The Never-ending FAQ • 26 February 2025

First news: I’ve shut down our crowd-funding campaign. Or rather, I’m trying to. While I’ve emailed everyone on our (pathetically short) list of supporters, some folks still have monthly automatic credit card payments set up. To them I say, thank you for your continued support, but going forward I’m going to refund your automatic payments anyway, so you may as well shut them...

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Wrapping up “Stories You Probably Missed” week

The destruction/construction crew showed up a half-hour before dawn this morning and they’ve been hammering and sawing away ever since, trying to get the job finished today, so my ability to concentrate is not quite what it might be. The plan for today was to wrap up “Stories You Probably Missed” week with the last of the stories we published during the period when we couldn’t...

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“(re)Visions in the Jar” • by Sophie Sparrow

Continuing with this week’s theme, two weeks ago we published “Visions in the Jar,” a beautiful and heartbreaking little story by Sophie Sparrow. Unfortunately we did this during the period when we were temporarily unable to access our Facebook, X/Twitter, or Bluesky accounts, so we were unable to promote the story, and thus the readership numbers were not what we feel this...

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A puzzling thing happened…

…during our span without access to Facebook, X/Twitter, or Bluesky. Christopher Degni is usually one of our most popular writers. We’ve been publishing his work for years, beginning, I think, with “Life and Jacq and the Giant and Death.” (Actually, going strictly by chronology, we published “Merry-Go-Round” first, but I believe we accepted “Life and Jacq…” for publication...

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A funny thing happened…

I thought I’d made adequate plans for the possibility that I might be knocked offline once the destruction/reconstruction project began. We had eight new Pete Wood Challenge flash fiction stories all set up in the queue and ready to be published automatically; no further editorial intervention required. All I had to do was let the cron jobs run.But…In keeping with the principle...

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Status Update: 10:15 AM 02/17/2025 -15°

Kind thanks to everyone who has written to express their concern about how I’m doing. Yes, January began on a back-to-back pair of extraordinarily painful notes, but neither are the reason I’ve been offline for about a month. The primary cause is that the contractor returned to finish the repair and remodeling work that was made necessary by last summer’s destructive...

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“Scavenger Hunt” • by Jeff Currier

A Buchladen in Brighton yielded Darien his first Magna Carta.  “Hidden just before the SS pillage of 1943,” the proprietor said, praying Darien was not Gestapo. Darien checked nearby universe branches. Nazis had burned it in every one. His second, he pilfered from a slow-verse where now was 1215. Cost him a crossbow bolt through the arm. He came up empty where Rome was...

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“Visions in the Jar” • by Sophie Sparrow

The air is thick, smells green and hopeful somehow, the day I visit the swamp witch. She collects marsh gas for me in a jar; curling tendrils of vapour spill and twist inside the glass like smoke. “You can see portents in there? Visions of the future?” I ask in earnest. She nods, places a hand on my swollen belly. I shift, protectively. She peers into the jar, watching the...

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