Hope you had a great end of 2024 and beginning of 2025. The editing team for Lesbians in Space (J.S. Fields, Heather Tracy, and William Tracy) hit the ground running in January to read through the amazing submissions you all sent in for the anthology! We spent about a week reading through them all, and I can tell you, there are some amazingstories.
Our final entrant count for submissions was 54 stories, and a total of almost 234,000 words! To put this in perspective, we raised enough money during the campaign to pay authors for about 20 stories or around 80,000 words...
That means we got enough stories to fill almost three anthologies!
We dug in, trying to categorize the different types of stories we got, from stories about alien contact, to classic space opera, to heists, pirates, dragons, fungus, AI, and more. The problem was, we kept running into cutting some of our favorite stories, no matter how we organized it, but we finally came to a solution, and that leads to our submission announcements, as well as our surprise!
First, we did regrettably have to reject a good number of our submissions, so some of you may have gotten a rejection letter already. There were so many fantastic stories here, it was really hard to choose.
But that also means we will be sending out acceptance letters in the next few days for those authors we want to represent in Lesbians in Space: Where No Man Has Gone Before! If you have not received a rejection letter and submitted a story, be on the lookout in the next week for a communication!
BUT
We also have a surprise announcement.
We have SO many great stories, we are planning to make a second anthology!
That's right! On the heels of our first round of acceptance letters, we're going to be contacting a select number of the entrants to prepare for Lesbians in Space: The Sapphics Strike Back! We are in the first stages of planning a new campaign for this second anthology, with a brand new cover and new interior artwork, that will show off some of the great stories we just couldn't fit in the first one. Those who submitted and have been chosen for the second anthology will also be getting an acceptance letter and more information very soon!
Details are still up in the air for this, as Space Wizard will also have our usual Year 4 campaign, for all the other books releasing from Space Wizard Science Fantasy between July 2025 and July 2026, but we plan to publish both anthologies in 2025!
Stay tuned for more sapphic excitement! In other news, hopefully most all of you have received your other goodies from the campaign (except for international shipments). If you haven't received something you think you should have, please email wctracy at williamctracy dot com to let me know and I can investigate!
That's it for now, but we'll be back next time with more information on both anthologies!
