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 direct-to-streaming movies, plus two holiday specials, every frickin’ year?

[Holiday specials?!?! Yeah, seriously. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special is going live on Disney+ this coming December. At last we’ll know the answer to the question we’ve all been wondering about for the past 44 years: can anyone make a bigger turkey than the legendary 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special? Stay tuned…]

Most importantly, though, remember when it was possible to watch, enjoy, and make sense of a new Marvel movie without having watched at least three other movies beforehand? 

This is where Spider-Man: No Way Home fits into the Marvel Cinematic Ecosystem. If you have not at the absolute minimum watched Spider-Man: Homecoming and Spider-Man: Far From Home, this one will make no sense at all. Give it a miss.

If you have watched the previous two, and feel a bloody-minded determination to finish out the series, then know that to understand most of what’s going on in this one, you should pop a 55-gallon drum of popcorn and also watch, in this order, the following movies:

• The Avengers
• Captain America: Civil War
• Spider-Man: Homecoming
• Doctor Strange
  
• Avengers: Infinity War
• Avengers: Endgame
• Spider-Man: Far From Home

Ideally you should also have watched all three Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies, both Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-Man movies (a.k.a., “The Spider-Man movies almost nobody watched”), and what the Hell, throw in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, too. (Although this last one might leave you with a profound feeling that No Way Home would have been better if both Peter Porker and Miles Morales had been given at least brief cameos in it.)

And then, by the time you have watched all of these movies, either your brain will have turned into feta cheese, or else you will have realized that by the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home, the filmmakers have painted poor pitiful Peter Parker into such an impossibly tight corner that the only way they can get him out of it is by resorting to the sort of Colossal Magical Timey-Wimey Cosmic Reset that Marvel doesn’t seem to mind doing all the time, but that to me always feels like a cheat, just one thin step above, “And then it turned out, it was all just a dream.”

In 2004, Toho Studios released Godzilla: Final Wars, which was intended to be both a 50th Anniversary Godzilla’s Greatest Hits sort of movie and also the final film before they retired the character for a decade, to retool him and come up with the truly weird Shin Godzilla.

Think of Spider-Man: No Way Home as Spider-Man’s Final Wars. It’s loud. It’s fun. Peter Porker—er, Parker—gets to fight all his greatest villains, even the dead ones, one more time. But let’s face it: 25-year-old Tom Holland is getting a bit long in the tooth to continue playing high school student Peter Parker. Perhaps it’s time to wrap up all the story arcs, close out the series, let him swing off into the sunset, and then give the character a few years’ rest before starting over again, preferably with Miles Morales.

Hey! Didja hear there’s a new Doctor Strange movie coming out next week? Are you excited about it?

Yeah. Me neither.

~brb

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

Written by Pete Wood

Continued from Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3

The 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 cherry pie. Now, instead of returning home, she is bouncing from disaster to catastrophe, each one worse than the one before. After being chased down the streets by a bunch of clowns, narrowly avoiding becoming dinosaur chow, missing out on participating in the Chicxulub extinction event, and making a new friend just in time to save her from drowning on the Titanic, she’s landed in what seems to be a nice, safe place, only to hear—

“Exterminate all humans!” a metallic voice blared from some unseen loudspeaker.

Had we messed up 3204? I looked around in panic, then I relaxed. This was the robot uprising of 2347. Every school kid knew about it. Or was supposed to. I wished I had paid more attention in class.

Smoke and fire everywhere. An ice cream truck, its music playing insanely fast, headed straight for a crowd of kids. They jumped clear.

Stella tugged at my sleeve. “Perhaps we could find a house?”

“You can’t trust the robot butlers and maids,” I said. “All the robots rebelled.”

“You sure about that?” Stella asked.

Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure about that. I remembered something from class. The household bots hadn’t joined in the revolt.

I dragged my new kid sister to the nearest house, one of those classic hovering domes they hadn’t made in centuries.

I told Stella about the Timepak and the Titanic as we sprinted to the house. I thought she got it.

We made it to the front stoop. Lucky for us, the doors opened, and we entered a foyer. A fire crackled. Classical music played.

A sleek white robot glided over. “Welcome strangers,” it cooed. “May I be of assistance?”

“Do you have apple pie?” I asked.

“I regret that the Cuisinator 2400 is at market. Due to the um, unpleasantness outside. Some robots don’t know their place. I do not know when the maid will return.”

“You got chocolate milk?” Stella asked.

The robot bowed. “Certainly.”

A light shimmered. A figure appeared. Becky Heston in her stupid cheerleader outfit. God, I hated Becky Heston.

She smirked. “You’re so easy to track, Dawn.”

I forced a smile. “Hello, Becky.”

She held out two McDonald’s apple pies. “I hope you stocked up.”

“Could we borrow one, please?” I asked.

“Sorry. Can’t spare any dessert, sweetie.” She tapped her time belt. Nothing but smoke.

“You got the power. I have the machine,” I said.

“Fine!” Becky sighed and gave me a pie. The other went into her backpack.

A tiny light sparkled in front of Becky. Something flew out and hit her. Hot gooey apple pie dripped down her face and onto her uniform.

“You did that on purpose!” Becky snapped.

I couldn’t stop laughing. Neither could Stella.

“I have no idea where that pie came from,” I managed to say after a few seconds.

“You lying tramp,” Becky said.

