Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Writing 101 • Day 3: Who Are You?

We humans love stories.

We love to hear them. We love to tell them. We love to pass a good story on to others.

Stories are how we learn. Stories are how we teach our children. Stories are the collective memory of our tribe, handed down from generation to generation. They’re how we preserve and share our clan’s lore, of our gods and our heroes, our ancestors and our enemies, our loves, our laughs, our triumphs, and our tragedies. Stories are how we try to puzzle out the nature and meaning of the world in which we live, and then try to share our understanding with others.

Children love to be told stories. When they get old enough, they can’t wait to learn to read by themselves, so that they can revisit their favorite stories over and over and over again without having to pester their parents.

[Then they go to school and get strapped into literature appreciation chairs, and by the time they graduate most have had that love beaten completely out of them. But that’s a topic for another time.]

It’s in our nature. We humans are wired by evolution to want to hear and tell stories. Being able to do so was probably a valuable survival skill in the last ice age. Thus the fundamental principles of story-telling were laid down in the Neolithic age, if not earlier, and they require that, at an absolute minimum, a story must have:

» A reason for being told.

» A beginning, which engages the listeners’ attention and lets them know a story is being told.

» A middle, in which the core ideas or events of the story are developed and unfold.

» An ending, which makes it clear to the listeners that the story is finished, and the purpose for which the story was being told has been fulfilled.

[Forgive me if this all seems obvious, but based on what shows up in our slush pile whenever we’re open to unsolicited submissions, it’s not.]

Therefore, for the moment, I want you to forget about being a “writer.” Writing and literacy are recent inventions. You are heir to a tradition that goes back to long before writing was invented—to before rhythm and rhyme were invented, to make it easier to remember stories—

[Rhythm and rhyme are great mnemonic devices. Once you hear a rhyme in rhythm, it’s difficult to forget it. For example, I bet your memory will immediately fill in the last line of this limerick:
“There once was a young girl named Bright.
Whose speed was far faster than light.
She left home one day,
in a relative way,
and returned…” ]

You are heir to a tradition that perhaps goes back even to before your forebears thought to carve petroglyphs of aurochs in the cliff face, to help them tell the story of the Greatest Hunt Ever. And right now I want you to imagine yourself as your tribe’s lore-teller, smeared with bear fat and red ochre and standing before your clan, as they’re gathered around the campfire at night. For the moment, all their eyes are upon you. You draw a breath—

But before you utter your first word, I want you to think about these questions:

» What is my reason for telling this story?

» What do I want this story to do for my tribe? Teach? Enlighten? Frighten? Amuse? Exalt our shared history? Sing the praises of our chief? Dazzle them with my own brilliance and verbal cleverness?

» Who am I hoping to please or impress? 

» How do I hope to leave my tribe feeling when I’m done telling this story, or what do I want to leave them thinking about?

» What am I tonight? A teacher? A preacher? A jester? An inspiration? A warning?

» Who am I, this time?  


_______________________________


And a reminder…

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Pete Wood Challenge #38, “Happy Trails,” is now open for entries!

The Challenge: Write a story of up to 150 words in length using the prompt, “happy trails.” The prompt does not need to appear in the story. Any genre is fine.

Prizes: 1st place $20.00 USD, 2nd place $15.00, 3rd place, $10.00, Honorable Mentions, (1-2) $5.00. The winning entries will be published online by Stupefying Stories in June of 2025.

Who can enter: The contest is open to both Codexians and the general public. One entry per writer, please.

How to enter: Send your entry in the body of an email to:

southernfriedsfwriter@gmail.com

Include the words “Happy Trails” in the subject line. It wouldn’t hurt to include “Pete Wood Challenge 38” or “PWC 38” in your email, too. 

Deadline: 7AM EST, May 15, 2025

Now get writing!

Monday, April 28, 2025

“Big Bang Enlightenment” • by Sam W. Pisciotta


Jenny scowls, her foot tapping out the passing moments as if marking my silence. 

The brochure lies on the table between us. Big Bang, Incorporated. Experience enlightenment.

“This awakening,” she says, “this little mind vacation was supposed to end after a week.” She leans forward, pleading. “Goddammit, Mo. Say something. Argue with me.”

I need no words. The universe and I are one.

Jenny flicks the ring on her left index finger, triggering her uniPort. A thread of light jumps to connect with the ring on her right hand. She turns her palms down, and her scheduling screen illuminates between us.

“Look at all those red squares.” She spreads her hands to enlarge the view. “The days I covered for you this month. Afternoons you missed picking up the kids. Neglected appointments. Forgotten dinners with our friends.” She laughs, the breathy laugh she uses when she doesn’t find something funny. “There’s a shit-load of red on this screen, Mo.”

She closes her uniPort and leans back. Her body displaces the air around her. Matter moving through space. The moment unfolds like the shuffling of cards, and within it, there is truth. All is good.

“I understand that you needed a break, but your firm called again. They’re going to fire you, and I don’t make enough…” Jenny’s voice wavers; her words quiver in the air between us. “We’re falling behind.”

A tear sits at the corner of her eye; hydrogen and oxygen and sodium chloride held just at the eyelash. I can feel the bonds that keep them together, the forces helping to bring the entire universe into existence. At the same moment, a thought, a pale blue egg, shapes within me: I’m about to lose my wife and children.

