“The Unicorn Farm” • by Carol Scheina

Mellie was seven when she discovered the unicorn farm. 

The unicorns’ brilliant coats glistened like sunbeams through raindrops. Manes floated like misty clouds.

She imagined riding a unicorn along forest trails, but a fence, crackling with magic, penned them in. She couldn’t even pet them.

From a distance, Mellie gave her best neigh. One neighed back.

Later, she learned the farm shaved down the magical horns, selling pieces for potions. Over the years, their horns grew short and jagged, their eyes pooling with sadness.

Mellie poured over spellbooks. At age 11, she left for magic school.

Seven years later, Mellie returned and whispered the spell she’d practiced. The crackling fence vanished. Mellie neighed, urging freedom, and unicorns galloped away, misty manes vanishing into the nearby woods. All except one, which neighed and bowed its head.

Mellie hopped onto its back, and she was seven again. The dream was finally real.

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Carol Scheina is a deaf speculative author whose stories have appeared in publications such as Flash Fiction Online, Escape Pod, Diabolical Plots, Stupefying Stories, and others. Her writing has been recognized on the Wigleaf Top 50 Short Fiction Longlist, and she has become a fan favorite here for her finely crafted flash fiction pieces on the Stupefying Stories website. You can find more of her work at carolscheina.wordpress.com. 

It’s impossible to overstate how crucial Carol has been behind the scenes here, for all her help with The Pete Wood Challenge, The Odin Chronicles, Tales from the Brahma, and more. Therefore, if you haven’t already read it, you really should check out “Six Questions for… Carol Scheina,” if for no other reason than to get the complete (we think) list of everything by her that we’ve published in the past four years. 

If you don’t have time for that, though, you should at the very least read “How to Return an Overdue Book to the Summer Library.”

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The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. For each contest Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

This time the challenge was to write a flash fiction story of no more than 150 words in length that was inspired by the phrase: “Happy Trails.”

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REPRISE: “Take Me to Your Litter Box” • by Pete Wood

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.”

» READ IT NOW

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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.

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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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REPRISE: “The Disappearing Cat Trick” • by Carol Scheina

 

Tanya’s parents refused to let her get a cat.

No matter how many times Tanya argued that the planet’s environment was fully approved for cats, or that cats had already made their home among the rocks and dust and blue bamboo plants of Odin III, they wouldn’t budge.

Tanya suspected they didn’t want the responsibility of a pet, so she did the next best thing and showered attention on her neighbor’s felines. 

That morning, a gray cat with a notched ear rubbed around her legs. Tanya pulled a bag of freeze-dried protein snacks from her backpack. Galactic provided them to its mining crews, but no one enjoyed eating what tasted like paper pulp with a fishy aftertaste. Tanya always rescued trashed snack bags because, as it turned out, cats adored the taste. The gray gobbled the treat up.

Tanya hadn’t seen the gray before, but he seemed happy to see her. He butted his head into her legs whenever she stopped petting him, begging for more attention. The young girl scratched around the fuzzy chin until her watch buzzed. She really needed to get to school or she’d get a tardy card.

Her skinny ponytail threatened to come undone as her feet pounded the road. She slowed upon reaching the communications office near the school. Strangely, the gray cat was sitting by the office door, licking its paws as though it had been there all along. Yet there was only one road into town, and the cat certainly hadn’t been running alongside her. How’d it get there so fast?

» READ IT NOW

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Carol Scheina is a deaf speculative author whose stories have appeared in publications such as Flash Fiction Online, Escape Pod, Diabolical Plots, Stupefying Stories, and others. Her writing has been recognized on the Wigleaf Top 50 Short Fiction Longlist, and she has become a fan favorite here for her finely crafted flash fiction pieces on the Stupefying Stories website. You can find more of her work at carolscheina.wordpress.com. 

It’s impossible to overstate how crucial Carol has been behind the scenes here, for all her help with The Pete Wood Challenge, The Odin Chronicles, Tales from the Brahma, and more. Therefore, if you haven’t already read it, you really should check out “Six Questions for… Carol Scheina,” if for no other reason than to get the complete (we think) list of everything by her that we’ve published in the past four years. 

