'twas the night before fund drive ...

... and even the mice are working their little paws off to get everything ready in time! Or they would be if we had any mice.

Yes, the time is very nearly upon us. And since you, loyal patrons, have made our financial lives immeasurably easier this year, it seems only fair to give you a sneak peek of our plans.

When the fund drive kicks off tomorrow, we're going to have an overall goal of $15,000. That's down from last year's $18,000, and is the first year since I've been editor-in-chief that it's gone down -- and that's thanks to all of you, and the cushion you've given us.

We do, of course, have stretch goals. You'll see the full list tomorrow, but the headlines are that we're going to be trying to add new areas of fiction to the magazine. Specifically:

Translated fiction. We're going to be partnering with two academic institutions (the new Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the University of Leeds's "Reading the Fantastic" project) to host Samovar, an imprint of <cite>Strange Horizons</cite> that will focus on speculative fiction in translation. If we raise US$18,000, we'll publish an inaugural special issue at the end of October, focusing on SF from Spain, to tie in with this year's Eurocon in Barcelona. If we raise US$21,000, we'll be able to make Samovar a regular part of the magazine, with new issues at least twice per year. Samovar will pay 6 cents per word each to authors and translators, and will accept submissions of proposed, partial, and completed translations.

Interactive fiction. As with translations, this is an area we've technically always been open to, without really necessarily having the in-house skills or experience to make it work. But it turns out—if you didn't already know, that one of our art directors, Tory Hoke, runs a fantastic IF magazine called Sub-Q ,which has published writers such as Yoon Ha Lee, J. Y. Yang, E. Lily Yu, and many more. And so, if we raised US$23,000—our maximum goal this year—we're going to bring Sub-Q in-house at <cite>Strange Horizons</cite>, to publish special issues twice per year, under a similar model to Samovar. Sub-Q will pay 9 cents per word.

Needless to say, we're quite excited about the potential of both initiatives, so you'll hear more about them as the fund drive progresses.

You may, of course, also be wondering how being a patron is going to intersect with our regular fund drive rewards. It will work like this:

• We're going to rejig our patron levels. A big reason for this is actually that we have to: Patreon (as some of you have discovered) no longer allows new pledges of less than $1 per thing, which means that our $0.50 and $0.75 levels are misleading. We're probably going to switch to per-month as a result
• You're all due rewards for the current year of support. Thank you! T-shirts (as pictured) and mugs and postcards have all been ordered, and we'll be in touch in due course about getting them to you
• If you continue your support during the fund drive you will, as normal, be automatically entered into our prize draw -- you don't have to donate anything extra
• If you do decide you want to donate extra, there will be a couple of rewards that you can't get through Patreon. Sorry, we're just sneaky like that.
• For this coming year, we'll probably determine eligibility for patron rewards based on amount donated, rather than "support for a whole year" -- that seems fairer to those who joined us mid-way through 2016 (hi!). In practice, to avoid overloading ourselves on admin, we'll probably process people in batches a few times a year.

Hopefully that all makes sense and seems reasonable; as always, feel free to ask if you have any questions. If all goes according to plan then, like last year, I'll be back during the fund drive ... with GRAPHS.

-- Niall

P.S. Yes, of course we have a fund drive bonus issue as well. I won't spoil everything that's in it, but I will tell you that it includes a review by Adam Roberts, of a novel-in-verse, written in verse.