A spark flares in my frontal lobe like an ember within damp wood, a smoldering that won’t catch. Images form then sputter: Sitting across a table from Jenny at Valentino’s. Her black dress. Candlelight. The children at the swimming pool. Comforting Jenny when her father died. These are memories worth holding, aren’t they? Important feelings. I struggle to hold Jenny’s words, to keep them together, to stay present with this person I’ve lived with for fifteen years, but bright rays of sunshine push her aside.

“Your daughters miss you, Mo. What happened to the man who yells at the VR feed during football games? The guy who laughs when the dog chases her tail? I miss you too.”

She’s about to tell me she’s leaving.

“You’re not well,” she says. “I can’t take care of you. The girls are afraid.”

Don’t. This thought, a chunk of heavy clay, globs within me. It slips and shifts beneath the weight of my attention before dissolving. A sense of calm washes that don't away. All is good. Except—it’s not all good. I don’t want them to leave. That perfect egg begins to crack.

Jenny wipes her tears. “That goddamn company.” She rises from the chair. “I need you to know, I talked with the lawyer. We're joining the class action suit.” Jenny leaves the room and calls for the girls.

Somewhere deep within me, I picture myself saying her name, standing to follow her, hugging her, stopping her from leaving. I finger the uniPort. The screens of my old life scroll and flash before me, revealing the illusion of my past existence. Struggling against the light, I locate the contract and illuminate it.

Big Bang Incorporated. All parties agree to the terms and conditions outlined herein.

I scan the Explanation of Process. It explains the electromagnetic manipulation of my neural network, which has leveled the activity within my parietal lobe. I have agreed to their use of Espiritu347, a proprietary herbal treatment that stimulates regions within my limbic system. The result—a short-term sense of spiritual awakening.

My hand shakes as I scroll through the contract on my uniPort, the battle raging within me. I glance at the Required Disclosure.

Some individuals have experienced complete synthetic Nirvana. These instances are rare, and Big Bang cannot be held responsible for any permanent behavioral change.

In the foyer, Jenny tells the girls to wait in the car. The front door clicks shut. A moment later, Jenny steps into the kitchen, and the screens of my old life collapse.

“We’re leaving, Mo.” Her voice sounds small, like she’s already gone. “I’m taking the girls to Mom’s. They can’t be here for this, but I’ll be back to meet the people from the care facility. They said you can stay there with the others until we get this sorted.” She kisses my cheek. “Just for a while.”

Overwhelming compassion for Jenny wells within me. She’ll be okay. Everything unfolds as it should.

“Mo! Are you listening?” Jenny’s voice sounds pained, trapped within her physical illusion. One day she may find peace—as I have. Warmth surges through my breast and circles my heart like a current. It erodes me, smoothing out the edges of my ego. Yet, something darker sloshes through the pools of light, something rough and ragged, like two stones grating against one another. That part of me screams for recognition and pleads for my frontal lobe’s neurons to fire; it begs for Jenny to see me.

“Please,” I say.

Jenny, having turned to leave, stops and faces me. “Mo?” Her eyes, hopeful and teary, catch the room’s fluorescent light. “We don’t want to leave. Just give me some sign you’re still with us.”

Warm light pulses through me. A tear forms in my eye. The material world melts away like butter in the sun—soft and fluid. An explosion of hot, gooey sunshine. I begin to hum the universe’s deep song, and my chest resonates with the divine. A smile forms on my lips as I rise to dance with the godhead.

The front door clicks shut. All is good.

 


 

 

Sam W. Pisciotta is an intrepid storyteller hurtling through spacetime on the power of morning coffee and late-night tea. He writes stories for people who want to visit other planets, learn magic from birds, or camp in haunted forests. His M.A. in Literary Studies from the University of Colorado trained him to deconstruct a variety of texts; living life taught him how to put them back together. Sam is a graduate of the Odyssey writing program. He loves holidays and birthdays, pints at the bar, and falling down the research rabbit hole. He would never choose the blue pill. Connect with him at www.silo34.com and @silo34 on X and Instagram.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read “The Island of Dolls” and “The Worm’s Twist,” published last fall in Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE.

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Ask Dr. Cyberpunk • with your host, Bruce Bethke

By now enough people have seen this photo that some have begun to ask: “What the Hell is all that stuff?”

This, my friends, is where “Cyberpunk” really began. If we had streaming video, this would be a slow pan around the room, but since we don’t, you’ll just have to imagine it. Going clockwise, starting from the lower left:




Yes, this all makes perfect sense to me, and no, this is by no means everything. This is just the minimum I needed to have set up in a corner of the basement to maintain my sanity while the destruction/construction project was in progress.

If you’re wondering what this hardware sounds like, try this: “Fanfare for the Post-Singularity Man.”  

[Please note that this was one of a series of video notes from a work in development, shot live and in real time in one take using my phone’s mic, hence the overmodulation, keyboard noise, and generally sloppy playing.]

If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with “Cyberpunk,” we need to set the Wayback Machine to, oh, late 1978 or early 1979, I think, and take a closer look at what I was doing then.


Wow. I still had curly hair then, and still fit into Levi’s with a 32-inch waist. And I was already working on the set of ideas that would in 1980 become the short story, “Cyberpunk,” but at the time this photo was taken, print fiction was the last thing on my mind. When I began putting together the ideas that would eventually become “Cyberpunk,” I was working on my would-be magnum opus: a sci-fi punk rock stage musical, entitled—

INVASION of the DISCODROIDS!