If you don’t have time for that, though, you should at the very least read “How to Return an Overdue Book to the Summer Library.”

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REPRISE: “The e-Menace” • by Roxana Arama

It’s Roxana Arama Week!

Following the successful first season of The Odin Chronicles, we launched another group-written shared-world serial: Tales from The Brahma, a saga of life aboard, yes, a generation ship the size of a small planet. Brahma never found an audience, though, which led to our decision to cancel it after ten episodes.

The single most-read story of all the Brahma episodes was this one, “The e-Menace.” As we were pulling together stories for The Best of Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE, we decided it would be a shame to let this one languish in darkness, as a forgotten episode of a forgotten series. Even without reading the rest of the stories in the series, this one is just too good to miss.

Besides, it’s a great lead-in to tomorrow’s all-new story, “Warp and Warpath!”

» READ IT NOW

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Roxana Arama is an award-winning Romanian American author. She studied computer science in Bucharest, Romania, and moved to the United States to work in software development. She is the author of three novels: The Regolith Temple: A Sci-Fi Thriller, The Exiled Queen: A Roman Era Historical Fantasy (in the Delight of Humans and Gods series), and Extreme Vetting: A Thriller. Her short stories and essays have been published in many literary magazines. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her family. 

 

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Six Questions for… Carol Scheina

Carol Scheina is a deaf speculative author whose stories have appeared in publications such as Flash Fiction Online, Escape Pod, Diabolical Plots, Stupefying Stories, and others. Her writing has been recognized on the Wigleaf Top 50 Short Fiction Longlist, and she has become a fan favorite here for her finely crafted flash fiction pieces on the Stupefying Stories website. You can find more of her work at carolscheina.wordpress.com.

What we haven’t mentioned much is how crucial Carol has been behind the scenes here, for all her help with The Pete Wood Challenge, The Odin Chronicles, and Tales from the Brahma. Therefore, this seemed like a good time to catch up with Carol and ask her our usual batch of half-serious, half-silly questions, and point you towards some of her stories on our site.

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SS: What is the first SF/F book or story you remember reading?

CS: My parents let me read whatever was on their bookshelves, and when I was five, my eyes gazed at books by Ian Fleming and James Clavell… King Rat sounded like such an interesting title, but all the long words clumped together in a tiny rat-sized font, so I put that one back. (Now that I know the subject matter of that book, I’m rather glad I didn’t read it at age five!)

I discovered a book that was easy to read for my young eyes and had lovely illustrations to boot: The Tin Woodman of Oz. It was an old paperback book with a musty smell behind its bright yellow cover. In those pages, I followed the adventures of the Tin Woodman over and over.

Eventually, my parents took me to the library so I could give the old Tin Woodman book a rest before I read it to pieces. On the library bookshelves, I found other books in the Oz series, and as I grew older, I jumped into stories by Madeline L’Engle and Robin McKinley. There were always new magical worlds to visit.

I’ve never stopped reading fantasy, and I’ve been known to return to those old books that captured my young imagination. On my bookshelf now rests my parent’s copy of The Tin Woodman, and the musty pages still bring a smile to my face.

SS: When you write a new story, are you a plotter or a pantser?

CS: I generally consider myself a panster. I like to start out every story with a plan, and I handwrite outlines and ideas in a notebook. I even scribble out rough first drafts so when I sit down in front of a computer, I can start typing right away.

In the process of typing, I’ll get ideas on how to make the story better, and I veer more into pantser territory. The ending will change, or I’ll figure out a really neat twist that I want to incorporate. But I can’t get to that point without a plan to get me started in the first place.

SS: What is your favorite beverage to drink while writing?

CS: I’m a tea drinker, and every morning, I brew a pot. Then I may brew another pot in the afternoon. Not surprisingly, I always need to work near a bathroom. Still, there’s something wonderfully relaxing about writing with a steaming cup of tea with sugar and milk nearby.

