The phone meowed twice. It had never made that noise before.
Why would anyone call at three a.m.? Eric picked it up, but there was nobody there.
Mr. Ruffles stopped licking his fur and stood on his two hind legs. “Well, that’s the signal.” He looked at Eric. “I guess we cats have collected enough data.”
Eric stared at his fat tabby. He had just left the office after spending hours trying to fix a coding error and was exhausted. He was hearing things. “What?”
Bart, Eric’s beagle, didn’t even lift his head up from the rug in front of the gas logs.
“Meow,” Mr. Ruffles said in a tone dripping with sarcasm. “The field study is complete. The mother ship should be transporting us up any minute now.”
Surely if there is anyone around here who truly “needs no introduction,” it’s Pete Wood. However, for form’s sake, here we go again…
Pete Wood is an attorney from Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his kind and very patient wife. His first appearance in our pages was “Mission Accomplished” in the now out-of-print August 2012 issue. After publishing a lot of stories with us he graduated to becoming a regular contributor to Asimov’s, but he’s still kind enough to send us things we can publish from time to time, and we’re always happy to get them.
For the past two years Pete has been in the process of evolving into a fiction editor, God help him, first with The Pete Wood Challenge, then with Dawn of Time, then with The Odin Chronicles, and now with Tales from the Brahma, a shared world saga that features the creative work of Roxana Arama, Gustavo Bondoni, Carol Scheina, Patricia Miller, Jason Burnham, and of course, Pete Wood. We suspect that Pete’s real love is theater, though, as evidenced by his short movie, Quantum Doughnut — which you can stream, if you follow the foregoing link.
Pete Wood photo by Lee Baker.
Okay, this bio is a bit past its sell-by date. The film adaptation of Quantum Doughnut is still out on YouTube, to my mild surprise, and well worth nine minutes and fifteen seconds of your time, if you’re so inclined. Tales from the Brahma failed to find an audience and was cancelled after ten episodes—eleven, if you include Roxana Arama’s “Warp and Warpath,” which was originally written for Brahma but then revised to work as a standalone story—and while the ten-episode serial Dawn of Time was completed, that happened at a really bad time, so it never got the post-completion promotion it deserved. I still like the series premise, though, as summarized in the intro to Episode 10. (Huh. Written by Roxana Arama, again.)
The story thus far: 32nd Century high school student Dawn Anderson has just had the worst day ever. Needing a better grade in History, she “borrowed” her father’s TimePak to take a short jaunt back to the 20th Century, only to make a perfectly innocent mistake involving a stolen handgun and a too-hot McDonald’s cherry pie. Instead of returning home, she ended up bouncing from disaster to catastrophe, each one worse than the one before. After being chased by clowns, narrowly avoiding becoming a tyrannosaur’s snack, jumping out mere moments before the Chicxulub extinction event, making a new friend (Stella) and rescuing her from the Titanic, being found by her worst enemy (Becky) and being forced to rescue her, too, from a robot uprising, the three of them barely escaped with their souls, but not Becky’s soles, as things truly went to Hell…or more accurately, to the Time Recycling Plant, where changes to the timeline are fixed by melting down reality and recasting the space-time continuum. Now, at last, it looks like Dawn has finally managed to leap back to her own time and place…
Or has she?
After 49 episodes The Odin Chronicles went on hiatus, and while it will be returning to complete season two, I can’t say exactly when it will resume.
But all that is beside the point. When we mention Pete Wood, what everyone really wants to know about is:
Q: What’s going on with The Pete Wood Challenge?
A: I’m glad you asked! After some prolonged negotiations, Pete and I have agreed on the terms for what I wanted to call The Last Dangerous Pete Wood Challenge but we wisely decided to call “Happy Trails” instead. Here they are.
Challenge #38, “Happy Trails,” is now open for entries!
The Challenge: Write a story of up to 150 words in length using the prompt, “happy trails.” The prompt does not need to appear in the story. Any genre is fine.
Prizes:
1st place $20.00 USD, 2nd place $15.00, 3rd place, $10.00, Honorable
Mentions, (1-2) $5.00. The winning entries will be published online by
Stupefying Stories in June of 2025.
Who can enter: The contest is open to both Codexians and the general public. One entry per writer, please.
How to enter: Send your entry in the body of an email to:
southernfriedsfwriter@gmail.com
Include
the words “Happy Trails” in the subject line. It wouldn’t hurt to include
“Pete Wood Challenge 38” or “PWC 38” in your email, too.
Deadline: 7AM EST, May 15, 2025
Now get writing!
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