Coming Attractions • Launching July 1st

Ten years ago today(ish) we released the first issue of SHOWCASE, our ambitious if somewhat misguided attempt to launch a weekly webzine. SHOWCASE #1 featured four original short stories—

» “The Vending Machine,” by Sarah L. Byrne
» “Smart Money,” by Samuel Marzioli
» “Caught,” by A. G. Carpenter
» “Seek Vista,” by Gary Cuba

A review of “Star Trek Into Darkness,” (gosh, is that movie really ten years old now?!)—

And a catastrophic misjudgement, the Stupefying Stories bulletin board and chat room, which almost instantly became a giant spam post magnet and moderation nightmare. The initial iteration of SHOWCASE also suffered from a fundamentally ugly design (we were always going to fix it “later”) that was difficult to navigate and looked like crap on a cell phone, and wasn’t much better on a desktop.

Nonetheless SHOWCASE soldiered on in this format for 13 issues, before going through an evolution and a series of redesigns that eventually ended up becoming this WordPress site.

In this format SHOWCASE ran for another five years and published hundreds of stories, most of which were well-received and most of which are still out there on the site —gosh again, I’d forgotten that my story “First Date” (my one and only attempt at writing paranormal romance) is still out there, though to counterbalance my embarrassment I offer up “Elves Are Douchebags,” by Robert Lowell Russell—

But that iteration of SHOWCASE suffered from two fundamental problems: it was a dilution of our publishing efforts, at a time when we were having trouble getting new books out the door, and when everything began to go off the rails in 2019 something had to give, and the SHOWCASE WordPress site was it. 

Since then we’ve made intermittent attempts to relaunch SHOWCASE and/or to fold it back into this web site (the one you’re looking at right now). These met with varying degrees of success. I for one liked the idea of relaunching SHOWCASE as a low-priced chapbook series, but apparently no one else did: sales were dismal. As for our efforts to fold SHOWCASE into the main Stupefying Stories web site: you can examine the results right here. “Bootleg Bees” by Laura Jane Swanson is still very near and dear to my heart, “Invasive Species” by Steve Quinn still cracks me up, “Market Futures” by M. Ian Bell is an outstanding example of the sort of story I wish I saw more often when we’re open to submissions, and as for “On the Menu Stains of Madness” by G. Scott Huggins: what can I say about this one that I haven’t said already? At least try to read it. Please?

But all of that—the experiments, the false starts, the screwball ideas—is now history, and prologue to today’s big announcement:

SHOWCASE IS BACK!

Beginning Saturday, July 1st, SHOWCASE returns as a regular, daily feature on this web site. Every day at 0700 CDT, we will publish a new, free, SF/F short story for your reading pleasure, complete in one post. No more multi-part stories spread out over days! No more movie reviews! (Really, do you care what I thought of Spider-Man 17: Shove It Up Your Spider-Verse?) No more fatuous articles by yours truly bloviating about the publishing business. Stupefying Stories is about stories, and beginning July 1st, that’s what we’ll be doing: publishing a LOT of stories, every day! We already have more than 40 stories in the queue and ready to go, with more being added to the publication pipeline all the time.

Yes, of course there will be ads: that is kind of the point of this whole thing, to get you thinking, “I like what these people publish. Maybe I should buy some of their books.” Yes, there will be pitches for you to Support Stupefying Stories, especially by becoming a regular monthly subscriber to this site. We’re not being sponsored by any large corporation or religious cult. (At least, not yet.) We’re not taking paid advertising for anyone else’s products. (Again, at least not yet.) We’re not planning to hide our content behind a paywall.

All we want to do for now is publish stories. LOTS of stories, that we think you’ll enjoy so much you’ll want to tell your friends about them. Remember, likes and hearts are nice, but it’s shares and retweets that get the message out.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work. I have stories to publish and four more new submissions came in while I was writing this. 

Thanks for your support!

Bruce Bethke | Stupefying Stories