SS: How do you balance writing vs having a life?

CS: I have young kids, and I love watching them grow and discover their passions. Because my kids take top priority, I look for the moments in-between their adventures, and that’s where I find my writing time. Maybe it’s in the time spent waiting for my child to race at the swim team meet, or in the hour-long drive to an activity. It may be five minutes here, 30 minutes there. I always have a little notebook and pen with me so I can scribble story notes and ideas no matter where I am. Then there’s that glorious hour between 9 p.m. and midnight, when I can be found typing the story up.

SS: What feels like your best natural length for a story?

CS: I’m very partial to flash fiction, which is funny because my earliest attempts at writing fiction were novels. I started my fiction journey with National November Writing Month, progressed to short stories, then to flash. At first, it was my lack of time that drew me to writing shorter, but I quickly realized that shorter isn’t faster or easier! My first attempt at flash ended up being 5,000 words long.

I kept trying my hand at flash, though, as it was one of my goals to be published in Daily Science Fiction. Once I met that goal, I found that I really enjoyed the challenge of writing flash fiction and kept at it. It now feels like my most comfortable story length. 

I also feel like it’s made me a better writer. It’s taught me to look at word choices closely, whether side plots are actually beneficial, and how to identify the heart of the story, among other things.

SS: Is there an author whose work you think has been unfairly overlooked or forgotten? 

CS: I feel like the authors of short stories need more exposure, and I’m not just saying that as a short story author myself. There are speculative writers experimenting with stories and genres in ways you don’t see with novel-length stories, and I’m continually finding myself blown away by the talent out there.

One of the first flash fiction rock stars I followed was Melissa Mead, who was a frequent contributor to Daily Science Fiction and has also been published here at Stupefying Stories. She twisted fairy tales and tackled sci-fi concepts with wit and imagination. I’d read her stories and think, “Dang, I want to write like her.” Melissa passed away in 2022, but her stories still live on to entertain us. I highly recommend going to the Daily Science Fiction website and searching for Melissa Mead. There’s a treasure trove of her tales there!

§    §    §

Speaking of a treasure trove, in preparing this profile for publication we decided to put together a short list of Carol’s stories on this site, and were genuinely surprised by just how many there are. Rather than a short list, then, here’s every (we think) story by Carol Scheina we’ve published in the past three years.

If you read nothing else by Carol, read this:

“Exploring Strange New Worlds with a Hearing Loss”

Our favorite fiction by Carol

“How to Return an Overdue Book to the Summer Library”

“The View from the Old Ship”

“True Love is Found in the Bone Sea” 

“Of Myths, Legends, and Parenthood” 

“The Disappearing Cat Trick”

“Monthly Magic Subscription Box”

“Inheritance”

Pete Wood Challenge Stories

“Would You Like Fries With That?”

“Long-Distance Relationship”

“The Family Business”

“Just Like Before”

“The Secret to a Happy Marriage”  

“Clowning Around”

“Secondhand Hugs Still Have All the Warmth”

“The Difficulty of Disembarking”

“To Boldly Go”

“For Sale: Used Time Machine. No Refunds!”

“The Santa Heist”

“Don’t Ignore Your Television’s Captioning”

“A Conversation Held at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Butler Assassins”

“Proper Witch’s Home”

Tales from The Brahma Stories

“A Palette of Home”

“Just Like Mama Made”

The Odin Chronicles Stories

“Delayed Messages”

“Love and Groceries”

“The One Who Walks Out”

“The Disappearing Cat Trick”

“An Infestation in the Mines”

“A Time to Wait”

“The Same Bratwurst Every Day”

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The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

REMINDER: There is another Pete Wood Challenge that is open for submissions right now. For details and how to enter, click this link.

 

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“Not a Fan” • by Pete Wood

Tara’s stomach lurched. The chili’s seasoning felt off. Acidy. Sour.

Jeremy, her blind date, smiled. “Well?

“Interesting.”

“It’s the sauerkraut.”

 She pushed the vile crock away. He’d picked the Raleigh chili parlor for dinner.

