Letter from the Editors, January 4, 2023

In a few days’ time, The Sunday Morning Transport will celebrate its first birthday. Looking back, it’s wild how far a pandemic wish for a speculative fiction newsletter has come. Thanks for joining us through our first year of stories (check out the archives!), (very) Irregular video chats, and every thing else we’ve done. We can’t wait for you to see what’s coming next.

Over the course of the year, our community has grown exponentially — we’re nearing 2,000 subscribers — and we hope, as word spreads about The Sunday Morning Transport, we will continue to grow in ways that support and celebrate our authors.

We have a lot to celebrate about the past year. We were a 2022 featured publication on Substack. Esteemed editor and critic Paula Guran picked four 2022 Sunday Morning Transport stories for her Year’s Best Fantasy collection: Elizabeth Bear’s “The Part You Throw Away,” Curtis Chen’s “The Book of Unwritten Poems,” Sarah Gailey’s “The Daily Commute,” and Max Gladstone’s “To Make Unending.” Congratulations, everyone! Finally, we’re delighted to see a number of SMT stories on the Nebula reading list already, including (let us know if we’ve missed any) Kat Howard’s “Telling the Bees,” Annalee Newitz’s “A Hole in the Light,” Aliette de Bodard’s “Sword of Bone, Halls of Thorns,” Elizabeth Bear’s “The Part You Throw Away,” and Karen Lord’s “Legend.”

As you might have guessed, we’re doing a number of things to mark our first year — a January membership sale for annual memberships, and a month of free stories (more on those below) for starters. To shift your free membership to a paid membership, click here!

This month’s upcoming stories begin on January 8 with Sarah Rees Brennan’s much-anticipated “Tears Waiting to Be Diamonds, part 1” — a new In Other Lands story! (And yes, you read that right — this is our first double-header.) On January 15, Natalie C. Parker’s “Our Lady of Tomorrow” asks “what will you do, when the future comes to town?” When Benjamin Kinney’s “The Work Clock” strikes on January 22, it will challenge how we perceive time, and work. And then finally, on January 29, the second half of Sarah Rees Brennan’s “Tears Waiting to Be Diamonds” will bring us even more Other Lands adventures.

Meantime, we’re compiling the Best of Sunday Morning Transport 2022 anthology — based on your feedback, interactions, and more — let us know your faves (they are all our favorites, so we need to know yours!) by replying to this message, or by email at  morningtransportnewsletter.gmail.com

We hope you all had a good New Year’s Day and we will see you this Sunday with our first 2023 story!

Julian and Fran