A little something for the weekend?

Remember when Marvel movies were fun? Remember when we all used to look forward to the next Marvel movie, because it was going to be exciting, different, and a great way to take your mind off the hook and get lost in pure heroic escapism for two solid hours? Remember when Marvel/Disney/Sony/Whatever was not pounding out four theatrical movies, plus four TV series, plus three...

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Dawn of Time • Episode 4: “As American as robots and apple pie”

Written by Pete WoodContinued from Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3The story thus far: 32nd Century high school student Dawn Anderson is having a really bad day. Needing a better grade in History, she “borrowed” her father’s TimePak to take a short jaunt back to the 20th Century, only to make a perfectly innocent mistake involving a stolen handgun and a too-hot McDonald’s...

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TV Corner: Halo – It’s Not Actually Bad • By Eric Dontigney

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Video game adaptations are, at best, a mixed bag. Some rise to the level of okay, such as Doom, the 2018 Tomb Raider, and…well, those Sonic movies seem to have won people over. Unfortunately, for...

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Releasing May 1st!

After more than seven months on the Kindle Vella “Most Faved” list (Vella is way too edgy and hip to have something as mundane as a “Bestseller” list), and spending all of that time in the Science Fiction Top 5, Henry Vogel’s latest novel, The Hostage in Hiding, is at last coming out in a complete and standalone edition.We are doing something different this time, too. Instead...

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Talking Shop: Character Description • By Eric Dontigney

Description is a tricky beast for all fiction writers. That goes double for character description. We’ve all read that book where the characters are described in such exacting detail that we’ve lost the thread of the story by the time the writer wraps it up. On the opposite end of the spectrum are those books with characters so thinly described that they only exist in...

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Status Update • 04/25/22

 Wow. It’s only been three days since I posted the Pledge Break, but the outpouring of support has been—well, humbling, to be honest. Astonishing. Breathtaking. I had no idea that so many people care so much about Stupefying Stories and want us to continue.  Thank you.As of this morning, Stupefying Stories 24 is now fully funded, and we’re close to having enough...

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BLASTING INTO YOUR UNIVERSE ON MAY 1ST!

 Coming in seven days on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and every other platform we can find! Available in paperback and hardcover, t...

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A little something for the weekend?

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin muzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the...

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Pledge Break

 Come on. Out of the hundreds of writers who have been published in Stupefying Stories in the past decade, there must be at least one person out there who knows how to run a successful crowd-funding campaign and who is willing and able to help us raise the $1,000 we need to publish Stupefying Stories 24. If that person isn’t you, then I’m going to pull out my old public...

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Dawn of Time • Episode 3: “Have buckwheat, will travel”

 Written by Travis BurnhamContinued from Episode 1 | Episode 2The story thus far: 32nd Century high school student Dawn Anderson is having a bad day. Needing a better grade in History, she “borrowed” her father’s TimePak to take a short jaunt back to the 20th Century, only to make a perfectly innocent mistake involving a stolen handgun and a too-hot McDonald’s cherry...

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Tips from a Pro: Eric Dontigney - The Writer’s Mindset

It’s an odd sort of thing to think of oneself as a professional in the world of writing. There are few, if any, clear lines of demarcation. After all, consider all the novelists who moonlight as college professors, lawyers, or scientists…wait, maybe I’ve got that relationship inverted. Oh well. The point is that it’s hard to know when you’re a pro. Writers don’t really...

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The Road Ahead | The Class of 2032

I was reading an article in The Atlantic the other morning. A Stanford psychologist did a study of more than three million pop songs released between 1959 and 2010, in an attempt to find out why some artists hit the public consciousness with a dazzling flash and then disappear, never to be heard from again, while others stick around for long, steady, and successful careers....

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It's Class Reunion Time!

 So I’m sitting in yet another hospital waiting room, reading the latest issue of ANALOG while Karen undergoes yet another outpatient diagnostic procedure, and what do I find in the “In Times To Come” teaser for the next issue but this:“…the return of a cunning shape-shifter in Auston Habershaw’s ‘Proof of Concept’…”It’s hard to describe how it feels to see the name of...

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Henry Vogel's new web site is up

 Aside from the paragraph of lorem ipsum on the front page that somehow slipped past QA, what d’ya think? Not to put too fine a point on it, while Stupefying Stories is our labor of love here at Rampant Loon Press, original novels are what pay the bills. So if you’d like to see us do more issues of Stupefying Stories, please, check out Henry’s web site, and maybe...

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A little something for the weekend?

By a curious fluke of the cosmos Easter (Western), Passover, and Ramadan all overlap right now, which makes this about the holiest possible weekend of the year, at least in the Western hemisphere. Personally I plan to spend as much of today and tomorrow as I possibly can with my children and grandchildren, celebrating Easter, so to my Catholic and Protestant friends, I say,...

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Dawn of Time • Episode 2: “Which came first—the chicken or the ergs?”

Written by Gretchen TessmerContinued from Episode 1 The story thus far: 32nd Century high school student Dawn Anderson needed a better grade in History, so she “borrowed” her father’s time machine to take a short jaunt back to the 20th Century. Once there, though, she made a perfectly innocent mistake involving a stolen handgun and a too-hot McDonald’s cherry pie, and now,...

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Creating Alien Aliens, Part 16B: From Communication to Central Government…

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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