by Bruce BethkeI've been waffling, flolloping, and equivocating over whether to announce this for some weeks now, so I guess it's finally time to just bite the bullet, throw it over the transom, run it up the flagpole, insert hackneyed cliché here, and see how people react. And the thing I have to announce is—
Well, you remember how I said the grand prize in the "The Land Before ZIP Codes" was going to be something really exceptionally cool, but I wasn't ready to announce it just yet? This, my friends, is the announcement that at least two or three of you have been eagerly waiting for. Coming July 1st, The Friday Challenge, in conjunction with Rampant Loon Press, is
What? Why? Now that, my friends, is a long, long, story—but we don't have time for that now, so here's the short version. In a sense, it all starts with Amazing Stories. I mean, not in the sense of Amazing (founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, the man who invented the term "science fiction" and for whom the Hugo Awards are named) being the seminal magazine that spawned all the other legendary pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, and the careers of all the writers who rose to prominence in those decades, or even in the sense of Amazing being the magazine that spawned my career, which it was. I mean, literally, it starts with Amazing Stories—and the last time it went bankrupt, back in 2000-something. Having a rather strong sentimental attachment to the title, I just couldn't stand to see it vanish forever from the market, so I quietly pulled together a group of backers, and we began working on a plan to buy the magazine and resuscitate it one more time, this time with yours truly as interim editor-in-chief...
And then we gave up. Because, although we crunched the numbers six ways from Sunday, the conclusion was inescapable: there was just no way to make money by reviving that magazine.
Now, a true visionary would have stuck with it anyway, secure in the belief that pure genius and chutzpah could overcome that tiny obstacle and make Amazing Stories once more the shining beacon of brilliance it was imagined to be back in the First Great Depression. But thankfully we had no true visionaries in our group, so we just shook hands, filed the business plan under 'S' for Stupid, and went our separate ways. My way eventually took me into the blogosphere, thence to The Ranting Room, and ultimately to here, now, today, and The Friday Challenge.
Where in a sense I've been playing editor-in-chief for at least the past year and a half anyway, and more like five years, if you count all the larval development that took place over in The Ranting Room.
So why STUPEFYING STORIES, of all names? That, my friends, is yet another story—about a five-thousand-word story, and I'll share it with you another time. But the gist of it is that just about every other possible combination of astounding, amazing, astonishing, incredible, thrilling, wonder, etc., etc., was used back in the 1930s, and the trademark is still owned by some successor corporation today. I, however, have owned 'Stupefying Stories' since the 1980s. It originally was slated to be the title of a 'Best of' yours truly anthology that never happened. Then it was going to be a parody anthology.
And then I decided, oh, what the heck. I've been wanting to do some kind of Friday Challenge fiction showcase since the incept date of this site. As long as I'm going to take the plunge into the madness of small-press publishing anyway, why not invite some friends along for the ride?
Hence, STUPEFYING STORIES. We're not launching a new semi-pro magazine here; Lord knows, the world doesn't need another one of those. It's not really a magazine in any case. It will be more like a trade paperback book in form and appearance, and there are sound reasons for calling it an 'anthology series' or 'bookazine' or something on that order. We're planning to release four in the next year: in July 2010, October 2010, January 2011, and April 2011, respectively, and after that what happens next is anyone's guess. We don't expect to make any money off this thing. The best we're hoping for is not to lose an outrageous amount of money, and along the way to give the Rampant Loon staff some desperately needed hands-on experience with generating print, Kindle, iBook, and Open ePub deliverables from common source. Our friends over at The Internet Review of Science Fiction were running a thousand-bucks-a-month deficit when they finally decided to fold the tents and close the show. We can't afford to get anywhere near that burn rate, and if we do, we'll pull the plug.
But in the meantime, herewith, today, we officially announce the launch of STUPEFYING STORIES. What we want to publish first and foremost are stories that have previously appeared as entries in The Friday Challenge or on our predecessor site, The Ranting Room, and frankly, this is where we can use your help. A heck of a lot of good material has come through these two sites in the past five years and we're having trouble sifting through it all and finding the ones we want to publish. (The recent disappearance of HaloScan and all its comment archives has not helped things any.)
So as the old Voör'ta!gâean saying goes, "Two eyes are good, but dozens are better, and many tentacles make spaö'nag the g'g!vúnět." (To which of course the traditional rejoinder is a hearty, "Spa fon!") If you have the time, and the inclination—or a keen memory, or even a story or two tucked away that you meant to enter in a Friday Challenge but never quite got around to posting, or a promising half-story that wasn't a winner but that you've since finished—the floodgates are officially open and we're looking for content!
We don't know where this is going. This may actually be successful; more likely it will turn out to be a face-plant and a money pit. But if in the judgment of history it turns out that STUPEFYING STORIES was the springboard that launched two or three notable writing careers, then that will be an ending worthy of a song.
Oh yeah, at the top of this column I promised to announce the grand prize in the "The Land Before ZIP Codes" challenge, didn't I? Well, the winning entry will be the featured story in the July STUPEFYING STORIES, of course.
And if that doesn't get you motivated, nothing will!
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