Update

Assembly of the Winter 2026 issue is going well. I always worry that we’re not getting enough submissions, but then I look and see that we are. 154 so far this year, including both the fall issue and the pending issue, just from Duosuma. Subtract the 61 that we got for the fall issue (with a 2.5-month submission window), and that leaves us at 93, and we still have three weeks left in this two-month submission window.

I need to assemble some kind of editorial board, for lots of good reasons. Need to figure out how to start posting volunteer opportunities for that.

Real, Legit, Non-AI Images!

Finally! Spent a lot of time searching on the freelance artist sites Dribbble.com and Fiverr.com, but to no avail. Finally settled on iStockphoto.com as an excellent source for real, human-created artwork, with paid licensing and real, human art attributions. And shopping for the right image for a given article is quite a hoot!

The Print Edition!

Is happening. As soon as I finalize a piece (and often, before), I start doing the layout for it for the print magazine. I was going to go with a piece of art from one of the upcoming issue’s art contributors, but I found something more suited to what I want moocat.net to be and am using that. This is a sneak-peak, not a final version:

Many of the artists on iStock include their location or country of origin, enabling me to feature Ukrainian artists where I can. The print mag will be done via MagCloud and will be available for purchase there. It should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 72 pages, and the expected price is somewhere around $20, with some kind of steep discount for contributors, if I can figure that out.

Applied for an ISSN for the print mag but it got declined because they need samples from a published edition first. Today applied for an e-ISSN (a real thing) for moocat.net the site itself. Hoping the Library of Congress can issue that at least, since the site has been around for 25 years!

Overall, I’m psyched, about the new issue and especially about putting out a print version (for a quarterly release) for the very first time. At 8.25 × 10.75” and in full color, this edition will be in a different format from the print anthology, which was 6 × 9”.

The next moo-alert will be much closer to the end of the submission window, so I should have more and interesting things to report then. And I can start bragging on the quality of the writing from my contributors then.

Until then, tchuisse!

— Moocat