Oy vey.

(...to be continued...)




About Bruce Bethke:
In the early spring of 1980 Bruce wrote a little short story about a gang of teenage hackers. From the very first draft the story had a one-word title—a new word, one that he’d made up in a deliberate attempt to grok the interface between the emerging high technology scene and teenage punk attitudes, and this word was—

Oh, surely you can guess. 

Half a lifetime later Bruce is still getting questions about this story, so rather than answer them privately and one at a time, he’s decided to make answering questions about cyberpunk a regular feature on this site. If you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask him, post it in the comments here, IM him on Facebook, or email it to brucebethke.cybrpnk@gmail.com. He can’t guarantee he’ll answer, but will certainly give it a good try.

Friday, April 25, 2025

Notes Toward Building a Writers’ Community


I must admit, I’ve always found writers to be puzzling.

I am one. I’ve had some success at being one, as you may have noticed. I grew up in a literature-rich environment. My mom was a published poet of no particular note, and quite a few of her old school friends were professionally published writers, mostly of mysteries. (Mom always seemed disappointed that I preferred science fiction, and never told her friends about “my son, the writer,” until I made my first sale to Hitchcock’s.)

So it’s fair to say I’ve been around writers all my life. But I’ve never quite understood them.

I think that’s because by inclination and education, I’m a musician. While I loved to read fiction, and from time to time puttered around with writing it, for the longest time, I truly believed I would make my living as an adult by writing and performing music.

In a sense, I did. My musical training, combined with my off-the-charts verbal acuity, landed me my first job in software development, with a now-defunct company making synthesizers and music-adjacent software. This led to my next job, which led to my next job, and so on, and so on…

Thus, there is a contiguous, if somewhat meandering and indirect, path from this—


 To this—


To this—

 
And now back to this.


I spent most of the 1980s making the transition from dreaming of becoming a successful musician to actually being a successful short story writer. By the early 1990s I was selling every story I finished writing, usually on the first or second submission, and often for far more than the magazine’s stated word rate, as I’d become a “name” writer whose name on the cover would (it was hoped) sell more magazines.

[Nota bene: This was back in the old days, before the dark times, before Amazon, when there actually were such things as print magazines and bookstores with magazine racks that sold them. Ask your grandparents about them.]

I spent most of the 1990s making the transition from being a successful short story writer to becoming a critically acclaimed and award-winning novelist, and along the way discovered that awards and rave reviews and such are all very nice, but in traditional publishing, your career is only as good as the sales numbers for your most recent novel. So in late 1999 I said “F*** this” and went back to working in software development.

It seems that once one has become a somewhat famous and award-winning writer, though, there is no walking away from it—or in my case, driving away.



 

(Another compelling argument for using a pseudonym, if you ask me.)

§

In 2005 I began to write a blog—because, what the heck, who wasn’t writing a blog, then? Over the next five years this blog morphed into The Friday Challenge, a sort of ad hoc writing workshop -slash- writing contest, and a community of writers began to grow up around it. This community would go on to form the original nucleus of the Stupefying Stories crew, and for a time, it was really good.

I’d been in writing communities before. I had been in writing groups galore, some good, some bad, some downright crippling. The worst was probably one run by an imperious leader who demanded to be the final authority on all things literary, as she was a graduate of a certain VERY FAMOUS writer’s workshop!

[“That’s nice,” I should have thought to ask before joining. “Have you ever actually sold anything to a pro market? Or are all your long list of publication credits just fanzines and small-press mags that pay in contributor’s copies and birdseed?”]

The best was without question the one with Joel Rosenberg, Patricia Wrede, Lois McMaster Bujold, Peg Kerr, myself, and a rotating cast of short-lived sixth-member guest stars. (We should have made them wear red shirts.) I learned a tremendous amount about the craft of writing and the business of selling books while in that group. Sadly, Joel died in 2011—that’s Joel Rosenberg, the fantasy and science fiction author (or as Joel preferred to call himself, “The original Joel Rosenberg”), not Joel C. Rosenberg, the guy who churns out bestselling novels about terrorism and Biblical prophecy—and the group disintegrated soon thereafter.

I joined SFWA in—1985, I think. Under the rules then in effect I’d actually made enough pro market sales to qualify for Active (voting) membership before I even knew the organization existed. At first I was very excited to be a member of SFWA, and even let myself be conned into running for office in 1990. I served two terms on the SFWA Board of Directors, under Ben Bova, but by the time my second term was done, my interest in the organization had tapered off exponentially. I’d thought I was joining a professional writer’s organization that was dedicated to helping members advance their careers. What I found instead was—

Okay, here’s a parallel. Once, on a business trip, I found myself booked into a hotel that was also hosting a standup comedians’ convention. You’d think that would be great, right? A hotel just full of standup comedians, everywhere you went? Imagine getting on an elevator with four standup comedians for a long trip down to the lobby. It would be a scream, right?

Well, yes, it did make me want to scream. That much is true. But everywhere I went in that hotel, I bumped into small groups of comedians standing together, bitching and moaning about clubs, contracts, agents, club owners who were chronically late with their checks, who was stealing who else’s material, and especially about those new up-and-coming no-talents who really didn’t deserve all their recent success because they hadn’t paid their dues. Oh, they hated those people most of all.

