If you're a fiction writer interested in submitting to us, you may have noticed that we've been closed to submissions for an unusually long time, more or less since the end of the Our Queer Planet call, and that we haven't announced a date for re-opening. You may be wondering what that's about.

The simple answer is that it's been one of those years. Since everyone who works on Strange Horizons is a volunteer, real life inevitably takes precedence now and then; indeed that's one of the reasons the magazine is structured the way it is, with multiple editors in each department. It gives us as an organisation a certain amount of resiliency, and us as individuals the chance to have a break when we need to. For the fiction department, in various ways, real life in 2016 has been demanding, and over the course of the summer it's become clear that things are not returning to an even keel as quickly as we would like.

We are therefore delighted to announce that Vajra Chandrasekera is joining us as a Fiction Editor, working with Lila Garrott, Catherine Krahe, and An Owomoyela.

If you've been reading Strange Horizons recently, there's a good chance that you recognise Vajra's name and if you do, I suspect you're as excited as I am about him joining the magazine's staff. As a book club participant, occasional reviewer and regular columnist, he has contributed some of the most insightful critical thinking we've had the pleasure of publishing in the last year. And as an author—with July's "Sweet Marrow", and this week's "Applied Cenotaphics in the Long, Long Longitudes"—he's contributed two wonderfully elegant and thought-provoking stories. Put another way, by far the biggest downside of him joining the magazine is that we won't be publishing very much by him for the foreseeable future!

In organisational terms, this should mean that we will be able to re-open to fiction submissions in the near-ish future—although authors, we'll still need you to bear with us for a few more weeks. It also means that the workload for each fiction editor will be reduced, and that it will be easier for individual editors to take breaks as and when needed. (These will be indicated on our masthead as they occur.) Most importantly, though, in creative terms, I think Vajra's input can only be a good thing for the magazine, and I can't wait to read the stories he brings to our pages.