“Honestly, Becky, I had nothing to do with it.”

The robot butler appeared with a damp towel and chocolate milk. “Oh, my goodness,” it said. “Apple pie all over your face, Miss.”

Becky snatched the towel but did not thank him. Stella grinned and accepted the chocolate milk. She thanked the robot several times.

 Becky wiped off her face and blouse and threw the towel on the floor.

“No wonder they’re so upset outside,” the butler muttered.

Stella, Becky, and I locked hands. I flipped the switch and the machine took us—

Somewhere colder than the worst winter. Ice. Howling wind.

And Becky in a cheerleading skirt.

 

Next week: “Episode 5: The cave that time forgot”

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Pete Wood is an attorney in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his kind and very patient wife. His first appearance in our pages was “Mission Accomplished” in the now out-of-print August 2012 issue. After publishing a lot of stories with us he graduated to being a regular contributor to Analog and Asimov’s, but he’s still kind enough to send us things we can publish from time to time, and we’re always happy to get them.

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PLEDGE BREAK

Dawn of Time is supported by the generosity of readers and listeners like you. If you appreciate the kind of programming we’re bringing you, please show it by clicking this link or the button below to make a donation today. All major credit cards are accepted, and all donations go directly towards paying the authors and artists who create the content that you’re enjoying on this site. Literally, all donations go straight into the PayPal account from which we pay our authors and artists.

 

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

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 every decent video game adaptation, you get a Super Mario Brothers (sorry,
Bob Hoskins), or a Street Fighter (sorry, Raul Julia), or the 2007 Hitman (sorry, Timothy Olyphant…but I loved you in Justified). So, whenever I heard talk of a Halo adaptation, I was justifiably wary. As someone who played the original Halo: Combat Evolved on a PC, I can say that there is a lot to love about playing Halo. It’s a lot of fun.

Yet, it wasn’t exactly deep on a story level. You’ve got a protagonist who you never see outside his armor and operates just this side of being a functional mute. Your real touchstone is the onboard AI, Cortana, and even she’s pretty thin in that first game. To Microsoft’s credit, they have fleshed out the backstory in subsequent games and tie-in media. Even so, a deep backstory isn’t guaranteed to produce a great adaptation. For example, I really enjoyed Assassin’s Creed…as a fantasy-action film. It’s always fun watching Michael Fassbender dig into a role with a lot of physicality. Yet, it was pretty lousy as an adaptation. I don’t know who to blame for that one, the studio or the screenwriters, but they abandoned the existing canon for an…original?...sure, we’ll say original story that left a lot to be desired.

So, when Halo the show stopped being something geeks talked about on message boards and became something that was really happening, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. I discovered it was happening around the time it was debuting, so maybe I lucked out there. The casting gave me some sparks of hope. Pablo Schreiber had some cachet with me from his performance as “Mad” Sweeney in the American Gods adaptation. Natascha McElhone as Dr. Halsey was an inspired choice. She has a gift for the kind of layered performances you’d need for the morally bankrupt Halsey. Danny Sapani as Captain Keyes. Well, I don’t think that guy has ever been bad in anything he’s done. The cast really sparkles from top to bottom.

Still, the proof is in the pudding, as they say. I went into watching Halo with as open a mind as I could. I knew going in that they were going to have to have Pablo Schreiber take off the helmet and talk. You can have a silent, practically invisible protagonist in a video game. You can’t do that in a medium where people must talk to each other on camera. Overall, I’ve been impressed with it. They took the obvious step of walking back the timeline to before Master Chief crashes on a Halo installation. That let them build in some of the backstory about the Spartan 2 program and what Halsey did to make it happen. It also provided an opportunity to explore the relationship between John-117, Halsey, and Cortana.

The story doesn’t hew precisely to Halo game storyline, which it never could. The video games aren’t episodic in nature, so trying to adapt them that way would have doomed the project from the start. Instead, the writers aimed to create plausible storylines around the existing canon. The production values are excellent for a TV science fiction show. They aren’t perfect, but that’s to be expected when you need to CGI ALL of your bad guys. The plotting isn’t perfect, either. The weakest part of the show, in my opinion, is the running subplot with Kwan Ha Boo, a rebel teen, and Soren-066, a renegade Spartan. While both Yerin Ha and Bokeem Woodbine put in good performances, their story seems terribly disconnected from the much more compelling Master Chief storyline. There are still 3 episodes left this season, so maybe they’ll pull those storylines back together. For the moment, though, that subplot feels like a distraction from, rather than a benefit to, the show.

For the Halo game purists out there, this show will probably annoy you because of the inevitable liberties it had to take with the source material and Master Chief. For people looking for good sci-fi entertainment, this show hits most of its marks. With a second season already slated, you might as well jump on board for the ride.

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Stupefying Stories is supported by the generosity of readers like you. If you appreciate the kind of programming we’re bringing you, please show it by clicking this link or the button below to make a donation today. All major credit cards are accepted, and all donations go directly towards paying the authors and artists who create the content that you’re enjoying on this site. Literally, all donations go straight into the PayPal account from which we pay our authors and artists.

 __________________________________________________

Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.

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SHAMELESS ADVERT: If you like Harry Dresden or John Constantine, you’ll love THE MIDNIGHT GROUND. READ IT NOW!

