The Never-ending FAQ: submissions window closing soon

Welcome to this week’s installment of The Never-ending FAQ, the constantly evolving adjunct to our Submission Guidelines. If you have a question you’d like to ask about Stupefying Stories or Rampant Loon Press, feel free to post it as a comment here or to email it to our submissions address. I can’t guarantee we’ll post a public answer, but can promise every question we receive will be read and considered.

Today’s question comes from Malina, who asks:

Dear editors of Stupefying Stories,
What's the deadline for submitting to the Showcase? I couldn’t find it in the submissions guidelines.

Regards,
Malina

I’m really glad you asked that question. You are right; we don’t have a cutoff date in our current Submission Guidelines. When we reopened to submissions and posted those guidelines, we naïvely thought we’d be able to keep up with the inflow of new Showcase submissions.

Then, Duotrope opened the floodgates.

We’ve now hit the point where we can either handle new submissions or publish fiction, there isn’t time enough in the day to do both. Since our entire raison d'être is to publish fiction, it’s therefore time to close the window for a bit, to enable us to concentrate on book production. Ergo—

Effective Monday, April 1st, 2024, we are closed to unsolicited submissions. Any unsolicited submission received on or after April 1st will be rejected unread.

We plan to reopen to Showcase submissions on Saturday, June 1st. However, be advised that we will be changing our submission guidelines before we reopen for submissions in June, in order to try to improve the wheat/chaff ratio.

Thank you,
Bruce Bethke
Editor, Stupefying Stories
A Rampant Loon Media publication