(Except for the new talents, who likewise clustered together in corresponding groups for basically the same bitch session, except ending with talking about those old guys who really needed to retire or die and get out of the way.) 

I found SFWA to be a lot like that.

§

The more successful professional fiction writers I got to know, the more puzzled I became. A few were genuinely kind, gracious, and helpful. A very few became good friends. Far more were not and did not, and it seemed the more successful they were, the more likely they were to be dicks. (Except for the ones who had only had some success despite years of trying, and were embittered by the experience. These guys—and they were almost invariably guys—typically pegged the needle on the dick-O-meter.)

Eventually, I began to formulate a theory. Musicians, on some level, seem to instinctively know that you must work together, if you’re ever going to get the show onstage. Even if you can’t stand someone, you work with him, because that’s what you must do to put your performance in front of an audience. The show’s the thing. The show is the only thing. Even someone like me, who hates performing live and would much rather work in a recording studio, understands that if the performance doesn’t reach an audience, it was all for naught.

Writers, on the other hand, tend to be introverts. Many don’t seem to like other people much. They find meeting and interacting with readers a chore, and would much rather be back at home, in their comfortable space, working on their next story or book. They seem to want someone else to take care of all that tedious business of finding an audience for their work and putting their work in front of that audience.

Hence the need for editors, publishers, and possibly even agents and influencers.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc,* you will often find professional writers gathered together in small groups, usually in the hotel bar, unless the con is large enough to have a SFWA suite, bitching and moaning about editors, agents, publishers, who’s stealing who else’s material, who’s chronically late with their royalty checks, who’s famous this month who doesn’t deserve it, and why isn’t anyone paying attention to meeeeee?        

* Latin for, “Do you actually understand this?”

§

Do you begin to see the fundamental problem involved in building a writing community? You’re trying to create a cohesive and mutually supportive group, but starting with a collection of introverts and misanthropes. It’s like trying to enter the Iditarod with a sled pulled by a team of cats.

I understand and sympathize. I really do. I like working with new writers; the ones who haven’t been in the business long enough to have become bitter, burned out, or jaded. I think a good writing community can encourage and develop a lot of really talented people, and do some remarkably good things. I know the original Friday Challenge/Stupefying Stories community did. I’m incredibly proud of all the people who started out with us and went on to become successful and even award-winning writers.

But I’ve also become aware that I myself am, by nature, an introvert—but it’s a weird kind of introversion. I can perform the part of being Bruce Bethke, Semi-famous Writer, Editor, Publisher, and General-purpose Cheerleader for the writers whose work I publish.

But only for a few hours at a time, and it’s exhausting. It’s just like performing music live and onstage. I can do it, but not all the time, and after the show I must rest. 

I know from past experience with The Friday Challenge that building and maintaining a writing community is a lot of work. It is not a one-man job. So here’s the first question I want you to consider, before we go any further:

Who here is willing to help?

 

Thursday, April 24, 2025

Writing 101 • Day 2: What is a story?

It’s kind of funny, really. 

My parents were both public school teachers. I grew up in a house that was simply overflowing with books and magazines. I learned to read at a very early age—before I began school—and have spent my entire life since then reading, writing, and ultimately, editing and publishing, stories.

But what exactly is a story? That’s a question I never considered until now.

When people ask what I as an editor want to see in a story, I usually say something like: “I want to see a story that introduces me to an interesting character, takes me to an interesting place, reveals something interesting about that character in that place, and at the end, leaves me glad I took the time to read the story. Better yet, I want to see a story that at the end makes me say, ‘Damn, I wish I’d written that one!’”

That’s getting ahead of ourselves, though, and is a bit of a circular reference. It’s like the dictionary definition of storyteller: “a teller of stories.” Well, duh.

So let’s take a closer look at the fundamental question. What exactly is a story?

It’s how we communicate. It’s intrinsic to our nature. Nature equipped us with eyes, ears, hands, and a mouth with vocal cords. We can make sounds and gestures. We can hear* and see the sounds and gestures others make. That’s the extent of our stock organic I/O equipment, and it’s all strictly serial and linear. The closest we get to a parallel communication protocol is perhaps when someone is both singing and dancing; beyond that, it becomes a matter of technological enhancements stacked on top of our organic systems, and we probably hit peak bandwidth with the invention of the color motion picture with surround sound and subwoofers. With our technology we can transmit more information faster, but our poor eyes, ears, and brains can’t assimilate and process it in real time, so at some point it all becomes just incoherent noise.

A story, then, is a communication protocol. It’s the means by which we take the experiences and ideas that are in our minds and transmit them to another person, in the process modulating, shaping, controlling, and imposing meaning on those thoughts, to lift them above being mere noise.

[Sidebar #1: I wonder if a truly telepathic species would even have stories? Without the need to turn thoughts into words and then words into vocalized sounds, would there be any need to shape the message? Would such a species even develop the concept of language?]

So here is a first principle. A story is not merely an assemblage of words, sentences, or paragraphs jumbled together: it’s a stream of information, conveying a sequence of ideas, actions, or events, that is intended to communicate meaning to the receiver.

[Sidebar #2: Then again, if the meaning you intend to communicate is that there is no meaning, we’re all just helpless pawns wallowing in futility in an existential vacuum and nothing we do or say ever really matters—sorry, you’re in the wrong room. You want Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s class. It’s down the hall and to the left.]

