Here’s what’s going on in the Stupefying Stories/Rampant Loon Press office right now.
- The new and improved SHOWCASE: The Next Generation launches this coming Saturday, July 1st, at 0700 CDT. Beginning Saturday, SHOWCASE will be bringing you new stories daily, at 0700 CDT sharp, with all stories carefully hand-selected and lovingly polished to a high gloss by award-winning, nay, legendary science fiction author Bruce Bethke. Bookmark this link! https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/ Better yet, join the cult of great short fiction and become a Follower!
Hmm. There doesn’t seem to be a way to isolate the [Follow] link from the Followers gadget in the left column of the web site. We’ll have to work on that. In the meantime, you’ll just have to scroll up to find the [Follow] button in the left column and click it.
Hmm also. https://stupefyingstories.com is still having issues with the site certificate. http://stupefyingstories.com works, but your browser may say it’s an unsafe site because of the missing “s” in the transport protocol specification. Another thing for the to-do list. For now, use https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/ - We have a great lineup of new short stories already in the queue for SHOWCASE, with more being added every day. I’m really pleased to tell you that you’ll be seeing a lot of brand-new stories from a lot of previous contributors and returning fan favorites, including Beth Cato, Anatoly Belilovsky, Karin Terebessy, Marcas McClellan, Carol Scheina, Karl Dandenell, Judith Field, Gustavo Bondoni, Julie Frost, and many, many more! Really, I am absolutely delighted that so many Stupefying Stories alumni have returned to support this, some even going so far as to write absolutely new and fresh stories just for this call. Why, it almost brings a spark of warmth and life to my cold and leathery publisher’s heart, it does, to know that so many writers who started out with us still support the old Rampant Loon.
- Speaking of supporting Rampant Loon Press, we’re going to be a lot more up-front about badgering you to subscribe. We do Stupefying Stories and SHOWCASE out of pure love for genre fiction, but in publishing as in tennis, love means nothing. To keep SHOWCASE going at this level we need to raise about $500 USD monthly, and rather than doing so with pledge breaks or Kickstarter campaigns I’d rather have subscribers. If we can get just 100 people to commit to just $5 monthly— (No obligations! Cancel anytime!) —we can keep SHOWCASE going at this level indefinitely. If we raise more than that, we will use it to pay our authors more. (Say what?! That’s crazy!)
We’re not out to fill the void left by the shut-down of Daily Science Fiction. Right now, we can’t begin to pay our authors what they paid theirs. But with your help, we can begin to move towards filling the hole in the online genre fiction ecosystem that DSF left behind.
Nota bene: We have had a few well-meaning people offer to give us very large donations, and while I really do appreciate their kindness, I’d rather have a large number of small-amount subscribers than a few large-amount one-time donors. It’s a matter of my preferring to have a broad base of committed and ongoing support for Stupefying Stories. It’s a sort of a populism thing.
I have had a few people offer to provide us with downright lavish funding—on the condition that we agree to run more stories promoting this or that religious, political, or socio-sexual viewpoint and no stories by any of “those” people. (However the prospective donor defines “those.”) These are offers I assure you I will never take. I’d rather strike the tent and close the circus than become a pimp for some religious, political, or socio-sexual viewpoint. On this, you have my promise.
- Stupefying Stories #24 rolls out next week. Seriously. It’s actually within reach to release it this week, but then I realized that even if I did release it this week, this being the Independence Day holiday weekend, no one would notice. So next week it is.
- Finally, as you can see from the photo, we have pretty much finished moving into our new office. Same address; different floor, more room, better light, and more fresh air. In the process of moving, though, we found a lot of old manuscripts, correspondence, and half-finished projects that were all left in an uncertain state when everything was forwarded to Helena Handbasket in July of 2019. In the weeks to come I’m going to be sorting through all this stuff and figuring out what’s still viable, what’s potentially salvageable, and what is better employed as fireplace tinder. Looks like I’m going to be giving the (supposedly now working correctly) new email system a thorough workout.
Thanks for reading all this, and have a great day!
—Bruce Bethke | Stupefying Stories
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