Once more: Thanks

 

Thank you to everyone who has sent positive thoughts and encouraging words since Monday’s announcement. Your kindness and concern is appreciated. 

Thanks also to everyone who has offered up a suggestion as to how we could reboot this thing and keep Stupefying Stories going. They’re all good ideas. I appreciate your willingness to share your thoughts and creativity and to volunteer to help.

However, the hard reality remains: last July’s medical crisis was life-changing. Once things finally settled down a bit—meaning I was no longer prepping and delivering IV infusions every eight hours, around the clock, seven days a week, for months on end—and I tried to get back to work, I was baffled by why I was tired all the time and couldn’t seem to get anything finished. So I began to keep very close track of my time and how I spent it.

The results are clear. Whoever and whatever I was before last July, I am now 90% single parent and caregiver. Everything else that I used to do—everything, including Rampant Loon Press—now needs to be fit into slightly less than two and a half hours daily.

The one thing no one can give me is more time. No one, not even the Dallas Cowboys, can buy more time, not even five more seconds.

I like to imagine we’re going into some sort of chrysalis or cocoon stage, and in a few months or a year we’ll reemerge as something big, beautiful, and glorious. I have tried to walk away from the SF/F publishing business before, but don’t seem to be able to do so. Something always draws me back in. We will in all probability be back, in some new form.

But for right now, and for the immediately foreseeable future, I have no idea what that form might be or when it might happen. Hence Monday’s announcement. 

Once again, thanks for your support,
Bruce Bethke