Six days left, and we're heading towards ,000 raised -- we need another 0 or so to hit that milestone, at which point we'll publish the next part of our fund drive issue, Michele Bannister's poem, "The Architect of Snow." After that, at $7,000, we have "Household Management", a new story by Ellen Klages. We've also had a big final update of the fund drive prizes list, adding novels by William Alexander, Brenda Cooper, Kathe Koja, and Rebecca Ore, anthologies edited by the dynamic duos of Steve Berman/Connie Wilkins, Anil Menon/Vandana Singh, and Chris Nakashima-Brown/Eduardo Jimenez Mayo; lots of good stuff, tell your friends! Don't forget, we're heading towards $8,000 as our main goal and then, if we get there, we'll raise our pay rate for poetry at $9,000, our pay for reviews at $10,000, and we'll add podcasts of our stories at $11,000.

In the meantime, in keeping with our numerically-themed posts of recent days, here's another list to give you some afternoon reading. We're proud to be a magazine that consistently publishes new voices -- so here are a half-dozen writers you may not have realised that we published, back in the day.

1. John Scalzi. We published his story, "Alien Animal Encounters", way back in 2001 -- his first professional sale. Five years later he published his first novel, Old Man's War, which picked up a Hugo nomination; and he's been troubling awards shortlists ever since.

2. Speaking of Hugos, this year's winner in the Best Novelette category was Charlie Jane Anders, for her Tor.com story, "Six Months, Three Days." We published her story "Not to Mention Jack" in 2002, which may not have been her very first story sale but was pretty early on; and we've been lucky enough to have a couple of other stories by her since as well, "Horatius and Clodia" in 2005, and "Source Decay" in 2011.

3. Another very first published story, I believe, was Justine Larbalestier's "The Cruel Brother" in 2001. Justine has since gone on to a great YA career, including the Magic or Madness trilogy (the first volume of which won the Andre Norton Award), Liar, and this year's Team Human. (I also recommend her nonfiction book The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, published by Wesleyan in 2002.)

4. We published "The Palm Tree Bandit" by Nnedi Okorafor in 2000; more recently she's published several acclaimed YA novels, including Zarah the Windseeker, The Shadow Speaker and this year's Akata Witch, and to cap it all took home the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel last year, with Who Fears Death.

5. "Three Tales From Sky River: Myths For a Starfaring Age" was Vandana Singh's first pro fiction sale back in 2004 (and we actually published a poem by her the year before). She blogged about what it meant to her last week. We've been delighted to publish another of Vandana's stories, "Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra", along with a regular column by her last year. In the meantime her novella Distances won the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award and was honor listed for the Tiptree Award, her collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories came out from Zubaan Books, and this year she co-edited Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana with Anil Menon.

6. We also published Mary Robinette Kowal's first pro sale "Portrait of Ari", in 2006, and started her clock for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, which she won in 2008. Her first novel Shades of Milk and Honey was shortlisted for the 2010 Nebula Award, her story "For Want of a Nail" won a Hugo in 2011, and last year she served as Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.