Editorial

This past weekend I had the honour of sitting on the jury for WordPlay 2014, an annual festival that celebrates writerly video games. Video games have incorporated text and prose almost since the beginning (“The princess is in another castle”), but the prevalence in games has waxed and waned.

Interactive Narrative and WordPlay

BY The Editors

This past weekend I had the honour of sitting on the jury for WordPlay 2014, an annual festival that celebrates writerly video games. Video games have incorporated text and prose almost since the beginning (“The princess is in another castle”), but the prevalence in games has waxed and waned.

AE #17

Letter from the Editors #17

BY D.F. McCourt and the AE staff

Four years. If AE were a person it would have just started junior kindergarten. But magazines grow up far faster than that, especially today. We say a ten-year old dog is seventy in “dog years” because, like a seventy-year-old human, that dog is starting to get within spitting distance of its life expectancy. If we apply that logic to magazines, AE is ancient. Only 20% of new periodicals survive to celebrate a fourth birthday, making us about 90 in magazine years.

To read is human, but to skim ...

Over the Transom: The Parts That People Skip

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

It seems that every few weeks someone writes a piece about why agents will stop reading your manuscript, often within the first few sentences. It doesn’t seem fair, and perhaps it isn’t, but these are readers with a finely honed sense of what works — or more precisely, what they can sell — and they know that no one with buying power gets any more forgiving further downstream from them.

AE #11

Letter from the Editors #11

BY D.F. McCourt and the AE staff

Welcome back for Issue 11. AE continues to grow and we are doing our best to manage without too many visible growing pains or too much premature aging for our editorial staff. Without dwelling too much on statistics, our readership (as estimated by monthly unique non-automated visitors) is more than three times what it was one year ago. And in April 2012, our readership was nearly three times what it was in April 2011.