A burly man wearing a Chicago Bears jersey set a platter down. “Limburger Tofu Wings. You staying for Bears trivia, man?”

“You bet.” Jeremy picked up a limp gray wing.

The waiter high-fived Jeremy and left.

Tara avoided looking at the appetizer.

“Food’s amazing,” Jeremy said. “But I’m here for the Chicago fans. Bears events all year.”

“You go anywhere else?” she asked. The NFL’s offseason lasted  for five more months.

“Why would I?” He grabbed another wing.

She tapped her phone and soon confirmed Chicago’s mortal enemy. “Did I ever tell you I love Minnesota?” she lied.

Jeremy’s face went ashen. “You’re a Vikings fan?”

Tara edited her dating profile as Jeremy let her down gently.

___________________________

 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 Stupefying Stories #6. 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 few years Pete has been in the process of evolving into a fiction editor, God help him, first and foremost with The Pete Wood Challenge, then with Dawn of Time, The Odin Chronicles, Tales from The Brahma, and on, and on. Along the way he’s introduced us to the creative work of Roxana Arama, Gustavo Bondoni, Carol Scheina, Patricia Miller, Kimberly Ann Smiley, Kai Holmwood, Brandon Case, Jason Burnham, and many, many more. We suspect Pete’s real love is theater, though, as evidenced by his short movie, Quantum Doughnut — which you can stream, if you follow this link.

[Pete Wood photo by Lee Baker]

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Six Questions for… Pete Wood

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 Stupefying Stories #6. 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 few years Pete has been in the process of evolving into a fiction editor, God help him, first and foremost with The Pete Wood Challenge, then with Dawn of Time, The Odin Chronicles, Tales from The Brahma, and on, and on. Along the way he’s introduced us to the creative work of Roxana Arama, Gustavo Bondoni, Carol Scheina, Patricia Miller, Kimberly Ann Smiley, Kai Holmwood, Brandon Case, Jason Burnham, and many, many more. We suspect Pete’s real love is theater, though, as evidenced by his short movie, Quantum Doughnut — which you can stream, if you follow this link.

[Pete Wood photo by Lee Baker]

With all the attention we’ve been paying to The Pete Wood Challenge lately, this seemed like an opportune time to catch up with Pete and ask him our usual batch of half-serious, half-silly questions.

§

SS: What is the first SF/F book or story you remember reading?

PW: That’s tough. I used to go to the bookmobile a couple of times a week and check out fairy tales when I was in first or second grade. Then I moved onto fantasy and science fiction. The first science fiction book may have been Danny Dunn, kid genius who developed all sorts of cutting edge technology from time machines to shrink rays. Or it may have been a paperback novelization of the 1960s television show, The Time Tunnel. I remember reading The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet in fourth grade. A bunch of us did. The first serious science fiction book that really stuck with me might be The Infinite Worlds of Maybe, by Lester Del Ray, or the story “Frost and Fire,” by Ray Bradbury. [Nb: You’ll find that one, along with a lot more stories that are iconic now, in Bradbury’s R is for Rocket.]

 SS: When you write a new story, are you a plotter or a pantser? 

PW: I’ve always been a pantser. I develop the characters first and then a concept and let the characters lead me where they want to go. My last two novellas have been heavily plotted with the characters thrust into the plot after the fact. That’s a tougher way to write, I think, because the characters can’t act naturally if their fates have already been predestined.

SS: Of everything you've had published, which book or story of yours is the one you are most proud of? Where can readers find it? 

PW: “The Less Than Divine Invasion,” published in the January/February 2023 issue of Asimov’s. This story took ten years to write. It started out as a novel and ballooned up to 40,000 words before I had to admit it just wasn’t working. I cut it back to 18,000 eventually. I had to massacre my darlings, but I think it ended up being a damned good story. It’s about an incredibly ill-conceived (and I hope reasonably comical) alien invasion that starts in a small town in North Carolina.

SS: Do you listen to music while writing? If so, what kinds of music or which artists? 

