Shred of Evidence

Those of you who write mystery and crime stories may have noticed changes to Shred’s guidelines. Hopefully the nuts and bolts are pretty self-explanatory, but I’d like to take this opportunity to sketch out the thinking behind the changes.

I consider original short stories to be the meat of the site. That’s what the webzine published for the first three years of its existence, and I’m proud of each issue. By publishing a story every other week, over the course of the year Shred will release about the same number of stories as on the quarterly schedule. But two weeks is a long gap, so I would like to run something during those off weeks.

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Last month, I announced that dead but dreaming Shred would drag itself forth from the watery bowels of R’lyeh. I also set some priorities in terms of whose needs would be dealt with first:

Past contributors: If you have any webzine business (including but not limited to requests for story removal), please send me an e-mail with “Shred Contributors” in the subject line. If your e-mail is tagged like this, I’ll be able to deal with it more quickly.

Patient submitters: I have submissions from August 2006 to April 2007, and will respond to all outstanding e-mails before Monday. If you submitted (but did not officially withdraw) a story during that timeframe and have not received a response by the 28th, please consider yourself in the “neglected submitters” category.

Neglected submitters: As I said last month, I lost a large number of e-mails. If you submitted a story before August, and would like to have it considered for publication, please resubmit with “Submission: Original” in the subject line.

Please note that Shred is otherwise closed to submissions of original short fiction. (Yes, you’re on the honor system, since I don’t have a list of whose e-mails were deleted. And yes, I’m okay with that; my prospective authors are a good bunch.) Once more, you have my sincere apologies.

Given that the last issue of Shred was released in February 2006, the “next issue” should have come out in May 2006. I will be doing things by halves—2006 is well past, but I’ll at least hit the “May” part. Next Monday, Shred 2.0 will publish “Births, Marriages and Deaths” by Aliya Whiteley.

The new format of the site may be tweaked a bit in the coming days, but what you see now will be pretty much what you get. I’m interested in reader feedback. In the spirit of Web 2.0, I am enabling comments on stories and news items. Registration is encouraged but not required. In a couple of months I’ll revisit commenting and other options for making the website more interactive.

The old version of the site will remain online. I am in the process of moving stories into the new content management system and backdating them appropriately. No promises as to when I finish that particular task. I have no plans to delete the Shred 1.0 pages, so don’t fret too much about updating links.