers, even in this quite limited capacity, I am way, way behind on everything.  So this is a little PS to let you know that I'm trying to catch up but it is super slow going.  Both Alan and I do read every single (non-spam) email we receive and we try to reply to all of them, but replies are going to be slower than usual while we both get ourselves unburied.

More generally, we look forward to providing you with great books during this bizarre and uncertain period.  I said earlier today that these are really strange times, but it's also fascinating to know you're living history as it happens, as opposed to recognizing it in hindsight as usual.  I feel like genre fiction readers are better equipped than the general population to handle it when things get Deeply Weird, and indeed they have.

We'll get through this together, even while we're at least six feet apart.