Apex Book Company

2008 was a tough year for Shimmer (www.shimmerzine.com). After a long string of setbacks and delays, I closed to submissions in early summer. “Temporarily,” I said, but the truth is, I was ready to give up. Things that had been interesting challenges when we started now seemed impossible–even things that should have been really simple, like posting some updates to our web site, just went wrong. It felt like everything I tried to do was mired in quicksand. We’d been slowly grinding toward this point for years, I realized, and now we were there, and we were stuck, and we were completely demoralized.

It hurt.

Everyone knows writing’s personal — everything from the daily battle to make time to do the work to the process of digging deep within yourself to make the page come alive. Yeah, writing’s personal.

But so’s publishing. Going on hiatus, admitting defeat, realizing how badly I’d screwed up to let things get to this point — that hurt. Shutting down took off a lot of pressure, and for a little while, I felt relieved, and sure that I was doing the right thing.

A funny thing happened, though . . . I kept thinking about Shimmer. I kept reading other magazines and thinking, “That’s neat, but I would have done it differently.” I kept talking to Shimmer readers who missed us, and other editors who were still inspired by their work (especially John Klima and Sean Wallace), and finally I realized that I wasn’t ready to let Shimmer go.

It sucked to have let things slip so much, and it would suck to have to do all the work to get things back on track — but it sucked more to just let it die. I needed to stop thinking about how tough everything was and just get back to work. Don’t let anyone tell you publishing isn’t personal.

The real lesson for me is one I’ve had to learn over and over, in every area of my life: shut the fuck up and act. Do something. Get on with it. You can’t just sit there paralyzed by how huge or impossible the task is and how hopeless and despairing you are; none of that actually matters. What matters is taking action. You have to just jump in and do it anyway. I don’t care if you’re talking about writing a novel or running a magazine or painting your kitchen or finishing a triathlon: if it’s something you want, then STFU and do it.

Yeah, you’ll make mistakes. But that’s okay, because the biggest mistake is to not do it at all. You can’t let the possibility of doing it imperfectly get in the way of doing it at all.

Here’s the other lesson: once I jumped back in, the other pieces of the puzzle came together much more easily than I’d expected. There were some messy parts, yes, but overall it’s been exhilarating and inspiring and fun. So I’ll expand: STFU and do it, because it’s not as bad as you think.

So, Shimmer’s back. Issue #10 will be released in another week or two, and it’s my favorite issue yet, full of the kind of lovely and haunting stories I like the most. When I need to remember why Shimmer’s worth the effort, I look at this issue and say, because I get to publish this.

And then I STFU and get back to work.

Beth Wodzinski is the Editor-in-Chief of Shimmer. Beth Wodzinski’s fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, and Fictitious Force recently. She tests software for a living and admits to a fondness for reality TV.