It’s been a batguano busy month here at La Casa del Calamari, so it’s been some time since we’ve done a Week in Review post. Looking back at the last one…
The first and foremost thing that jumps out at me is what’s happened to the cow pasture and that little maple tree just across the fence. This morning, it looks like this:
I suppose it won’t be too much longer before it looks like this again.
I tell people I choose to live in Minnesota because I like the ever-changing parade of seasons. In truth, I wish the ever-changing parade of seasons would just slow the f*** down once in a while. They’ve been moving much too fast lately and I’m beginning suspect they’re accelerating. I’d like them to pause for moment, to let me catch my breath.
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The end of September is always a difficult time for me. It should be a wonderful time, as we celebrate my eldest daughter’s birthday. Instead, this year was the 15th anniversary of the day the El Paso county coroner’s office called to tell me her body had been found, and I needed to fly out to Colorado right away to confirm her identity and claim the body. I’ve no idea why this particular anniversary hit me harder than any of the previous ones, but it did. Perhaps it has something to do with this also being the 2nd anniversary of the acute medical crisis that put my wife in the hospital, first into the ER, and then into isolation and the ICU, for what turned out to be the rest of her life.
Last year at this time I was still in shock, I think, and trying to deflect by burying myself in work. This year the numbness has worn off, and I’m really starting to feel. I’m not enjoying it.
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I am by nature an introvert. I can fake being an extrovert, but only for a while, and find it exhausting. My natural introversion leads to introspection, and in the case of Stupefying Stories, retrospection. For much of the past month I’ve been buried in back-office stuff, taking a hard look at a chaotic mountain of disconnected statistics and metrics and trying to figure out what we’ve been doing right, what I’ve been doing wrong, what’s worth developing further, and what’s been a waste of time.
A sidebar parable: In 1975 I had a great ticket for a WHO concert, main floor, center, about 15 rows back from the stage. My pleasure was somewhat diminished by the fact that there was a pretty young girl next to me, perhaps 15 years old, who spent the entire concert jumping up and down in a frenzy, waving her arms in the air and screaming “ROGER!” at the top of her lungs. I suspect she was the sort of girl for whom Pete Townshend wrote the song, “Sally Simpson.” By the end of the show she had jumped herself to exhaustion and screamed herself absolutely hoarse, but Roger Daltrey never noticed.
That’s a bit like how I’m feeling about Stupefying Stories right now: like I’ve spent the past 14 years jumping up and down and screaming “NOTICE US!” at the top of my lungs, but am beginning to suspect that Roger never will.
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This bout of intense intro/retrospection was triggered by Pete Wood, who’d asked me to finish that complete chronological list of Pete Wood Challenge stories I’d been putting off doing until “later.” The task turned out to be more difficult than it at first appeared, as our site search function doesn’t work quite as expected and our metadata tagging was far less consistent than I’d thought. To complete the list I eventually ended up having to crawl month-by-month through absolutely everything we’ve posted since 2021, to glean the stories that might otherwise have escaped. Along the way, I also accumulated a lot of interesting and/or puzzling statistics.
Here follows the chronological list of everything we’ve published since the last Week in Review post. After that, I’ll share some notes about what I learned from taking a deep dive through our last three-plus years of stories and posts.
“The Slings and Arrows of Childhood,”
by Richard Zwicker
When Astrid says, “Last one there is a rotten egg,” she means it.
Six Questions for… Brandon Nolta
He’s been compared to Bradbury, Vonnegut, Ellison,
and Disch. Find out what all the fuss is about.
“Data Integrity,”
by Tommy Blanchard
The downside of uploading your memories to the cloud.
“Vacuuming Unused Rooms,”
by R. Gene Turchin
A strange and sad little story about immortality and grief.
THE PETE WOOD CHALLENGE #34: “Homeless”
“The Sky Will Fall,”
by Tobias Backman
“Proper Witch’s Home,”
by Carol Scheina
“Don’t Shoot the Messenger,”
by Andrew Akers
A particle physicist makes a truly mind-blowing discovery.
“You Should Go,”
by Laura Bohlcke
Some guys just won’t take no for an answer.
“The Creeping Fear,”
by Harris Coverly
A wee spot of good old-fashioned Gothic horror for you.
The Pete Wood Challenge Index
The Complete List of Everything We’ve Published, So Far.
More than 200 stories!
Also available through this permanent link. Bookmark it!
So who is this Pete Wood character anyway,
and why do we cut him so much slack?
The Never-ending FAQ • 25 October 2024
ROGER!!!!