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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 of going with our usual Amazon-only release, The Hostage in Hiding will be available on Kindle, Nook, iTunes, Kobo, and about thirty other ebook distribution channels we never knew existed, as well as in paperback and—this is the really exciting part—in a proper hardcover, with a dust jacket and everything!

We do not yet have pre-sale links for the ebooks, but the trade paperback and hardcover listings are live now, and Amazon is taking pre-orders. Check it out!

» Hardcover - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1958333026/

» Paperback - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1958333018/

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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 our imaginations as ghostly specters with one or two defining characteristics. While you can argue that there is no Right level of description, I’m in the camp of people who believe in a minimalist approach to character description.

Readers will fill in a lot of details without your assistance. Let me prove it to you.

Sandy and Paul sat at the table and chatted while they waited for their pizza. Paul idly played with the red pepper and parmesan shakers that sat on the checked red tablecloth.

In those two sentences, I gave you a wafer-thin description. Yet, I bet you conjured up a pretty clear image of the table the two of them were sitting at. I suspect some of you imagined a four-legged table, while others imagined a pillar table. I didn’t describe the chairs at all, but I expect some of you pictured slat-backed wooden chairs. Others probably imagined those aluminum piping style chairs with the vinyl seat cushions. I only mentioned the shakers, but I bet you imagined those squat glass shakers with the metal tops. Did you see the napkin holder in your mental image? Maybe a waiter in the background talking with other customers? Were there booths? Did you see bright lighting or was it a low-key place with mood lighting?

My point here is that you can imply and let people’s imaginations fill in a lot of the details. Unless those details are crucial to the story, there is no reason to expend paragraph upon paragraph describing them. The same holds true when you’re dealing with character descriptions. Yes, you need to provide some details. You don’t need to paint a picture so detailed that the reader sees exactly the same character that you see. In fact, it’s counterproductive if you do. Letting the reader fill in some of the details helps them invest in the imaginative process. So, what kind of details do you need?

You need the obvious stuff. Are they male or female? Tall or short? Athletic, average, going to seed? As a rule, most people will toss in a few other salient details like eye color, hair color, and identifying marks. Does your character have a prominent scar? You should mention that. Do they wear their hair long or short? Sure, toss that in. Once you get beyond those kinds of details, though, you risk impinging on the reader’s ability to layer their own ideas onto the picture you’re drawing. Instead of going into extensive detail, give the reader a direction.

You can say something like: “He was handsome in a rough-hewn way,” or “She had a dancer’s body.” Rough-hewn and dancer’s body will mean different things to different people, and that’s where the magic lies. They can imprint their version of rough-hewn or dancer’s body onto the frame that you’ve built for them. Suddenly, they become the reader’s characters, instead of your characters. While it’s not enough on its own to keep readers invested, it’s one way you can invite readers into the creative process and get a little more of their psychological buy-in with the story.

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Stupefying Stories is supported by the generosity of readers like you. If you appreciate the kind of programming we’re bringing you, please show it by clicking this link or the button below to make a donation today. All major credit cards are accepted, and all donations go directly towards paying the authors and artists who create the content that you’re enjoying on this site. Literally, all donations go straight into the PayPal account from which we pay our authors and artists.

 __________________________________________________

Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.

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SHAMELESS ADVERT: If you like Harry Dresden or John Constantine, you’ll love THE MIDNIGHT GROUND. READ IT NOW!

 

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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 donations pledged to do Stupefying Stories 25. At the risk of committing a terrible act of hubris, I’m beginning to think that if we can keep this drive going, we can raise enough to do Stupefying Stories 26, and then—

Well, our goal was always to grow Stupefying Stories until it becomes a magazine that pays its authors “pro” word rates and can help get them the recognition they deserve. (Awards committees and anthologists always take pro publications more seriously.) But we’ll drive off that bridge when we come to it. Today, let’s focus on:

» Stupefying Stories 24 is fully funded and GO for launch on June 1st!

» Stupefying Stories 25 is close enough to fully funded now that I feel comfortable committing to launching it on September 1st.

» Stupefying Stories 26 is our stretch goal. Assuming we can raise the funding, we plan to launch it on December 1st.

Remember, this is only possible because you made it possible. THANK YOU.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work on putting out a magazine.

Still shaking my head in utter amazement,
Bruce Bethke  

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Stupefying Stories is supported by the generosity of readers like you. If you appreciate the kind of programming we’re bringing you, please show it by clicking this link or the button below to make a donation today. All major credit cards are accepted, and all donations go directly towards paying the authors and artists who create the content that you’re enjoying on this site. Literally, all donations go straight into the PayPal account from which we pay our authors and artists.

Any suggestions as to what you’d like to see at the “coffee mug or tote bag?” level?

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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, too!

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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 wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features. 

No, it was not Freddie Mercury. It was Big Brother, and if you have not by now recognized this as the opening of George Orwell’s 1984, shame on you. I think every April should be National Re-read 1984 Month, and instead of watching a movie this weekend, why don’t you do something really radical and subversive and read a book? 

Personally, I recommend that you read 1984, if you haven’t already, or re-read it, if you haven’t read it since you were in school. If I ever teach a course that attempts to talk about all that is good, brilliant, and important about science fiction, 1984 will be on the required reading list. 

