We won’t mince words, this issue of Rolling Thunder is very, very late. All we can offer is our sincere apology, and an assurance that it was not due to negligence—in the past year we’ve had both a death and a birth here at Far East HQ as well as truly dark times in our personal lives, and our operation, already pushed to the limits of human capacity, suffered greatly. While we’ve managed to keep on top of mailorder and the website, other projects like Rolling Thunder, the Recipes for Disaster redesign and reprint, and others yet to be revealed, have suffered setbacks and delays. Throughout it all, y’all have been very patient and understanding, and for that you have our true gratitude—it made a trying situation more bearable. Thank you.

We’ve struggled to find an equilibrium and while not there yet, the thread is in our grasp. We’re beginning to catch up and we can promise an action-packed last third of 2012 beginning now. To begin, we are releasing Rolling Thunder #10 today, which you can read about above. As a token of appreciation and thanks to all of those who subscribed to Rolling Thunder, we are sending this issue free to all current subscribers; in other words, if you subscribed to Rolling Thunder before today, your four issue subscription has just turned into a five issue subscription. It’s the least we could do to reward you for your support in light of the delay.

Speaking of transitions, Rolling Thunder is undergoing one itself. Our initial vision was a mass-distributed, inexpensive but high-quality journal that would come out in a timely manner and be a project that simply broke even for us financially. We tried to will it into existence by mass-producing it right from the get go, and offering it at a break even price, however sales never reached the needed levels to be sustainable—as the currently available ancient back issues will attest. RT is still very important to us, so rather than give it up, we’ve decided to print 33% less copies, at the same high-quality, and charge more, which is necessary because as the print-run lowers, cost-per-issue goes up. We believe this model will enable us to keep publishing it until there is no need for RT in this world.