“Release Me,”
by C. L. Sidell
Carrie and Vanessa were just trying to find a good ghost story.
They got more than they’d bargained for.
§
And now, some things gleaned from the deep-dive
#1 All-time Most-read Post: “Announcing the 2014 Campbellian Anthology”
It was the Pro-bono Project from Hell, proof that no good deed goes unpunished, and a colossal waste of time, money, and energy. I still regret agreeing to do it.
#2 All-time Most-read Post: “Submission Guidelines”
Well, at least people are reading them, even if they’re ignoring them.
#3 All-time Most-read Post: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (movie review)
Saw this movie, we did. Long, it is.
#4 All-time Most-read Post: “Remembering the Future: 40 Years with ‘Cyberpunk’”
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
All-time Most-read Original Short Story: “The Shrine Keeper,” by Made in DNA
Not assigning it a number, but it’s somewhere in the Top 20s.
Top 10 Most-read Stories in 2024
“gastronomic,” by Richard J. Dowling
“Outside the Window,” by Gordon Pinckheard
“Chasing the Moon,” by Karin Terebessy
“The Pros and Cons of Time Travel,” by James Blakey
“Must Have Been Moonglow,” by Jeanne Van Slyke
“You Should Go,” by Laura Bohlcke
“As You Wish,” by R. M. Linning
“Don’t Shoot the Messenger,” by Andrew Akers
“Moving Further On,” by Gordon Linzner
Interesting that of the stories that were on the mid-year Top 10 list, only “gastronomic” and “The Pros and Cons of Time Travel” are still in the Top 10. For the most part, stories that were on the mid-year list have been bumped down by more recently published stories. This suggests that the SHOWCASE readership is growing, albeit so slowly as to make the growth nearly imperceptible.
Top 5 Most-read Stories in Q3 2024 (August, September, October)
“Outside the Window,” by Gordon Pinckheard
“Chasing the Moon,” by Karin Terebessy
“Must Have Been Moonglow,” by Jeanne Van Slyke
“As You Wish,” by R. M. Linning
Top 10 Most-read Stories in October (non-Pete Wood Challenge)
“You Should Go,” by Laura Bohlcke
“Don’t Shoot the Messenger,” by Andrew Akers
“The Pros and Cons of Time Travel,” by James Blakey
“The Slings and Arrows of Childhood,” by Richard Zwicker
“A Few Minutes in the Life of a Xenosociologist,” by Miriam Thor
“Vacuuming Unused Rooms,” by R. Gene Turchin
“Making Friends at Twenty Thousand Leagues,” by Addison Smith
“Chasing the Moon,” by Karin Terebessy
“Data Integrity,” by Tommy Blanchard
“Arrivals at Hope Station Have Been Indefinitely Postponed,” by Warren Benedetto
Had the most recent Pete Wood Challenge stories been included in this list, they’d all have fallen between “Vacuuming Unused Rooms” and “Chasing the Moon,” for October, but none would have made it into the Top 30 for Q3 or the Top 50 for 2024. Which led me to wonder…
“That Darn, Dear Cat,” by Melissa Mead
“Roadside Stand,” by Pete Wood
“No Justice for Deserters,” by Pauline Barmby
“Lunar Ghosts,” by Sylvia Heike
I honestly was surprised that Pauline Barmby’s “Songbird, Jailbird” didn’t rank higher, but as I said earlier, the data is somewhat puzzling.
§
At this point I have no firm conclusions. However, the data seems to suggest these ideas.
» SHOWCASE readership is growing over time, albeit so slowly as to make the growth nearly imperceptible.
» SHOWCASE stories have short shelf-lives. It’s the rare story that is still being read six months after it was published.
» Pete Wood Challenge stories have even shorter shelf-lives. They get a decent amount of attention at the time they are published, but that attention fizzes away rapidly. Two weeks after they’re published, most PWC stories have gone flat and stale and will never be read again.
Therefore?
Therefore, I don’t know. All I can say at this time is, hmm…
And remind you of this.
Heads up: from Sunday, October 27 to Thursday, October 31, Stupefying Stories #26 will be FREE on Kindle. You don't even have to be a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, it will just plain be FREE on Kindle for those five days. For those same five days we will be running a countdown sale on Stupefying Stories #23, #24, and #25.
Tell your friends. Remember, likes are nice, but shares and retweets boost the signal.
And also this.
FREE E-BOOK GIVEAWAY!
SUNDAY 10/27 ~ THURSDAY 10/31!
TELL YOUR FRIENDS!
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