When you’ve worked on something for as long as we have–not just on this year’s Avatar Review but all the Avatar Reviews of the past–it’s not uncommon to get sidetracked by day-to-day stuff and forget where you are in the process, exactly what it is that you’re building and what that’s going to look like when you’re finished. This is especially true since we went away from “themed” issues a few years ago. When we open our submission window every fall, we never know exactly what we’re going to get–only that one way or another, it’s going to be good. For that we have only our amazing contributors to thank. And we thank them, profusely.

As editors though, we feel like we owe at least some sort of obligation to describe what it is that we’ve assembled. So here is that description. It’s the word cloud you see to the right, the top 20 most frequent regular nouns in this issue. This is what our writers and artists have “told” us through their submissions to be the important items in their current creative process, the things that they think about, obsess over, and focus on the most. It’s a pretty amazing list. Or not so amazing. OK, amazing. Just maybe not surprising.

The font is proportional, so the bigger the word, the more prominently it figures in the grand scheme of things. And the biggest word of all? Call us crazy, but we don’t think anyone will need a ruler to see what that word is.

And now it really is (time).

–The Eds:

Paula Grenside
David Ayers
Steve Harris
Howard Miller