Now go thou and read. And remember:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

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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 radio hat, dust it off, put it on, switch to my on-air voice, and tell you that Stupefying Stories and Rampant Loon Press are supported by the generosity of readers and listeners like you. If you appreciate the kind of programming we’re bringing you, please show it by clicking this link or the button below to make a donation today. All major credit cards are accepted, and all donations go directly towards paying the authors and artists who create the content that you’re enjoying on this site. Literally, all donations go straight into the PayPal account from which we pay our authors and artists.

Please don’t make me escalate this to the coffee mug and tote bag level.

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

 

Written by Travis Burnham

Continued from Episode 1 | Episode 2

The 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 pie. Now, instead of returning home, she is bouncing from bad to worse. Case in point, after narrowly avoiding becoming yet another fossil in the Chicxulub impact crater, she’s landed comfortably on the deck of a luxurious ocean liner, only to hear—

“Hurry, Miss, we have to get to the lifeboats. We’re sinking!”

I moved toward a lifeboat, but it lowered away. Scratch the lifeboat escape. The eight-piece band played a ragtime number, “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” which rang through the cold, night air. I recognized the song thanks to my Music teacher.

The deck began tipping, followed by shrieks.

I needed TimePak fuel, fast.

Stopping a steward, I asked, “Point me to the dining room?” He eyeballed me as if to say are you seriously hungry right now? But then said, “‘A’ deck. Left at the bottom of the stairs. The Verandah Café.”

Thankfully, there was an à la carte table laid out. Reaching for the food, I noticed a foot under the tablecloth. A foot attached to a girl a bit younger than me, knees pulled to her chest. She had rich dark hair cut into a style that didn’t seem fashionable for the time.

I waved at her. “Hello.”

“Hi,” she replied. She raised her chin high in a display of courage, but her bottom lip trembled. She looked with interest at my time suit and I remembered that maybe I’d been fashionable for 1975, but certainly wasn’t for 1912.

“I’m Dawn,” I said.

“Stella.”

The ship listed to the side even more. Stella squealed. Icy water swirled around my calves. The revolver felt heavy in my waistband, but offered no comfort.

I grabbed some buckwheat cakes and rolled in spoonfuls of marmalade, but paused before dropping the food into the slot. Why did I keep ending up in these terrible situations?

A wall of water began rushing forward, picking up a baby grand piano like it was a toy. It was heading right for us.

We’d learned about disasters in History class, but the statistics hadn’t fazed me. Stella wasn’t a number, though. I thought of all the other people on board. They weren’t numbers either any more, but there was no way I could save them all.

I wasn’t allowed to change the past, but there was no way that Stella was going to survive the Titanic, so saving her wouldn’t change anything, right? As long as we returned straight to 3204, we shouldn’t mess anything up.

I used my circuitry loupe and examined the TimePak’s inner workings. “Maybe the Situational Transmogrifier has one transposed diode?” I muttered to myself.

I reached out for Stella and she grabbed me. The past and the future, holding hands. “Hold tight, Stella, this is going to be a wild ride.” Using micro-tweezers, I flipped the diode around. “This is either going to be loads better… or exponentially worse.”

Just as the band above begin the first notes of the hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” I dropped the makeshift McDonald’s pie into the TimePak’s slot.

Flash! Bang!

Wherever we were, the floor was level.

Sirens screeched.

“Exterminate all humans!” a metallic voice blared from some unseen loudspeaker.

 

 

Next week: “Episode 4: As American as robots and apple pie”

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Travis Burnham’s work has found homes in Far Fetched Fables, Hypnos Magazine, Bad Dreams Entertainment, South85 Journal, SQ Quarterly, and others. He is a member of the online writers’ group, Codex, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Converse College. He also recently won the Wyrm’s Gauntlet online writing contest. Burnham has been a DJ on three continents, and teaches middle school science and college level composition. He lives in Lisbon, Portugal with his wife, but grew up in Massachusetts, is from Maine at heart, and has lived in Japan, Colombia, and the Northern Mariana Islands.

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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 get licenses or certifications the way you see in other professions. Frankly, that’s a real problem in the credential societies that most developed world countries have become. 

At best, you get writing adjacent certifications. Copywriters can take courses around certain kinds of writing or skills that support their writing. Maybe you head over to HubSpot Academy and get certified in their Content Marketing course. For speculative fiction writers, maybe you try to snag a spot in one of the big workshops, like Clarion, Taos ToolBox, Gotham Writers’ Workshop, or Odyssey. If you love capital L literature, you get yourself an MFA at the low, low price of lifelong debt. 

Yet, none of these degrees, certifications, or workshops actually make you a professional writer. They might help you skill up in certain ways, and there is value in that. Honing your craft is part of the process. But…but, the primary difference between the amateur and professional writer is what I think of as the Writer’s Mindset. There isn’t anything mystical or magical about the writer’s mindset. You don’t need a guru to get there. You don’t even need to firewalk to get it. In fact, it’s almost hideously mundane. 

The Writer’s Mindset is about treating your writing career as a career. It involves annoying things like going to work every day. You must check your email and reply to clients or editors in a prompt manner. You meet deadlines. I know, I know, that sounds a lot like work and almost nothing like that Romantic Ideal of sitting around on a couch and waiting for the muses to strike you with brilliance. Yet, if you look at people who make a successful go at writing for a living, in any area of writing, this is how they handle their business. 