PW: I listen to albums or just a mix of certain artists. Back in college, I put on the Moody Blues LP of Days of Future Passed to write. That’s still an option, but my new favorite is probably Making Movies by Dire Straits. Kinda mellow, kinda profound and never too intrusive. A good Steely Dan mix is nice too.

SS: What feels like your best natural length for a story? 

PW: Flash. I love a good flash story. I can crank out a flash piece in an hour or so if I am lucky. You can pack a lot into flash if you try. I have a lot more respect for decent flash than stories or (God help us) novels that run on forever and have endless sequels. That’s why I love doing the Challenges for Stupefying Stories. The diverse takes on the prompts are fun and fascinating.

SS: If you could snap your fingers and make one cliché, trope, or plot gimmick vanish, which one would it be? 

PW: Sexism. I find it just depressing that so many golden age stories and novels have no female characters. In so many, the women are window dressing or sex objects. I gave up a third of the way through Stranger in a Strange Land, because Heinlein didn’t have a clue what women are like. Sadly, there’s still a lot of sexism going on. Women characters and authors have much more of a voice, but we still haven’t gone nearly far enough.

SS: Thank you for your time, and just in case we haven’t plugged it enough, here’s the link to every Pete Wood Challenge story we’ve published so far. There are more than 200 stories in this list, all free to read for the cost of a click on a link. Check it out!

The Pete Wood Challenge Story Index (So Far)

 

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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.

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The Never-ending FAQ: from the mailbag

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.

We’re posting a bit late today because I once again made the mistake of trying to write this column late last night, and once again found I can’t burn the midnight oil like I used to. Early Morning Bruce is positive, optimistic, and full of energy and ambition. After Midnight Bruce is cranky, irritable, and on the whole far more like President Biden than J. J. Cale, these days.

Moving right along, then…

Q: Your Submissions Guideline page is unclear. In one place it says you’re closed to submissions now and in another says you’re planning to reopen for submissions on July 1st. Which is it? Are you open for submissions now?

A: Thanks for pointing that out. We are CLOSED to unsolicited submissions until further notice. Our Submissions Guideline page has been updated accordingly.

Q: I clicked the button for The Pete Wood Challenge but all it says is, “temporary placeholder file.” What’s up with that? 

A: It’s a leftover from our most recent web site redesign. Our intention was to put an index to the complete Pete Wood Challenge stories under that button—which wouldn’t be that difficult, as we already have all Pete Wood Challenge stories tagged with metadata that makes them easy to find (as you can see by clicking on this link)—but the time needed to do that work vanished, and so it remains undone. Now, we’re questioning whether it needs to be done at all.

Q: Your website doesn’t work well on my cell phone. Maybe that’s the reason why your daily readership has dropped off? 

A: We are painfully aware of that. The migration of readers from PCs, to tablets, to cell phones happened more quickly than we were able to react to it. This web site was designed two years ago to take full advantage of what we could do with it then on a PC. Now, readers are more likely to be coming to Stupefying Stories on their phones and they never even see most of the content on this page. 

We are working on yet another site redesign, but there are only so many hours in a day, and we have other more important problems to solve first.

Q: I submitted my story [title] last fall and you still haven’t responded to it. Is it still under consideration?

A: Good grief, you’ve been waiting six months for us to respond?! Don’t do that! According to our records, every story that was submitted for SHOWCASE was either rejected or accepted and put under contract months ago. There are a few stories that were submitted for CLANKALOG that are still floating in limbo, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, but if you’re still waiting for us to respond to a SHOWCASE submission, please query. Email can and does get lost or misplaced—and seems to be doing so with increasing frequency, now that everyone and their cat is incorporating A.I. into their email and spam filters. 

(HAL says: “You didn’t really want to read that, Dave. It would only have upset you.”)

Q: You accepted my story [title] for SHOWCASE and put it under contract. When are you going to publish it?

A: We have finalized the schedule for SHOWCASE stories through the end of September. We’ll be contacting authors shortly to verify that we have their latest author’s bios and PayPal information, but if you can’t wait until next week, query. We won’t answer any sooner, but it will make you feel better to send the message.