It’s easy to elaborate on what a story is not. A story is not:

  • a vignette
  • a slice of life with no real beginning or end
  • a still life
  • a travelogue
  • a sermon
  • a political screed
  • an encyclopedia entry
  • a character sketch
  • the first chapter of your novel-in-progress

A story is a linear narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end (not necessarily in that order), by means of which the storyteller intends to lead the listener/reader from a starting point to an ending point, keeping their attention engaged along the way, and ultimately guiding the listener/reader to grasp some sort of meaning.

What that meaning might be varies depending on the storyteller’s purpose. A story can be told to inform, educate, motivate, agitate, obfuscate, entertain, or serve any of a large number of other purposes. Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em scream, make ‘em sigh. The key point is, it doesn’t matter how beautiful your words and sentences are, if in the end, your story has no point

After reading thousands of slush pile submissions in the last fifteen years, I can assure you that the single worst thing to see in a submission is a story that is just absolutely brilliant and beautiful for the first twenty pages—and then collapses into a puddle of meaningless goo on page twenty-one, because the author had no idea what the point of their own story was. An unfortunate point might invite an editor to send a “please revise and resubmit” letter, with a few suggestions for sharpening the point of the story. A nonexistent point will just make the editor feel they’ve wasted their time and never want to see that story again.

_____________

For discussion:

  1. Imagine that instead of submitting your story for print publication, you had to read it out loud in front of a live audience. How do you think the audience would react to your ending?

  2. Seinfeld excluded, can you think of an example of a story that has no point and no real ending, and yet is considered good?

  3. What else would you add to the list of things a story is not?  



_______________________________


And a reminder…

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Pete Wood Challenge #38, “Happy Trails,” is now open for entries!

The Challenge: Write a story of up to 150 words in length using the prompt, “happy trails.” The prompt does not need to appear in the story. Any genre is fine.

Prizes: 1st place $20.00 USD, 2nd place $15.00, 3rd place, $10.00, Honorable Mentions, (1-2) $5.00. The winning entries will be published online by Stupefying Stories in June of 2025.

Who can enter: The contest is open to both Codexians and the general public. One entry per writer, please.

How to enter: Send your entry in the body of an email to:

southernfriedsfwriter@gmail.com

Include the words “Happy Trails” in the subject line. It wouldn’t hurt to include “Pete Wood Challenge 38” or “PWC 38” in your email, too. 

Deadline: 7AM EST, May 15, 2025

Now get writing!

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

The Never-ending FAQ • 23 April 2025

Welcome to this week’s installment of The Never-ending FAQ, the constantly evolving adjunct to our Submission Guidelines and general-purpose unfocused Q&A session.  If you have a question you’d like to ask about Stupefying Stories or Rampant Loon Press, feel free to post it as a comment here or to email it to our submissions address. I can’t guarantee we’ll post a public answer, but can promise every question received will be read and considered.

Q: What’s with the flowers?

A: Those are bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis). I’m always happy to see them because they’re one of the first flowers of spring around here, and an indicator species. The native pollinators love them. Yesterday they were just little green nubs poking up out of the ground. This morning they were in full bloom and swarming with bees. By the weekend, they’ll be gone. They don’t last very long, but they sure do make me happy when they show up.

Q: I’m thoroughly confused. I thought you were closing up shop, yet here you are publishing new stories like “Walls Have Ears” and “Visionary.” Are you open or not?

A: We are not open to unsolicited submissions at this time, if that’s your concern.

Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE, as an online daily free fiction feature, is going away. After a few years of trying to make it work, we’ve reached the same conclusion that the people who ran Daily Science Fiction and Page & Spine must also have reached; that it’s an unsustainable business model. As measured by the number of people who read the stories in SHOWCASE vs. the number of people who actually threw a few bucks in the tip jar once in a while, reader support never exceeded 5%. Further, there was no detectable crossover from the people who read the stories in SHOWCASE to the people who bought our books.

The original plan was to shutter SHOWCASE and cut over to a new web site a few weeks ago, but that plan was totally buggered by the “minimally invasive, three days tops” remodeling project that ended up making my office unusable for more than two months. 

Hmm. Well, adapt, improvise, overcome. We remain committed to publishing every story we have under contract, but will be winding down SHOWCASE in a slower and more gradual fashion than initially planned through the spring and summer months. So yes, we will continue to publish new stories and non-fiction pieces… Until such time as we run out of new web content to publish.

Q: I saw your announcement yesterday of your new Writing 101 series. Two new posts weekly, every Tuesday and Thursday, for the next twelve weeks? Given that you’re winding down SHOWCASE, isn’t that a little ambitious?

A: No, it’s ludicrously ambitious.

It’s an old Jedi mind trick. I’m trying to redevelop the habit of writing daily. By setting myself the goal of publishing two new posts weekly; well, that forces me to focus on topics and be succinct. By laying out a twelve-week schedule; okay, that means there is an end out there, right after the 4th of July, so I have a deadline and can gauge my progress towards it.

I’ve been writing fiction for professional publication for 45 years. I’ve been running Stupefying Stories for 15 years. In the latter role I have read untold thousands of slush pile submissions—literally, I stopped counting at 5,000 submissions, and that was years ago.

It’s time someone else benefited from what I’ve learned.

Q: But, a writing workshop? At this late date?

A: This is where we began: with an ad hoc writing workshop call The Friday Challenge, and the notion that maybe we could help people to become better writers and find publication success. 