Stephen King talks about it in his memoir, On Writing, with his 2000 words per day goal. Kevin J. Anderson, the author of something like 150 books, advises people to not make excuses and get on with the writing. David Badalucci talks about setting goals and developing good habits, like blocking out time every day for writing. In other words, professional writers don’t treat their writing like a hobby. As a general rule, people take time for their hobbies. They make time for their careers. You can blow off your hobby as often as you want, but you can’t blow off your job very often before you won’t have it anymore. 

Feeling discouraged, yet? If not, good for you. It means you’re at least open to the idea that writing professionally is work, and you’ll have to make some sacrifices along the way. If you are feeling discouraged, it means you probably bought into some of that Romantic Ideal thinking, but all hope is not lost. You can adapt how you think about things. That’s the miracle of neural plasticity at work. Of course, I’ve been talking about all of this in general terms. I can hear you saying, “Great generalizations. But give us specifics, Dontigney!”

Okay, that’s fair. Here are some specifics that can help you adopt the Writer’s Mindset. 

1. You must set a writing schedule.
2. You must keep to your writing schedule, barring a genuine emergency. I’m talking blood spurting, house on fire, we must go to the bomb shelter because bombs are literally falling from the sky right now, kinds of emergencies. The kind of emergencies that you would leave a day job to go handle. If it doesn’t rise to that level, it’s probably an excuse. 
3. The phrase “writer’s block” must leave your vocabulary. Every other kind of professional does their job on demand, which means that you can as well. 
4. You must investigate your industry. This is for fiction writers, so think things like agent preferences, editor preferences, and industry trends. This information may not alter your current writing projects, but it may inform subsequent projects.
5. If you get a (reasonable) deadline from an editor, meet it. Meeting deadlines makes you the “no-hassle” writer. People like working with the “no-hassle” writer. Nobody likes working with a prima donna. (Caveat: this does not apply to film-to-book adaptations. Read about Bruce’s experience with that here.)
6. Accept that not every writing day is going to be fun. It will feel like work sometimes, maybe often, and you need to keep doing it anyway. 

Now, mind you, this advice is aimed specifically at people who want writing as a career. It’s okay to treat writing as a hobby. A lot of people do. The tradeoff you make with that choice is that very few people ever manage to make a living at their hobby. Making the transition means incorporating some of the less pleasant aspects of day jobs into what was your cool, fun hobby. If you can come to terms with that, you have a shot at becoming a professional writer. 

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Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.

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SHAMELESS ADVERT: If you like Harry Dresden or John Constantine, you’ll love THE MIDNIGHT GROUND. READ IT NOW!

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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. His conclusion was that there are two distinct phases in a creative artist’s life, exploration and exploitation, and the difference lies in how the artist manages the transition.

• In the exploration phase, the aspiring artist is free to take risks, to experiment, and to try to find that ineffable something that sets them apart from everyone else and makes their work fresh and surprising.
  
  
• In the exploitation phase, the successful artist, having now found that something and caught the public’s eyes and ears, sticks to it with fierce tenacity and never again surprises or disappoints their fans.

This is an extremely simplistic model, rife with opportunities for argument. Still, the finding intrigues me. I have always been far more interested in exploration and experimentation than in exploitation. Perhaps it’s a personality flaw, but I truly hate to repeat myself. To me the idea of writing one story that really clicks with an audience, only to find myself then condemned to spending the next forty years rewriting that same damned story over and over again, sounds like one of the torments of Hell that Dante thought was too horrible and subsequently edited out of The Divine Comedy.

Or a succinct description of Isaac Asimov’s career.

Today, Stupefying Stories stands at a crossroads, and the road ahead is decidedly unclear. A month ago it seemed too clear: Karen’s medical crisis back in February turned out to be not any of the things they’d thought it might be, but a symptom of her cancer returning. A month ago, the road ahead looked very much like this:

At that time, it seemed the only sane and sensible thing to do was to wind Stupefying Stories down as gracefully as possible and then try to guide it to a soft landing, in hopes that some of the wreckage might be salvageable later.

Today, a month later, things look somewhat better. We have a treatment plan and are pursuing it. There is a glimmer of hope. I am spending a lot of time driving around to various hospitals and clinics and sitting in waiting rooms, while Karen undergoes one or another outpatient procedure…

But what the heck. I do have a good laptop computer, and there’s this stack of manuscripts sitting here, waiting to be copy-edited. So why not work on trying to keep Stupefying Stories going?

As with any traumatic experience, the recent near-death of my indie publishing dreams has given me cause for reflection. If I were picking through the wreckage, what are the pieces I would hope to find and salvage? What exactly have I been trying to do here, these past twelve years? What do I think I can do, going forward? What are the parts of this job that I have really enjoyed doing, that I seem to do fairly well, and that I would choose to continue to do, if possible?

Looking back at the work of the past twelve years—at the fifty or so books and hundreds of standalone short stories we’ve published—a few salient points begin to emerge from the datasmog. I was never able to manage the transition from exploration to exploitation in my own writing career. Why did I think my career as an editor and publisher would be different? I have never been any good at self-promotion, and it seems my incredible gift for unsuccessful self-promotion is a sort of field effect that extends to cover those near me as well. (Sorry, Henry, Eric, and Judith.) I have this weird ability to come up with ideas that others can exploit with great success, but seem unable to keep any of them for myself.

