Nattering on about what we might be looking for

We started with the title of our magazine; just the title did not make it clear what sort of stories we might want to publish.

There are some hints there. If liches are involved, there probably needs to be magic or sorcery or wizardry. (But actual liches are certainly not required!) If elegance is involved, well something in the story ought to be elegant. (Check this blog in the future for perhaps an extensive discussion of what elegant means to us in this context, but expect that sophstication, high culture and the like might be included.)

Most important, of course, the story should be something we want to read, and that we think other people will want to read.

As we were talking about it, one of us mentioned something that we thought would be cool: epic stories. As a possible example, Twenty Epics, edited by David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi. It was explicitly an anthology of "epic" stories, none of them over 10k words. (We don't actually own a copy. One of us was following its creation, blogged about by the various people involved in the early 2000s, and there was a single copy at one booth at probably the 2004 WorldCon in Boston, but there weren't any copies for sale, and we never ended up getting one.)

Another of us suggested that "cozy" fantasies are another catagory that we both like, that we should consider, so that'll probably end up in the guidelines.

Whether we'll end up thinking that "epic stories" or "cozy fantasies" are good indications to authors (or readers) of what we want is still an open question, so don't count on it, but we think it's a reasonable first guess.