When we first announced that we were shutting down SHOWCASE, we got quite a bit of email from people expressing sadness that we were ending the writing community they’d found here. Well, consider Writing 101 an effort to return to our roots, and to refocus on building a writing community. 

Do I think it will work? Ask me again in 12 weeks. 

Q: Why do you keep doing this? Why not just flip the sign to “Closed,” shut and lock the shop door, and walk away?

A: For moments like this. Rick Danforth, whose name you should recognize from his SHOWCASE stories “Patient Diplomacy,” “Thanks for the Memory,” “Purest Distilled Spirit,” “Take a Chance on Me,” and “All We Have Are Memories,” has just won the 2024 BSFA award for Best Audio Fiction, for his story, “The Personal Touch.”

This is why we started Stupefying Stories: to give a hand up to younger writers, in honor of all the people who gave us a hand up when we were just starting out.


Q: Speaking of workshops and writing communities and all that jazz, what’s going on with The Pete Wood Challenge?

A: I’m glad you asked! Read this!

 

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Pete Wood Challenge #38, “Happy Trails,” is now open for entries!

The Challenge: Write a story of up to 150 words in length using the prompt, “happy trails.” The prompt does not need to appear in the story. Any genre is fine.

Prizes: 1st place $20.00 USD, 2nd place $15.00, 3rd place, $10.00, Honorable Mentions, (1-2) $5.00. The winning entries will be published online by Stupefying Stories in June of 2025.

Who can enter: The contest is open to both Codexians and the general public. One entry per writer, please.

How to enter: Send your entry in the body of an email to:

southernfriedsfwriter@gmail.com

Include the words “Happy Trails” in the subject line. It wouldn’t hurt to include “Pete Wood Challenge 38” or “PWC 38” in your email, too. 

Deadline: 7AM EST, May 15, 2025

Now get writing!

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Writing 101 • Day 1: Welcome to the class

I was doing a reading at an SF/F con this past weekend—

Sorry for not alerting you that I was going to be there. It was very much a last-minute, spur-of-the-moment decision to go. I haven’t been to a con since DemiCon 30 in 2019, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get back into the SF/F con scene. Cons can be very strange places full of even stranger people…

Nonetheless, at the last minute I decided to go through with it, and so late in the afternoon on Saturday I found myself in a conference room with a half-dozen or so fans, doing a “reading.”

Now, when some writers do readings, they really do just read. Manuscript in hand, face-down in the paper, barely making eye-contact with the audience, sometimes twitching nervously, sometimes speaking so softly they’re completely drowned-out by the noise from whatever is going on in the next room over. (In this case it was a showing of the old Hammer Horror movie, Quatermass and The Pit. I love that one. Wish I could have been watching it.)

I’ve been doing these things for about 40 years though, so for me, a reading becomes a lot more interesting if I can turn it into a free-ranging conversation with the audience. Which is what I did.

I did read some fiction to them. Not my fiction, mind you; as an editor and publisher, I feel free to read whatever I like, provided it’s something I published and think they’ll like, too. As always, a few selected pages from Henry Vogel’s Heart of Dorkness stole the show. We were at a con. The story is set in a con. As soon as the p.o.v. character starts kvetching about the long line at registration and the slow elevators, the audience is pulled into the story.

It was during the subsequent conversation that someone in the audience caught me flat-footed. I should have anticipated the question. In hindsight, it was obvious. It was:

“As an editor, what do you look for in a story?”

You know, I’ve been doing this editing and publishing thing for so long, I’ve nearly forgotten the answer to this question. “Um, er, a good story, isn’t it obvious? Read what we’ve published in our books.

“Read the free fiction we’ve published on our web site. It’s all right there, if you just click on the SHOWCASE tab.”

But that’s a deflection, not an answer. What do I consider to be the things that define a good story? What separates the wheat from the chaff, the gold from the dross, the [insert shopworn cliché here]? I’ve always considered reading slush pile submissions to be like panning for gold…

(On the good days, “in a clear mountain stream,” but there are plenty of days when it feels more like, “in the runoff from a landfill…”)

…looking for the few gleaming nuggets that might be hiding there. But what is it, exactly, that makes a submission more likely to catch my eye? 

Hmm. I need to think about that.

Hence, this new column series. For the next—oh, twelve weeks, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ll be trying to strike up a conversation with you, about what it is that makes for a good SF/F story and how to write it. 

Why Tuesdays and Thursdays? It’s an old collegiate habit. I want to put myself on a strict albeit arbitrary schedule, to force me to think about the topics and write out my ideas beforehand. There is no syllabus; I’ll be making this up as I go along and am hoping the conversation will be steered by engagement with you. I am hoping to con subborn recruit a few guest lecturers to share their experiences and insights, but that idea is still in the early developmental stage, so I won’t promise anything right now. 

My parents were both teachers. I have spent my entire adult life resisting the push to become a teacher. But maybe, it’s time to finally give in and do it. 

See you next Thursday!

—Bruce Bethke

 

And meanwhile…

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Pete Wood Challenge #38, “Happy Trails,” is now open for entries!

The Challenge: Write a story of up to 150 words in length using the prompt, “happy trails.” The prompt does not need to appear in the story. Any genre is fine.

Prizes: 1st place $20.00 USD, 2nd place $15.00, 3rd place, $10.00, Honorable Mentions, (1-2) $5.00. The winning entries will be published online by Stupefying Stories in June of 2025.

