Dear Readers

By Meredith Allard

Is ten years a long time? Going back to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the answer is it depends. Sometimes time drags on and on, and on, like when I was in my classroom and it was 2:30 p.m. and school didn’t get out until 3:06. Every time I looked at the clock it was just two minutes later than it was before. Yet when I chat with friends from high school on Facebook, it’s hard to believe how many years have passed since we were sitting under the trees on the quad of the campus of Chatsworth High School, silly young people we were then. It’s already ten years since The Copperfield Review went online. And, like everything else, in some ways it seems like forever, and in other ways time has passed so quickly.

I first created The Copperfield Review because I was frustrated looking for a market where I could send my own historical fiction since there were few, if any, markets that accepted that genre. Thinking there must be other writers having that problem, too, I took a class at Learning Tree University to learn how to put together this crazy thing called an e-zine. Ten years ago e-zines were relatively new and not well accepted as a place to find great literature. People used to think that writers published online because they couldn’t get published anywhere else. These days that great print medium, the American publishing industry, has been added to the endangered species list, and the distinction between print and online has become blurred as more people accept that good writing is good writing wherever you find it. Now many readers and writers turn to e-zines, e-books, social networks, and blogs, and many wonderful writers are published there. Over our ten years online, The Copperfield Review has had the good fortune of publishing a number of those wonderful writers. I am constantly amazed to discover the fans we have all over the world, especially in the UK. Not bad for a little e-zine started on a whim in Los Angeles ten years ago.

I would like to personally thank the many readers and writers who have kept us busy for the past decade. It is a glorious thing to see that others love historical fiction as much as we do. I hope to continue this journey for at least another ten years.

Happy tenth anniversary, Copperfield readers.

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Meredith Allard is the executive editor of The Copperfield Review.