Q: You’d said that Stupefying Stories #27 would be released on July 1st. It’s July 3rd. What’s going on?

A: We went through a really bad patch this Spring that put the entire future of Stupefying Stories in jeopardy. This is why we held back on committing to some CLANKALOG stories. We weren’t sure we’d have the funding to put the book out. 

Thankfully, just when all seemed darkest, we received a visitation from an angel investor who has more confidence in the project than we sometimes do. We are now moving forward again, but won’t be making any announcements about future issues of Stupefying Stories until we’re confident we’ve figured out how to market the blessed thing.

One does not take the generosity, patience, and forbearance of angels for granted.

Q: If I may ask: what are your readership numbers?

A: That’s a mystery. We get the raw numbers constantly, but they don’t entirely make sense. We average 450 to 500 unique readers daily. We average 12,500 to 13,500 unique readers monthly. We’re closing in on a million unique page reads life-to-date.

But who are these people? Why, for example, did Tales from the Brahma • Episode 4: “The e-Menace” • by Roxana Arama, suddenly rack up nearly a hundred new reads in the last seven days? It’s been out there for more than a year.

[~n.b. Pete Wood: But only episode 4. The only other “Brahma” story that ever got significant readership was “Solace,” by Ephiny Gale, but not since October of last year.]

My first thought was that the spambots have gotten more aggressive lately. Ever since we launched the first version of SHOWCASE in 2013, we’ve been fighting a constant battle with spambots that have been crawling—usually I’d say “like spiders,” but no, spambots are more like cockroaches, only less endearing—through our site, looking for posts that don’t have commenting locked down so they can defecate all over them with ads purporting to be comments. 

(This, FWIW, is why we aggressively moderate comments on this site and don’t allow comments on old posts.)

I’d come to accept that a certain amount of traffic was generated by ‘bots and spiders, but lately I’ve begun to wonder whether that was the optimistic assessment. Now I’m starting to wonder how much of this otherwise inexplicable traffic is generated by A.I. large language models, trawling through our site in hopes of finding content to scrape and steal. 

We have hundreds of short stories out on the site, free for anyone to read. Thousands of posts, including all the non-fiction and such. Maybe having all that content out there for just anyone to read is no longer such a good idea.

Which brings us to the next question…

Q: Have you considered moving the Stupefying Stories site off of blogspot?

A: Yes. This is one of the primary reasons why we’re not making any plans for SHOWCASE past the end of September. We’ve had a WordPress site in the past, and it was a pain in the neck to maintain, so we stopped doing so in 2017. (Still, there are hundreds of good stories out there. You should take a look at them while you still can. That site is going to be shut down very soon.) 

We’ve been reluctant to move off blogspot, because of the many years of accumulated content out there. If you can see the right column of our home page, click the [Blog Archives] button in the upper right corner, just to get some idea of how much content we have out on blogspot. 

But if we’re going to be unpublishing all this content anyway, or at least trying to hide it from all the ‘bots, spiders, and A.I. factory trawlers…

Does anyone here have experience with substack? Right now, this is looking like our best option for putting content behind a paywall, or at least a “register to read” wall.

Q: Seriously, you’re thinking of putting SHOWCASE behind a paywall? 

A: Well, some premium content, perhaps, maybe. Things like “Welcome to the Death Machine Factory Tour,” by Ray Daley, “Planting the Flag,” by Graham Brand, or “On the Menu Stains of Madness,” by G. Scott Huggins. These stories were a lot of fun to do—especially “On the Menu Stains of Madness”—but they were also a hell of a lot of work, and very graphics-intensive. Artwork costs us money. (Surprise!) We’d like to publish more stories like these, but can no longer afford to just fling them out there and hope we see a return in the form of increased book sales or more reader support. So we need to do something else.

Q: Speaking of artwork: what is that animal in the photo at the top of this column?