Who can enter: The contest is open to both Codexians and the general public. One entry per writer, please.

How to enter: Send your entry in the body of an email to:

southernfriedsfwriter@gmail.com

Include the words “Happy Trails” in the subject line. It wouldn’t hurt to include “Pete Wood Challenge 38” or “PWC 38” in your email, too. 

Deadline: 7AM EST, May 15, 2025

Now get writing!


Monday, April 21, 2025

“Walls Have Ears” • by Raluca Balasa

[START]

This interview is being recorded, at half past noon on the eighth of June, 2025. We are in Interview Room C at the Windsor police station in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. No other officers or legal representatives are present. Can the interviewee state his name and date of birth?

Is interviewee even a word?

Please answer the question, Mr. Older.

[Laughs] Yes.

Yes?

The interviewee is capable of stating his name and date of birth.

Mr. Older, you understand that should this go to court, your evasion of the simplest questions will do nothing for your defence?

You’ve already said my name twice, so as far as I’m concerned, you’re the one evading. And isn’t it within my rights to remain silent?

Okay. If you don’t want to respond to a question, simply say “no comment” so we can move forward. Okay?

Sure.

Great. You were arrested on Centre Street at 20:30 for possession of weapons. Can you tell me what you were doing standing on top of the Bellevue House historic site with a crowbar and a stick of dynamite?

Absolutely. I was breaking in.

You do realize that the house is open for free tours year-round?

They’re renovating. The whole place is locked down.

Right. What were you going to do inside?

Just talk.

Talk? To whom?

The house.

No metaphors, please, Mr. Older.

Let me break it down for you. I have to be inside a building before it lets me see what happened there. Did you know that a lady died in the waiting room here twenty-three years ago? In this station. Check your ledgers. She had a stroke while her interviewer was in his office making tea. The building’s still very upset over it.

Do you consider yourself gifted?

I know my father’s griped to the entire department about my gifts. Might’ve been easier if you’d just sent him to interrogate me.

Family members aren’t permitted to conduct interviews, Mr. Older.

You’re hardly unbiased. Still kissing his ass these days? Working hard to be a sheriff like him, full to the chin with medals?

Are you angry with your father? Was this a cry for his attention after your mother left?

Ah, so you’ve read my file. But it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Please try to focus, Mr. Older. Why exactly were you at the Bellevue House?

PM John A. MacDonald lived there for a year. I wanted to learn his secrets.

Give me a… let me write that down. Okay. What did you want to learn about Sir John A. MacDonald that you couldn’t just ask the tour guides?

No one really knows what was wrong with his wife, why she was sick all the time. The damned tour guides wouldn’t know, but the house does. Maybe he was poisoning her.

You’re slandering a national hero. Do you have some vendetta against great people?

Now you’re the one being dramatic. I have nothing against John the person. It’s the idea of heroes. Of building someone up as a god to justify why we don’t ask them questions. It’s my mission to show people the truth.

Let me make sure I understand. You wanted the house to tell you Sir John A. MacDonald’s darkest secrets, so you could prove that he poisoned his wife?

That was just an example, officer. But everyone has secrets. Whatever his were, it’s my duty to expose them.

And then what?

Then we learn to stop taking others’ word as gospel, and to start thinking for ourselves.

You feel called to do this?

I wouldn’t have this gift otherwise. Remember Doug Ford? The whole drug scandal? Who do you think was the first to set the media off on that?

Are you saying you were that anonymous source?

Of course. I spoke to his old office.

Okay… [laughs] I’m sorry, give me a second. This is… It’s just that we’re not at risk of John A. MacDonald running for office anytime soon.

That doesn’t matter. Write this down. No leader should have such unquestioning love from his people, not even a dead one. It’s unhealthy—it’s like Stockholm syndrome.

Can you tell me why you hate authority figures?

[Laughs] I suppose it stems back to my family. You were right about one thing: I am angry with my father.

Have you ever seen a therapist, Mr. Older? Would you be open to the idea?

Oh, but you think he’s a hero, don’t you? Of course you do. I must be ungrateful. My father, always so busy cleaning up other people’s messes that he doesn’t even bother wiping his own ass.

[Coughs] Please, let’s keep this professional.

He sent me away when I first told him about my gift. Said I was arrogant, that I—I!—had a God complex. He was always blaming his flaws on others.

You felt abandoned? Was that it?

I was chased out. You see, my father finally convinced my mother to send me away to boarding school. He wouldn’t let me back into the house afterwards, said it was so I could make my own way in life. Really, he didn’t want me learning what he’d done inside the house while I was gone. He was afraid of me.

[…] Go on.

So if I could no longer talk to my childhood house after my mother ran away, I had to find a way of talking to his workplace. Of getting her justice.

[…]

Officer, these walls scream that Sheriff Older is guilty of domestic violence. His office told me exactly where my mother’s blood still is, on the underside of his desk where he didn’t think to clean up. Go check for yourself.

[…]

I’ve said everything I have to say. Thank you very much for your cooperation, officer. This interview is concluded at twelve forty-three, on the eighth of June, 2025.

[FIN]




Raluca Balasa holds an MFA in Creative Writing: Fiction from the University of Nevada, Reno. Currently, Raluca works as a writing and literature professor in the Toronto area. Her debut science fiction novel, Blood State, was released in 2020 from Renaissance Press.