Likewise, I have an impaired ability to ask for help. It’s not born out of pride or a desire to control or anything like that; it’s born out of my innate curiosity and constant love for exploring and learning. Just the other morning, I put on my to-do list: “Learn about podcasting.” (It’s for Dawn of Time. I’ll explain later.) Why did I phrase it that way? Why didn’t I write, “Find someone who already knows about podcasting, and is willing to advise and help, or better yet, do?”

Add that one to my growing catalog of character flaws…

*   *   *

As this introspective journey concludes, an elusive but common thread begins to glimmer into view. My constant interest in experimenting and discovery, coupled with my profound dislike for doing again what I’ve already done before? My greater interest in exploring than exploitation? My gift for coming up with new ideas that others can exploit successfully, but that I remain unable to exploit myself?

New ideas? Or new people?

Looking back at our collective history, it becomes clear that what Stupefying Stories has proven to be very good at is finding, coaching, and encouraging new writers. We began as a writer’s workshop. We seem to have a proven ability to find and publish now the writers everyone else is going to be talking about and publishing in another five to ten years. Not coincidentally, this is the part of the job I most enjoy doing, find most rewarding, and would most like to continue doing. Raising up a crop of new talent is fun.

I also know from personal experience how incredibly much it means to an aspiring creative to have someone who should know say to you, “You have talent. You have potential. You’re not ready to be the headliner yet, but you definitely belong up there on that stage.” 

And then not just to say that, but to put their own time and energy into putting you on that stage, even if the theater is a bit run-down, the ushers smell funny, and there are more empty chairs than people in the audience. Someone who should know is taking you seriously.

That’s what Stupefying Stories is all about. We’re not Carnegie Hall. But we’re a pretty darned good First Stage. 

*   *   *

If I was still working in public radio, this is the point where we’d cut to the pledge break. Thankfully I turned off that career path ages ago, but the idea is not dissimilar. I like Stupefying Stories. I think we’ve done some really good things over the years. I still enjoy the work, and I’d like to keep it going. (And maybe raise up a small crop of new editors, while we’re at it.) But to keep Stupefying Stories going, I need your help.

The financial model on which I originally built Stupefying Stories is unsustainable. We can get into the nitty-gritty of it another time, but the gist of it is that to keep Stupefying Stories going, we need to either win the lottery, find a lunatic billionaire sugar daddy (but Elon Musk’s attention is elsewhere right now), or switch to a crowd-funding model for future issues.

And at this point, I’m going to sign off, and put one more thing on my to-do list:

[_] Find someone who already knows about crowd funding, and is willing to help and advise, or better yet, to do

Thanks for reading,
Bruce Bethke

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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 someone who got their start with Stupefying Stories on the cover or in the TOC for one of the major pro magazines, on the cover of a new novel, or on the shortlist for a major literary award. It’s a good feeling, but—

My parents were both teachers. They would have understood it. It feels great when you see that someone who you years ago believed had a lot of potential is now living up to that promise you saw in them, but at the same time, they never write, they never call, you never find out what they’re doing until after they’ve done it…

[Actually, as my dad would have said: “You only hear from them when they need bail money, or when they come up to you and say, ‘Coach, if the police ask I was here in the gym shooting hoops last Friday night between nine and ten o’clock, okay?’”]

I know that a lot of Stupefying Stories alums are doing great things now. For example, I know that Pete Wood just sold a 15,000-word novella to Asimov’s, just as I know that Eric Fomley just made his 50th short story sale (!) to Medusa Tales Magazine. But I only know these things by accident.

Come on, folks! If you have a Stupefying Stories connection and you have a success story, SHARE THE GOOD NEWS! Let us add our little bit of bandwidth to helping spread the good news about your success! Give us a chance to help boost your signal!

Frankly, I like to hear about your successes. It validates my decision to launch Stupefying Stories in the first place.

Thanks,
Bruce Bethke

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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 even take a closer look at a few of his books.  

Thanks,
Bruce Bethke

P.S. The paragraph of lorem ipsum is gone now. If you find any more weird glitches on the web site, please let us know.

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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, Happy Easter! To my Jewish friends and relatives, I say, Chag Pesach Sameach! To my Eastern Orthodox friends, I say, Have a joyous Palm Sunday! And to my Muslim friends—actually, I’m not sure what to say, but whatever the wish is for a happy and peaceful holiday, I sincerely wish it for you.

Now, as for the rest of you lot…

In the 1970s there were a spate of what Larry Niven termed “Big Rock Hits Earth” novels. The best known now is probably Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, although I have a personal fondness for Shiva Descending, by Greg Benford and William Rotsler. There were many more such novels, all mostly forgotten now, and I don’t know how or if there were any direct connections between any of these novels and the spate of cheesy disaster movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact that appeared in the 1990s—the lack of known plagiarism lawsuits suggests otherwise, or at least that there was nothing actionable—

Suffice to say, the “Big Rock Hits Earth” story usually unfolds with the same beats:

1. Minor/amateur astronomer protagonist working in remote/minor observatory someplace discovers that Big Rock is heading straight for Earth.
   
   
2. Protagonist struggles to convince the authorities that the Earth is DOOMED! but no one takes them seriously.
   
   
3. Until protagonist manages to get through to one person in a position of authority, who looks at the protagonist’s data, smites their forehead and says, “My God, it’s true!” and becomes a champion for the protagonist.
   
   
4. Whereupon the authorities are roused to action and do something incredibly grand and heroic, to unite all mankind in the face of this impending disaster.
   
