It’s the last Friday in October already, so it’s time to clear out the mailbox and get ready for November. Beginning with…
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 variety of discount deals for Stupefying Stories #23, #24, and #25.
Tell your friends. Remember, likes are nice, but shares and retweets boost the signal.
Q: What’s with the Six Questions for… series of posts?
A: Stupefying Stories’ entire raison d'être is to draw attention to newer writers. We thought it would be fun to do this by running short profiles, longer than the usual author’s bio, but lacking the time to do full-blown in-depth interviews, we settled on giving authors a list of questions, some serious and some silly, and asking them to pick the six or so they felt like answering. It was either this or go whole-hog into doing a podcast, and we don’t want to go there.
Q: When will be seeing “Six Questions for... Bruce Bethke”?
A: You won’t. Six questions aren’t nearly enough to cover all the questions I get asked on a regular basis.
Q: Oh, come on. Surely there must be one question you can answer. How about…
Q: If you had a theme song that played every time you came into a room, what would it be?
A: I like to think it would be something really exciting, energetic, and dynamic; perhaps something written by Mike Post. I suspect it would more likely be “Send in the Clowns,” though.
Q: Do you listen to music while writing? If so, what kinds of music or which artists?
A: No. I can’t. If there’s music playing, I must listen to it—and listen to it critically. Analytically. Much as it’s really hard for me simply to read and enjoy fiction now, it’s really hard for me simply to listen to music.
I know people who can write in noisy, crowded coffee shops. I can’t. I need quiet, in order to focus and think. In one particularly bad office environment I worked in the ambient noise level was right up there with working on a factory floor. When I complained about it, I was told to buy ear buds and listen to music. This was counter-productive. At the end of the day I was in a really good mood, because I’d been listening to good music all day, but I hadn’t gotten much done.
Q: What’s the best kind of computer for a writer?
A: When asked what kind of camera was best, Ansel Adams answered, “The one you have with you.” The same goes for writers and their working tools. The best tool for writing is the one that you have with you, that enables you to get your ideas out of your head and onto some medium you can share with others.
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Q: Are you a plotter or a pantser?
A: I wish. I can plot first, but the results always seem dry and sterile to me. I can try to pants it, but when I do that I always seem to end up meandering around in circles and going nowhere. I truly envy both the folks who can start with an outline and produce good results and those who can just grab onto one end of a story and start pulling, to see where the tale goes.
My preferred method is to start with a legal pad and a cheap fountain pen, and to start by sketching out ideas. (Sometimes literally sketching a scene or a character, in order to help me visualize it.) My true first drafts are nothing that anyone else would recognize as such. They’re full of scribbles, parenthetical notes, crossed-out paragraphs, circles and arrows, comments in the margins, sometimes Post-It notes, sometimes half-pages torn out and Scotch-taped or stapled to other pages. I can’t really start to write what other people would recognize as a first draft manuscript until I’ve figured out how the blessed thing ends. Then I can go back and start figuring out what pieces need to be in place in order to setup and support that ending.
I’m definitely a non-linear writer. I liken it to sitting down at a piano and free-form improvising, working out motifs and progressions until I’ve developed some idea of what it is that will go into the piece of music I want to write. For fiction, that’s me with a legal pad and a fountain pen.
I’ve tried improvising on a typewriter. It’s just not the same.
Q: Back in August you announced an ambitious Fall scheduled for Stupefying Stories. Since then, nothing. What happened?
A: Towards the end of August something large and unpleasant dropped on me—no, not the oak tree limb through the roof, that happened in October—that caused me to question my entire reason for doing Stupefying Stories and to make me wonder whether I really still want to be doing this in 2025.
On both these questions, the jury is still out. I will tell you right now though that our original novels sell. Our short story collections don’t. The move to putting Stupefying Stories exclusively on Kindle and making it free to read on Kindle Unlimited didn’t change that. It’s beginning to look as if we can’t even give short story collections away.
Q: Aren’t you going to try to rush at least one book out right now?
A: Right now? Do you think anyone will notice anything besides the election and its aftermath in the next five weeks?
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Q: I’ve worked in short fiction publishing for [name redacted]. Must you be a masochist to be a small press publisher?
A: No. You need to be a dreamer, and something of an idealist.
Stupefying Stories began with a dream. Actually, not even that; we began with an informal writer’s workshop, The Friday Challenge, and with the idea that we could pull together a group of people with above-average reading comprehension skills and far-above-average verbal acuity, and do something really interesting, that people would notice.
For a while, that seemed to work. A lot of new writers came through here, on their way to bigger and better things. It was always an uphill struggle, though, especially as Karen’s cancer progressed and the Karen & Bruce story wound its way to the last chapter and epilogue. To the end, Karen was always really proud of all the new writers we’d helped get their start in publishing.
In the years that we’ve been doing Stupefying Stories, the market has changed. More importantly, the readership has changed, and continues to do so. It’s not enough to publish good fiction now. You need to promote and market, constantly, relentlessly, without fail, to the point of exhaustion and then beyond.
No, it doesn’t require masochism. But to be commercially successful at it definitely requires something we don’t seem to have.
Q: You should be more interactive! Be more engaged on social media! Maybe try BookTok? Can you do reader polls? Maybe those will bring in more readers?
A: Yes, we have the capacity to do reader polls, and have done them in the past. As with our failed Instagram experiment, our short-lived “Courting Controversy” series, and many other similar experiments, though, we’ve found that while they get plenty of attention, they don’t bring in more readers. Instead, they bring in people who have an urgent need to express their opinion, but once they’ve done so they feel no need to stick around and read anything else on the site. And given that the entire point of Stupefying Stories is to encourage people to read new fiction by new writers…
Honestly, reader polls are like having a fire hydrant on your lawn. You get a lot of attention from the neighborhood dogs, but only briefly, and it doesn’t do the grass much good.
So here we are: on the last Friday in October. Surprisingly, there’s no snow on the ground… yet. While the peppers are done for the year, I’m still picking green beans in the garden, and I may yet get a few more ripe tomatoes before they freeze to death.
Without thinking about it, this traditionally has become the time of year when I reassess what I’ve accomplished in the year now ending and start making plans for what I will do differently next year. At the moment, the only thought that is absolutely clear in my mind is that no matter how it turns out, I can’t wait for this election to be over.
Stay tuned…
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 variety of discount deals for Stupefying Stories #23, #24, and #25.
Tell your friends. Remember, likes are nice, but shares and retweets boost the signal.
2 comments:
Beautiful photo!
So you interviewed yourself after all.
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