Change is in the air (and it smells kind of like barbecue)

Hello, weary travellers …

Change is in the air behind the scenes at TTL. You may have noticed our stone-cold dead social media feeds and slower recent response times; it turns out that the one-two punch of some personal life changes and good old fashioned burnout hit me (Aimee) hard over the last year. After five years here in the Lounge, it feels like time for me to step back–for now, forever? Hard to say right now, when the burnout smoke is still so fresh.

So what does that mean for TTL? Fortunately this is not a unilateral plug-pulling event. I’ll still be here, a little bit, in some capacity as co-publisher. But this was already getting to be too big a show for two editors to run without help, and it’s definitely too much for Bennett to wrangle alone. Which means we’re hoping to bring a few people on board in 2024. Specifically:

• Co-editor. Along with Bennett, read some first-round and all final-round submissions, make ToC decisions, write every other editorial or so.
• First readers. Read first-round submissions, kick the ones you think are a good TTL fit up to the editors and send first-round rejections for the rest. The number of submissions you’re committing to read can be totally flexible; a little bit of help goes a long way right now.
• Social media presence. We have (dusty) social media profiles on X/Twitter and Bluesky right now; we’d like to at least maintain a presence on Bluesky, but we can be flexible on this, too.

If any of these sound like something you’d enjoy doing, send us an email at translunartravelerslounge@gmail.com with a subject line of “TTL volunteer” (just to help us sort things in the inbox), and in the body you can let us know where your interests lie. We’ll keep our antennas up until February 5, to give us enough time to make decisions and onboard people before submissions re-open in March.

And I’d also like to say before I skulk off into the shadows that I’m so grateful for the five years I spent here – all the authors who trusted us with their work, all the stories that made me laugh or cry (or sometimes both), all the readers who amplified the authors and the work that they connected with. I’m looking forward to see what the Lounge serves up next, with some fresh eyes at the helm. And I hope to see all of you in the Lounge again soon–but this time, I’ll be on the other side of the bar. Cheers.