   
5. And in the end, by the barest skin of our teeth, humanity survives, and a new day dawns, etc., etc.
   
   

With that established: now I want you to imagine a “Big Rock Hits Earth” novel as if written by Douglas Adams and made into a film by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, only with American actors and an American blockbuster movie budget. (Sidebar: Ron Perlman does a great Bruce Willis in step 4, and the “new day dawns” ending is hilarious.)

That’s what DON’T LOOK UP is: a 95-percent brilliant and viciously satirical story about a society (ours) that really deserves to be satirized savagely and without mercy and then have a big rock dropped on it, and about a 5-percent bummer of the self-realization, “Boy, we really are that screwed up, aren’t we?” sort. 

It’s not what I’d call a “feel-good” movie. But first it will make you laugh and then it will make you think, and I love it when a movie can do that, because it’s so rare.  

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Because it was 24° with snow flurries this morning and this weather is supposed to continue through the weekend, and because SHOWCASE contains Sipora Coffelt's story, "Finding Spring," about a girl stuck in a world where winter never ends, we’re doing a free e-book promo. This weekend only, the Kindle edition of SHOWCASE is free for the price of a click. Tell your friends. Share the link.

 

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

Written by Gretchen Tessmer

Continued 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, instead of returning home, she has just made an amazing discovery: Tyrannosaurus Rex had—

Feathers! But also, very sharp teeth. Yikes.

“Good boy,” I cooed, as if talking to my golden retriever at home. But “Rex” stomped forward (hungrily?) and I fled through the jungle, the dinosaur following too close for comfort.

Ugh, the Mesozoic Era was hot! I wished I’d worn shorts, but those weren’t really my style. More something our head cheerleader back home, Becky Heston, might wear, and the idea of wearing anything that might find its way into that smug and spoiled brat’s wardrobe was just—

          Wait, the gun! Oh yeah, that might help.

I stopped running abruptly, reaching for the .38 and pointing it straight up. I fired a warning shot into the sky. Rex took the hint, wary of the loud and unfamiliar noise. He veered off with a ferocious roar…

…leaving me in the late Cretaceous period, alone, without a McDonald’s in sight for like 65-80 million years.

But hey, humans are resourceful. And I was born lucky.

When I aimed that gun skyward, I noticed something up there that looked suspiciously like an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. Only hours from crunch time.

Talk about perfect timing.

I scrounged around the jungle for prehistoric fruit that might pass for apples or cherries. I was low on ingredients but found some ancient monocots to add to my fruit mash, hoping palm oil was an important one, power-source wise. I wrapped my pie filling in a leaf, shoved it in the compartment and hoped for the best.

The asteroid hit with the force of 7 billion atomic bombs. So. Many. Ergs. I went zooming forward through time, landing with a thud on a boat deck.

“Ow.”

Calm sea, chilly weather, and people rushing by me. A woman in a nightgown and slippers, hair curled up in rags, reached down to help me up. The boy with her slipped a white canvas life jacket around my neck.

“Hurry, Miss, we have to get to the lifeboats. We’re sinking!”

 

Next week: “Episode 3: Have buckwheat, will travel”

____________

 

Gretchen Tessmer is a writer based in the U.S./Canadian borderlands. She writes poetry and short fiction, with work appearing in Nature, Daily Science Fiction, Cast of Wonders, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, among other venues.

 

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Because it was 24° with snow flurries this morning and this weather is supposed to continue through the weekend, and because SHOWCASE contains Sipora Coffelt's story, "Finding Spring," about a girl stuck in a world where winter never ends, we’re doing a free e-book promo. This weekend only, the Kindle edition of SHOWCASE is free for the price of a click. Tell your friends. Share the link.

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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 in biology and a fascination with genetics, I started to use more science in my fiction.

After reading hard SF for the past 50 years, and writing hard SF successfully for the past 20, I've started to dig deeper into what it takes to create realistic alien life forms. In the following series, I'll be sharing some of what I've learned. I've had some of those stories published, some not...I teach a class to GT young people every summer called ALIEN WORLDS. I've learned a lot preparing for that class for the past 25 years...so...I have the opportunity to share with you what I've learned thus far. Take what you can use, leave the rest. Let me know what YOU'VE learned. If you want to know what I wrote in Communicating With Sapient Aliens? How? Go here: https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2022/03/creating-alien-aliens-part-16.html

I ended Part 16A with this: "The possibility of making a conscious self-sacrifice would also, it seems to me, to be something that sets us apart from the stuff on Earth that isn’t sapient…”

Let me expand on that and some other thoughts I’ve had regarding communicating with REALLY different aliens. For the most part, animals are not capable of making self-sacrificial decisions – and before you decide to grab me and throw me under the nearest bus, let me just assure you that we have between three and five cats, and either one or two dogs. This house has also hosted geckos, chameleons, tanks and tanks of fish, Russian box tortoise, fire newts, rats, albino African clawed frogs, snake, cockatiel, hamsters (the entirety of the divisions of the Animal Kingdom (excepting Marsupials) were represented at a single moment in time: Reptile, Fish, Amphibian, Bird, Mammal. The Plant kingdom has also been amply represented both indoors and out; and we live half a block from a park reserve and have deer, fox, coyote, Great Horned owls, hawks eagles, and countless other creatures visit our yard during the year. ALL of them communicate.

