New Maps readers,

You may have already gathered, from what I write in the Editor’s Note page and from release dates that push ever further toward the end of their respective seasons, but this has been a challenging year for finding the time to put this magazine together. I’m writing now to tell you that my personal life has finally asserted itself fully enough that I have to do something I hoped never to have to do: skip an issue.

To tell it briefly: This whole warm season, when not working my day job, I’ve been putting together a 25-foot yurt for me and my family to live in this winter. I hoped to have it raised sometime around now. But at the same time that I’ve been working on that, my partner has been going through an unexpectedly exhausting pregnancy, and I’ve had to be more available for family duties. Add in delays in drying our floorboards, and it’s turning out that the yurt won’t be ready for a while yet. And our interim place—a totally different and much smaller yurt we’re borrowing—seemed perfectly winter-worthy when we assessed that possibility in the sunny days of summer, but now the days have turned short and cold, we’ve had to reassess in a hurry and scramble to find something with amenities like, say, electric lights.

For those keeping count, that means my plate now has on it a day job, time filling in when my partner has no choice but to take a nap, a toddler who loves climbing on me, a yurt-building project, moving house, winterizing our homestead, and the Fall issue of New Maps.

In other words, I’ve got so many issues, my issues have issues. Something’s gotta give.

I’ll be back at it for the Winter issue, and hopefully with the break I’ll be able to get it out nice and early in the season, just after the new year. In the meantime, if you have a one-time subscription, its last issue will simply get pushed forward by one issue. If you have an auto-renewing subscription, the situation is slightly more complex, and you should receive an email soon with a few different options. And when Vol. 4 is made available as a Year Package, it’ll of course be at a lower price.

Thanks for your understanding.

Nathanael Bonnell
Editor