Learn more about Raluca and her work at:
https://ralucabalasa.wixsite.com/website

Follow her at: https://x.com/rabalasa

Saturday, April 19, 2025

Ask Dr. Cyberpunk • with your host, Bruce Bethke

Today’s question comes from Lars, who leads into his question with a quote from what someone else had written about me: 

“When coining the term for his 1983 story “Cyberpunk,” Bruce Bethke reportedly matched up words for technology and words for troublemakers until he found a pair that seemed right, rather than singling out punks as a crucial countercultural group for the new genre.”

Any chance you could enlighten us about the origin of the term? She is arguing that “punk” did not specifically and politically reference the “punk movement” (connotations of anarchy, anti-establishment, etc.) but [you] needed a term that generally referenced something “troublemakers.” We would love to hear how this came about.

Yeah, that looks like a translation of a paraphrase of something I’ve said many times in many interviews, and used to have posted on my website in an article entitled, “The Etymology of ‘Cyberpunk’,” until I took that article down because I got tired of dealing with science fiction fans who wanted to talk, and talk, and talk about cyberpunk without paying any attention to what I’ve been doing in the 45 years since I wrote that story. I’d re-post the article if I could find it now, but the file—well, it’s somewhere around here, buried in about 20TB of poorly organized data.

When I came up with the title: first off, I was just trying to come up with a catchy one-word title for my short story. I really wasn’t thinking about anything beyond that. So the way I came up with the title was by experimentation, by putting together various terms for technology—cyber, techno, und so weiter—and terms for “socially misdirected youth,” until I came up with a word that just plain sounded right. 

That was my critical consideration: that it sounded right. I tried a lot of word combinations, and even experimented with Japanese borrow-words—for example, bōsōzoku got really close to my concept—but there was no way to turn that into an English-language expression without making it sound silly. “Cyberbozos?” Sounds like an Alan Dean Foster novel.

The other key thing to know is that I didn’t set out to become a science fiction writer. I am by training and inclination a musician, which is why how the word sounded was extremely important to me.

Note this old photo. That thing behind my head is an ARP 2600, and that, as we musicians say, is my axe. And I keep writing and rewriting and deleting this part of my reply, but let’s just leave it at: if you go to the wikipedia articles on Contemporary Classical music, electronic music, and computer music—well, a lot of the names you’ll see there are people I met, knew, studied, or worked with. Some were even friends. An important part (to me) of my bio, that flies right over the heads of most people in the science fiction world, is that I spent a couple of years working for Passport Designs and was on the design team that developed MIDI and the Finale music notation engine, among other things. If you really want to understand me, go find and watch the movie, I Dream of Wires.

So yes, in the latter part of the 1970s, I was acutely aware of the punk rock music scene. And that is where the “punk” part of cyberpunk came from.

“...punks as a crucial countercultural group...”

Seriously? Countercultural? Hell no. In the US, punk was mostly just counterdisco.

I get the impression that at the time, punk meant something very different in the UK and Europe than it did in the US. In the UK, there seemed to be an authentic working class/proletariat/anarchist/revolutionary thing going on. (Though let’s face it, the Sex Pistols were the Monkees of punk.) There may even have been something authentically political about the New York punk rock scene, circa '76~'77. But by the time punk hit the rest of the US, I was living in Los Angeles, trying to break into recording studio work, and the LA punk scene was entirely about affecting the look, the pose, and the fashion. For a year or three there anyone could get a record contract, no talent required, if they just had a lead singer with a mohawk and a guitarist who wore lots of black leather, studs, and chains. (The studs and chains scratch the hell out of the backs of guitars, by the way.)

That is what the American punk rock scene was all about: not James Dean’s “Rebel Without a Cause” but Tom Petty’s “Rebel Without a Clue.” There may have been a few specimens of the real thing in the wild, but at least 90% of American punks were poseurs, pure and simple: affluent white suburban kids, dressing in punk style and going downtown to dance and get drunk on Saturday night, and then back to school or work on Monday. They were McPunks, and that is why Billy Idol became the quintessential “American” punk rock star. He had the hair, the clothes, the British accent and that little bit of a snarl in his voice, and made great-looking music videos that played well on MTV. But if you closed your eyes and listened to his music, and especially to the arrangements and studio production values in the recordings, you could be listening to any arena rock band of the time. There is nothing threatening—absolutely nothing “countercultural”—in a Billy Idol single. 

Which is why Billy Idol’s songs live on forever in FM airplay, while bands like The Clash, The Buzzcocks, Television, and Siouxsie and the Banshees are for all practical purposes forgotten now.

Except for “Rock the Casbah.” That one comes back on the radio on a regular basis, every time our government is trying to start yet another war with Iran.



About Bruce Bethke:
In the early spring of 1980 Bruce wrote a little short story about a gang of teenage hackers. From the very first draft the story had a one-word title—a new word, one that he’d made up in a deliberate attempt to grok the interface between the emerging high technology scene and teenage punk attitudes, and this word was—

Oh, surely you can guess. 

Half a lifetime later Bruce is still getting questions about this story, so rather than answer them privately and one at a time, he’s decided to make answering questions about cyberpunk a regular feature on this site. If you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask him, post it in the comments here, IM him on Facebook, or email it to brucebethke.cybrpnk@gmail.com. He can’t guarantee he’ll answer, but will certainly give it a good try.