From Arthur Vidro, Williston Park, NY:
      Congratulations on Calliope’s going quarterly.
        At first blush, some might consider it a step back to become a quarterly after having been a bi-monthly. But the bi-monthly status was in name only; subscribers, deep down, learned not to ex-pect an issue every two months. Now you have adjusted the publication schedule to meet the pub-lication reality.
       On the positive side, the more realistic sched-ule should allow for certain small improvements—for instance, we’ll be reading of contest-entry deadlines before the deadlines have passed. (The pages no doubt prepared with Calliope’s sched-uled, not its actual, publication date in mind.)
       The most important thing is the satisfaction that we, the readers, and you, the creators, have with the publication. That satisfaction comes from quality, not from quantity.

 The drawbacks in fewer issues per year is the fewer stories published…but I hope that the scal-ing back on publication frequency also gives you the leeway to expand the page count on deserving occasions.
       In any case, Calliope is in good hands, and this reader is very satisfied.
 
P.S. I have no comment on the Calliope web site, because I do not use the Internet…have never even gone to the Mensa web site.



Reply from CS:  Hi Arthur, and thanks for your patience. The last few years have been very tough for me. I know Sandy and I somehow kept to the bi-monthly schedule for a number of years, but my work commitments just kept growing. I still spend most of each weekend in front of a computer screen, but mostly it’s to do the work that didn’t get done Monday through Friday. I think Sandy is also relieved—maybe she’ll even have time to write her own stuff for publication again…
 
I’m hoping the web site will make up for the loss of immediacy that going quarterly must engender. I’m sorry you can’t see it, but it does provide an-other opportunity for our writers to reach an audi-ence.
 
Thanks for your kind words. It’s members like you who really do make it worthwhile.