Millionth word

I'm sleepy and headachey, so figured I'd take a break from serious magazine work to post something a little more frivolous:

Back in July, I mentioned that we were coming up on SH's millionth word of fiction. Sure enough, we published our millionth word the week of 17 October; it was either in Beth Adele Long's story "Rapunzel Dreams of Knives" or in Jenn's "Tales of the Chinese Zodiac: Snake," depending on which of those you consider to have been published second that week.

It doesn't really make sense to look at which exact word was the millionth one; the wordcounts in the database aren't precise enough for that. They're probably not really precise enough to specify an exact week, for that matter. But it's fun to pretend they are.

Anyway, if y'all who are attending World Fantasy want something else to celebrate, feel free to celebrate this. At one point we editors talked about printing out various words from our stories and handing them out at a party or something, but we didn't manage to actually do that. (I also thought briefly about using a script to generate an alphabetical list of all the words we've published, with duplicates removed so it would be shorter than a million, but decided against it.) But feel free to poke through our archives and choose some of your favorites among the words we've published. If you don't want to print out your favorite words from SH and wear them proudly to a convention, feel free to post them here as comments on this entry (but if you're reading this in LiveJournal, remember to follow the link back to my journal before commenting).

As before, my million-word count includes reprints. It looks like if we stick to our current schedule, our millionth word of original fiction should appear sometime in February of 2006, possibly in the middle of a Joey Comeau story.

. . . While I'm talking about the magazine, I should say thank you! to all who donated the other day after reading my entry about the fall fund drive. I don't look at the list of donors, so I can't thank you individually, but I hereby thank you collectively. Anyone who hasn't yet donated but is planning to should do so soon, as the fund drive is drawing to a close.

One Response to “Millionth word”

  1. SarahP

    Congratulations on the millionth word, Jed! I tremble in fear and awe thinking of how many submissions that means you’ve read…

    reply

Join the Conversation