As criteria go, this is not a bad one to embrace. 

Rampant Loon Press Status Update • by Bruce Bethke

Hang on. This gets very personal.

Funny thing, how you can spend most of your life with someone and still wind up with very few photos of the two of you together. We have lots of photos of one of us in someplace interesting, doing something with one or more of the kids or grandkids. But photos of me and Karen together, in the same place, at the same time?

They’re pretty rare. 

I kind of like that one over there to the right → . It was shot last year by our friend Dan Christy, on some barren volcanic landscape somewhere in Iceland. It wasn’t quite the photo I was hoping to use today: that photo would have been the one shot as we were standing in front of Something-or-other-Foss—in Icelandic, “foss” means waterfall, which is why so many Icelandic place-names end in foss; the island is just loaded with waterfalls—and it was taken on a beautiful bright and sunny day, with a wonderful sort of rainbow bridge effect shimmering in the air behind us, because of the sunlight shining through the mist. Unfortunately the nice young lady who volunteered to snap the photo of us wasn’t completely solid on the operation of my phone’s camera, so that photo exists only in our memories of the moment, and to some small extent in the reflection in the left lens of her sunglasses...

State of the Loon

Eric here. So, you might be wondering what the heck is going on with Rampant Loon. There was a whole flurry of activity right around the end of last year with the publication of Stupefying Stories #22 in November and The Midnight Ground right around New Year’s. Incidentally, The Midnight Ground has gotten nearly universally positive reviews on Amazon and Goodreads if you were on the fence about it.  There was talk of a new issue of Stupefying Stories on the near horizon and some new content formats, like a podcast. A new website was supposed to be unveiled. Unsolicited submissions were supposed to open up again in April. Books were in line for publication.

Obviously, none of that has happened in the intervening few months. There’s some behind the scenes things going on that have pushed back the calendar for all of those happenings. Without diving into all of the nitty-gritty, it basically boils down to the fact that Bruce works a full-time and sometimes more than full-time job. That is in addition to his duties as Cat Herder-in-Chief of all Rampant Loon projects. For my part, I work full-time and sometimes more than full-time as a freelance writer to support myself. I’m also getting ready to move in the very near future. That means that, despite all of our best intentions, the real world of work projects, deadlines, bills, and surviving-adult-life logistics got in the way.

With the exception of opening up unsolicited submissions in April, all of the things on the list above are still in play. Some of the behind the scenes things have resolved themselves already, others will resolve themselves within the next 3 or 4 weeks, and others remain stubbornly immune to a clear resolution timeframe. As the behind the scenes things resolve, though, you’ll start seeing more obvious movement and updates on all fronts.