I KNOW cats and dogs communicate. Your dog will rush out and save you from traffic or attack a burglar or a murder intent on killing your family. However, I think this is more of a pack/flock/pride/school response. I don’t know how conscious the decision to save you from death is…

However, I argue against the response/behavior being a conscious decision to sacrifice his or her life to save yours. I think it’s more of an inborn response to threats. I’m certain I will be castigated for this POV, but it’s my article and I’m sticking with my interpretation.

6) We will NOT be able to use our inherent psychic powers – because there is at BEST sketchy “evidence” that Humans even HAVE psychic powers. Yet, we throw that burden onto some poor schlub of an alien species with the blithe assumption that two brains THAT EVOLVED ON TOTALLY DIFFERENT WORLDS AND HAVE TOTALLY DIFFERENT BIOLOGIES…would be able to touch hands and instantly know what the other is thinking. In colloquial English as well (the argument being that by some Telepathic Ability Organ their thoughts will reach us in a language we understand with concepts we understand), the aliens would be able to utilize the paradigms and structures of our brains to skip over our tendency to think in the language we speak, and go right to communicating complex sociopolitical concepts and non-physical ethical concepts that evolved while the Communicator evolved on their home world.

My OPINION is that this is the rankest sort of Homo sapiens sapiens-o-centric thinking. That somehow our latent psychic abilities will spring forth in order to communicate with visiting aliens. Out most likely response will be the one President Whitmore had when the hive-minded Harvesters told him that there would be “No peace.” I doubt that Whitmore would have understood ANYTHING from a being whose biology precludes making any sort of sound at all. How would they be able to communicate in words if their biology doesn’t allow for words to be spoken?

Spock in “Devil in the Dark” is another example some might flee to – he wasn’t hearing words, just feelings. Which is all very fine and good, but at the end of the episode, he was able to clearly articulate that the Mother Horta liked his pointed ears. I doubt that when we DO meet the Others, that we’ll have concepts that are that “sympatico”. At best, we might hope that aliens would find our minds…coherent. Besides, “How To Build A Warp Drive And Achieve World Peace” would be difficult to communicate via emotions, shared or not.

7) How about numbers? I read and hear repeatedly that “Mathematics is the Universal Language”. OK, let’s go with that. Joan Slonczewski created a world with a totally alien biology in her novel THE CHILDREN STAR (1999). At one point she did NOT use mental telepathy, but microscopic creatures who were sapient enmasse and could cause the girl's Human brain to understand a form of communication using flashing biological lights. The could communicate with one of the children (but only one!) who was a math savant and could intuit what they meant by the numbers they flashed.

Maybe these people are talking about the initial communication, where we flash numbers at each other and then establish that our math is the same. I have trouble with that because if Humans have developed several counting systems ranging from Base 1 (Unitary system) to Base 60 (Mesopotamian) (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_(mathematics)), how many OTHER counting bases might there be, and how likely are would either be able to figure out what the other is counting in? Even allowing a common base system, how might we communicate ideas like politics, emotions, faith, love, and other intangibles? The fact is that, we can’t.

In “Arrival”, even though we know we have similar mathematics, the problem lay in differing perceptions of time. How do you overcome that? Clearly, it required the work of several geniuses – Louise Banks, Ian Donelly, and General Shang to TRANSLATE the math into words. It was intuitive.

So what will it take to communicate with aliens? Language. Math. Leadership. Combined in the correct proportion and NOT some kind of “here’s our team that will translate the alien language for us”. But rather, looking at what we get, asking the question, “Based on what appears to be here, what kind of a team do we need to assemble to make sense of this so we don’t end up either killing each other…or them eradicating us?” This is perhaps the biggest weakness of the majority of our SciFi franchises – STAR TREK, STAR WARS, BABYLON 5, THE EXPANSE and countless science fiction novels and series. There’s a sense that once we learn to communicate with one alien civilization, we can just keep applying the same rules and eventually come up with a benevolent democracy where everyone works together in peace and harmony…

So, in order to create convincing, realistic, and logically illogical alien aliens, I HAVE to think things through. And I as I pointed out on personal blog, "...my problem with most of the stories I’ve tried to write about WheetAh/Human have got them thinking just like we do, only with a plantimal brain. Hmmm…I 'may' have a lot of work to do."

Which, of course, gives me an idea for the NEXT periodic post in this series: is the Federation of Planets, the Chancellor with the Republic Senate, the Interstellar Alliance, or the United Nations of Earth and Luna/Martian Congressional Republic on Mars/Outer Planets Alliance marginal governing body…a given? What alien forms of government will aliens have – or have we thought of ALL possible forms of government?

Image: https://image.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/alien-human-600w-136457129.jpg

Guy Stewart is a husband supporting his wife who is a multi-year breast cancer survivor; a father, father-in-law, grandfather, foster father, friend, writer, and recently retired teacher and school counselor who maintains a writing blog by the name of POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/) where he showcases his opinion and offers his writing up for comment. He has 72 stories, articles, reviews, and one musical script to his credit, and the list still includes one book! He also maintains GUY'S GOTTA TALK ABOUT BREAST CANCER & ALZHEIMER'S, where he shares his thoughts and translates research papers into everyday language. In his spare time, he herds cats and a rescued dog, helps keep a house, and loves to bike, walk, and camp. He thinks out loud in print at: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/

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