I LOVE Being an Editor.

I will start this post off with some (extra) honesty: I wasn't sure how this magazine was going to do when I first started it. I'm a gal prone to sudden and explosive ideas, and this was certainly one of them. I had been going through the process of submitting my own stories, realizing how time-consuming and difficult that process is, and thinking, "I wonder how I can help." It was pretty clear, very early on, that there are a lot of standards in the publishing industry that I don't agree with.

As a writer, it has always frustrated me that the expectation is a pretty substantial wait time for a yes / no on a single story, without too much elaboration. I love feedback on my stories, I love growing my craft, and I love talking about my inspiration behind my pieces. Eventually, I wondered - it couldn't just be me who felt this way. The Internet, although chaotic and sometimes harmful, can be a wonderful sandbox of a tool to affect positive change.

And thus, the Coffee Ring Review was born.

I started this magazine in the middle of my final semester of undergrad. I wasn't sure how big it would get to be, or if anyone would really care about it at all. Still, I made the website, and the blog, and the Twitter, and the Chillsubs profile, and I committed to it anyway. I made a plan for what I wanted this space to be, and despite my uncertainties about what this space could be, I opened submissions for the first time.

In my first open period for this magazine, calling for somewhat lengthy prose pieces, I got over fifty submissions. FIFTY! (That I am still reading through, and blogging about between pieces.)

The time between me opening submissions and me writing this blog has made me very aware of something: I LOVE being an editor. I absolutely adore reading a piece and finding stories that fit in my inaugural edition. What I love MORE is the certainty that even if my magazine isn't a great fit for someone's story, I can still offer the positivity that comes with giving constructive feedback. I can still help, somehow, even if that help doesn't come in the form of an acceptance. And even more than THAT, I love that you all love this, too. It sucks to get a rejection, and it sucks to send them; it's made just a bit easier by someone's response to my feedback, letting me know that I've helped.

It's a process that I've truly fallen in love with. So, of course, I had to blog about it.

I like to think that some people read this blog. To those of you who've opened this post and made it this far, I promise I'm getting to the point. That point being: when there's a chance you'll love something, you should do it. Especially if it's low-stakes, and you can go at your own pace, try it. If you're not sure whether anyone will care, try it anyway. If you think nobody cares the way you do, try it anyway. If there's even a modicum of hope that you will enjoy doing something, even if you're not sure, try it anyway.

Either you won't love it, and you'll be able to walk away from it knowing a bit more about yourself, or you will.

And then you'll get to write a blog post about it.