Well, So Much for That Idea ...

Four months ago, we reported that British writer John Rickards (Burial Ground, The Darkness Inside) was going to launch a new crime-fiction Webzine called Degeneration Twenty in January of this year. And then we waited ... and waited ... and still the Webzine did not appear. Now, we hear from Rickards that we can stop holding our breaths. “It’s been coming for a few weeks,” he writes in his blog, “and I doubt it’s much of a surprise to anyone, but I’ve officially killed Degeneration Twenty for the time being. To borrow from an e-mail I’ve just sent everyone who contributed, to save me from explaining myself twice:

“Things at Rickards Towers haven’t been a never-ending cavalcade of jollies of late, and time’s been pretty tight on top of that. My missus has been struggling with post-natal depression since last year and it reached a peak last month, and while we’re dealing with it and it seems to be improving, it has/is eating into the available 24 hours a day. It also peaked just as I finished the last book, and took up what I was expecting to be a nice couple of weeks’ break in the work schedule that would’ve allowed me to bang together the mag. Now, of course, I’m in the editing grind and the holiday is over.

“Coupled to that, I’m not sure the mag would actually go anywhere towards accomplishing what it was originally intended to, and my enthusiasm’s been rather on the wane.”

Which is true: while the sentiment’s still there, I’ve become less and less certain that there’d been any real point in throwing energy at it in its intended form. The fiction side was great, but on the actual editorial side, all I could see was me repeating myself and throwing in “this is great” and “this sucks” commentary. And what, frankly, would be the purpose of that? [The] Internet’s full of that already. Add in the time it takes to read anything to give it a review and it’s just not going to happen. I’d rather kill it before it happens than have it fizzle after one shout, too.

I have a few different, probably more worthwhile thought knocking around, and it’s quite possible that at some point it’ll rise again in a new, mutated form. But for now, D20’s dead, baby.

Too bad. Yes, there are a number of Internet sources of original crime fiction, but they’re not certainly created equal. And having somebody of Rickards’ caliber editing D20 could have been a terrific contribution. But we fully understand having no time or energy to do what your brain and heart wish you would do. We’ll just hope to hear more from Rickards when his life is back to normal again.