HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 Just in time for New Year’s Eve, The Pete Wood Challenge presents four, count ‘em, four new flash fiction stories, all keying off the phrase, “[character] could have gone to [event] on New Year’s Eve, but instead, thanks to [other_character], [he|she|they] had been waiting in line for hours.”Y’know, one of these days I’m going to teach you all how to read Unix command...

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Schedule Update

 The stretch of free time I expected to have after Christmas failed to materialize. Rather than knock myself out trying to finish SS#24 and get it out on January 1st, I am pushing the release date back to January 15, 2022.Update to the Update: thanks to Sharon Cherri for catching that I’d published the revised release date as being January 15, 2021. That would have been...

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Adieu, Mr. Bond (Part 3)

[continued from Part One | Part Two] So Who Is This Bond Fellow, Anyway?If Bond has no place in the world of real espionage, and if the details of his life, his adventures, and even his face may be changed and changed again at the storyteller’s discretion, then where does he belong? Once again, we’re back to the challenge of trying to identify the one true Bond with only...

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Adieu, Mr. Bond (Part 2)

[continued from Part One]Will the Real James Bond Please Stand Up? With the realization that Ian Fleming didn’t even try to keep James Bond’s backstory straight or consistent (much as his own personal accounts of what he did for British Naval Intelligence during the war always remained a bit vague), many smaller realizations finally begin to fall into place. The first is...

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Adieu, Mr. Bond (Part 1)

I’d planned to run a review of the latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die, this morning, but got so tangled up in the writing of it that I decided to drop back and punt instead. Ergo, here for your reading pleasure is “James Bond: Now More Than Ever,” the capstone essay I wrote for the 2006 BenBella book, James Bond in the 21st Century. Understand, James Bond and I go...

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Merry Christmas to you and yours, from us and ours

No posts, email, or doing anything online today. Catch you tomorrow.~brb...

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Have Yourself a Stupefying Christmas...

 Just in time for Christmas Eve, The Pete Wood Challenge returns with six, count ‘em, six new flash fiction stories, all keying off the phrase, “After naughty and nice, Santa had a third list.” Without further ado, then…Honorable Mentions“The Santa Heist,” by Carol Scheina » READ IT NOW!“The Undeliverables,” by Allison Mulder » READ IT NOW!“The Santa Paradox,” by Mark...

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Minor Status Update

It’s been a complicated week here at Casa Calimari, but then Chemo Week always is. This is just a quick note to let you know that I’m not at WorldCon, nor have I dropped off the face of the Earth. Work on Stupefying Stories #24 is proceeding, although not as smoothly as I would like, and the regular blog posts should resume tomorrow. ~...

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Snow Day, Reprise

The storm is at last over The skies this morning are clear, and the snowblower serenade has begun. In a few minutes I need to get out there and join in, so while I’m working on digging out from the storm, here are some seasonally appropriate stories from the archives for you. Enjoy! * * * * * SEARCHING FOR HOME • by Lance J. Mushung I watched the view screen, horrified....

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Today's Free Story Idea

Stealing this from Joseph Cautilli, who asked the question:It is 2041. By 70 years of age most people are cyborgs with implants for heart or blood pressure or…?My initial answer was “blood sugars,” as it’s only 2021 and owing to my lack of a functional pancreas I already have an implant that does that. After giving it further thought, though, the better answer was obvious....

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Snow Day

 Hastily reshuffling this morning’s priorities in order to be ready when the storm hits. It’s already snowing heavily further south. According to the forecast we’re right on the boundary line: if the storm track shifts in one direction we’ll get an easily manageable few inches, but if it shifts the other way we’ll get buried.In the meantime, for your entertainment, here’s...

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Working Day

 No significant blog post today. I’m elbow-deep in work on Stupefying Stories 24, which is still on-track for release on January 1, 2022, and am trying to shut out all other distractions. One particularly tempting distraction lately has been the new FB group, Cyberpunk Books, which as you may have guessed from the name is about print fiction, not anime, gaming, movies,...

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The Son of the Return of Ask Dr. Cyberpunk

And the morning is off to an exciting start. I woke up to learn that yesterday the BBC ran an article on its web site entitled, The Matrix and the sci-fi stories that became a reality, and the article leads off by mentioning me and my particular little contribution to the genre. (I wonder what secondary or tertiary source they’re quoting?Then it mostly segues off into being...

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Creating Alien Aliens, Part 8: Aliens Only Have To Be Different In ONE Way To Make Them Alien!

Five decades ago, I started my college career with the intent of becoming a marine biologist. I found out I had to get a BS in biology before I could even begin work on MARINE biology; especially because there WEREN'T any marine biology programs in Minnesota. Along the way, the science fiction stories I'd been writing since I was 13 began to grow more believable. With my BS...

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Reading "The Rebel of Valkyr" • by Bruce Bethke

 Savagely, the Valkyrs closed with them, and the air rang with the metallic clash of steel. No mercy was asked and none was given. Kieron cut a circle of death with his long, outworld weapon, the fighting blood of a hundred generations of warriors singing in his ears. The savage chant of the Edge rose above the confused sounds of battle… Okay, everyone got that? The Valkyrs...

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Coming 01/01/2022

 _____________________________________________ In the meantime, while you’re waiting… stupefy (ˈstü-pə-ˌfī) to stun, astonish, or astound Available now on Kindle or in print. Coming in December to Nook, Kobo, Apple Books, and all the rest.On Amazon now ► STUPEFYING STORIES 23 Interface with Stupefying Stories!► on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StupefyingStories/►...

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Editors and You • an open query

 Yesterday’s column seems to have touched a nerve. Judging by the readership numbers and the back-channel communications, a lot of writers seem to have a lot of questions about the care and feeding of these strange creatures known as “editors.”As it happens, over the course of forty-some years in the writing racket I have gotten to know a lot of editors, some quite well,...

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Files found while looking for something else

Well, golly. While looking for the original source for the shareware beta version of Cyberpunk—which I still haven’t found—I found the files for the 2011 version, which was being developed under the working title of Cyberpunk 1989 for a book deal that fell through. I have some affection for the proposed cover art: →Ten years ago it probably would have been considered very...

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Eric’s Writing Updat…No, Editing Upda…No…• By Eric Dontigney

So, for those of you who got accustomed to my mostly-weekly writing updates, you probably wondered what happened.“Didn’t that Eric joker say something about an urban fantasy? Where are the updates?!”It turns out that I’m not the only writer in my family tree. I mean, yeah, every family tree has amateur authors and the like, but it’s a bit more serious in my family. I’ve...

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The Ongoing Email Saga

 Quick update on the email situation. Thanks to GoDaddy’s unilateral decision to move us to Microsoft Exchange, a product that deserves to burn in Hell, and to force us to use Microsoft Outlook 365, a product so vile it warrants having everyone associated with creating it consigned to the foulest depths of some place even worse—probably the Garfield Park neighborhood...

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