Creating Alien Aliens, Part 17A: A JELLYFISH Intelligence...HOW?

In September of 2007, I started this blog with a bit of writing advice. A little over a year later, I discovered how little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, Lin Oliver speak at a convention hosted by the Minnesota Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Since then, I have shared (with their permission) and applied the writing wisdom of Lin...

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SHOWCASE • “A Contract for Meyerowitz,” by Bruce Bethke

We’re pretty tied up right now with the work needed to get Stupefying Stories #24 finished and ready for release next week, and Trunk Story Week had a mid-air collision with Chemo Week and thus our planned posting schedule got a bit scrambled. Ergo here, for your entertainment, is yet another old story of mine that spent a few years in the trunk before being published. Afterward...

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Trunk Story Week • Part 3

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”— L. P. HartleyThere have been so many revolutions and so much evolution since I began writing fiction half a century ago that it’s become almost impossible to keep track of it all. When I began, writers wrote using typewriters, and mailed paper manuscripts to editors, who sometimes accepted them, and then marked...

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Dawn of Time • Episode 8: “When things look dark…”

Written by Ray DaleyContinued from Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4 | Episode 5 | Episode 6 | Episode 7The 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...

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Trunk Story Week • Part 2

 How do you know when it’s time to give up on trying to sell a story?In the old days of actual paper submissions sent by mail to magazines, there were two natural and reliable but unspoken indicators. Along about the fifth or sixth time your manuscript went out to an editor with shining bright hopes and came back home with its tail between its legs, it began to look pretty...

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Trunk Story Week • Part 1

Every writer has a collection of trunk stories: stories they can’t seem to get published no matter how long they keep trying or how much effort they pour into trying to revise and improve them. If you are at all serious about being a writer, you probably have a pile of them, too.If so, congratulations. You’re in good company. I have known hundreds of professional writers,...

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Proposal: Tales from the Trunk

There is a question that is of tremendous interest to writers, but I wonder whether it’s of any interest at all to readers. The question is: What separates a story that is well-written and finished from being a story that is published? Let’s face it. Most stories are fated to be trunk stories. The numbers are merciless. Every day there are far more new stories being written...

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SHOWCASE • “Appliancé,” by Bruce Bethke

 We’re pretty tied up right now with the work needed to get Stupefying Stories #24 ready for release on June 1st, so Ad Hoc Trunk Story week got pushed to the back burner and the new Saturday Fiction Showcase is still in the freezer, waiting to be defrosted. Hoping to kill two birds—No, wait. I hate that expression. I don’t want to kill anything. How about, “Hoping to...

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Dawn of Time • Episode 7: “The dreadful secret of McDonald’s”

Written by Cécile CristofariContinued from Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4 | Episode 5 | Episode 6The 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...

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