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.
I have another sizable pile of questions to answer this week and even less time to do so, so I’m going to skip the attributions and get right to it in Q&A format.
Q: I’ve been trying to get a hold of you but you haven’t been answering IMs, email, or even your phone. Are you okay?
A: Yes, I’m fine. I had to take a 3-day road trip to go back to Milwaukee to attend the funeral of one of my oldest and best friends. This one struck closer to home than most, as not only was he my age, but we shared the same birthday. I’m back now, though. It’s amazing how much email piles up when I’m offline for just a few days.
Q: I love the SHOWCASE stories you’ve been running lately, but when are you going to put out the next issue of the magazine?
A: Now that every story that was submitted for SHOWCASE in the last reading period is either under contract or has been rejected, we’re back to work on the magazine. As soon as we have a firm release date, it will be posted here.
If you’ve submitted a story recently and haven’t received either an acceptance or a rejection, please contact me through the submissions@ address. Do not attempt to contact me through the Stupefying Stories facebook page or Twitter/X page, as messages sent those ways do get through to me—eventually—but honestly, sending snail mail would be faster.
Q: You accepted my story [title] on [date]. When is it going to be published?
A: This question again?
The point of this open reading period was to get enough stories in the pipeline to keep SHOWCASE going through June. We’re now planning our publication schedule through June, so the short answer to this question is, “Sometime between now and the end of June.” Once we get SHOWCASE sufficiently front-loaded to let the publishing schedule run on autopilot for a few weeks, I want to concentrate on the next issue of the magazine, and only the next issue of the magazine.
Q: Why did you reject my story? What was wrong with it?
A: We started to write up a collective answer to this question, but it was turning too negative so we decided to shelve it until next week. Suffice to say we reject a lot of stories that don’t have anything wrong with them, per se, they just aren’t what we need right now.
The saddest cases were the ones that were really well-written. The author had obviously studied their craft and gone to all the right seminars and workshops. The author had really good craft skills. But they didn’t have anything new or interesting to say.
Reworking formulas that were old 40 years ago is a great way to make money selling novels, but doesn’t work in the short fiction market. Maybe it works for those magazines that are self-consciously striving to be retro, but it doesn’t work for us.
Q: Aw, come on, can’t you give me just one hint?
A: Okay, how about this: if you’re going to write a poignant contemporary or near-future hospital death scene, learn something about how hospitals actually work and what the people who work in them actually do. Don’t base your scene on what you learned from binge-watching Chicago Med.Finally…
This isn’t really a question so much as a test. This should be a link to an ongoing conversation on Facebook regarding the AI-generated audio book we did for EMERALD OF EARTH. Or it may just be a blank gray box.
Okay, that’s weird. It was supposed to go to this specific post on Facebook. Instead, it went out to Facebook just long enough to get redirected to the original post on the Stupefying Stories site. Hmm…
If you like the stories we’re publishing, become a supporter today. We do Stupefying Stories out of pure love for genre fiction, but in publishing as in tennis, love means nothing. To keep Stupefying Stories going at this level we need to raise at least $500 USD monthly, and rather than doing so with pledge breaks or crowd-funding campaigns, we’d rather have supporters. If just 100 people commit to giving $5 monthly, we can keep going at this level indefinitely. If we can raise more, we will pay our authors more.
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