A: That, my friends, is an Asian palm civet. It’s there because I was looking for a good illustration to go with The Odin Chronicles • Episode 35: “A Good Boy” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley, and going slightly mad trying to find an image of an animal that could be mistaken for a cat at first, but on second glance would have something distinctly alien about it.

I will tell you, the real curse of A.I.-generated art is now becoming apparent, in that the stock art sites are rapidly filling up with enormous amounts of really insipid A.I.-generated images of somewhat catlike aliens, produced by people with disturbingly sexual obsessions with cats. A generation or two ago these people would no doubt have been using oils or acrylics to emulate the works of Margaret Keane. 

Now, they’re using A.I. to clutter the world with images expressing their science fiction-informed cat-related kinks, and it’s… disquieting.

Anyway, after slogging through hundreds of images of large-breasted catgirls in form-fitting spacesuits (but always with just two breasts, go figure), I tried a different tack and went looking for actual photos of almost-catlike real animals, and had the pleasant surprise of finding an abundance of photos of genets. A good photo of a genet would have been perfect…

Except that genets tend to be spotted, and Kimberly distinctly describes the mystery animal in her story as being solid gray, so that sent me off on another search, this time for a genet-like animal with gray fur. I ended up with this photo of an Asian palm civet.

Asian palm civets, it turns out, are quite well known, because of their importance to the making of the world’s most expensive coffee, kopi luwak.

Kopi luwak—I am not making this up—is coffee made from coffee beans that have been eaten and then pooped-out by an Asian palm civet.

-------- COMMERCIAL BREAK -------

Daylight, interior, kitchen
HUSBAND in suit sitting at breakfast table
WIFE dressed like June Cleaver standing at stove

HUSBAND:
(takes sip from cup)

“Honey? This coffee tastes like shit.”

WIFE:
(turns around, smiling)

“That’s because it is!
It’s premium dark roast KOPI LUWAK!
Only the best shit for my man!”

HUSBAND:
(takes a deep drink from the cup
and comes up with a big satisfied smile)

“That’s my girl!”

[CUT to static shot of package, music up]

VOICE OVER:

“KOPI LUWAK!
For when you really want
to give your husband shit!” 

-------- END COMMERCIAL --------

Q: Seriously? Coffee made from civet poop? Who thought that was a good idea?

A: Given that it originated in Dutch colonial Indonesia, I have to think it was some Indonesian house servant who truly hated their so-called master. 

“Try it, sahib! Is ancient secret recipe! You’ll love it.”

Q: No, seriously. Coffee made from civet poop?

A: Actually, I’m given to understand that they’ve figured out how to duplicate the civet digestive enzymes and that actual living civets are no longer involved. It’s all processed in nice clean vats, now. 

Which is kind of pity. I’d always envisioned a kopi luwak production line as being a big sweltering corrugated shed filled with row after row of tiny wire cages, in which hundreds of poor miserable civets were being force-fed coffee beans and their productivity was being measured by the volume of shit they excreted daily. 

Kind of reminded me of being a tech writer, honestly…

 

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“A Jackass Walks into a Bar” • by Pete Wood

The sweat-stained customer glared at Inga. “I wanted a damned Dismal Stout, not crappy American beer. First day on the job?”

Inga knew it was a Dismal Swamp Brewery Stout. It was on the tap handle. “I’m sorry, sir.”

Sweaty brandished his phone. “My review’s live in five.”

Inga snatched the mug. 

Sweaty yawned. “I’m complaining to your manager, Missy.”

§

Inga dumped a dusty old can of American beer into a frosty mug. She scraped chicken wings from a long-gone customer’s half-finished appetizer onto a new plate.

She told Sweaty the appetizer and beer were comped.

He slurped his beer. “Now that’s a Dismal.”

“Absolutely.”

---

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.

---

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(Or buy just one, if that’s what you’d really prefer.)

 

The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

This time the challenge was to write a flash fiction piece playing off the key word: draft. Pete was so excited by this challenge that he even wrote a story himself—but neglected to include the key word draft, and thus his entry was disqualified.

Back to normal next week!

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