by Bruce Bethke...and twelve hours and some hundredweight of black dirt and mulch later, I've finally gotten back to work on this column. Tomatoes are finicky things, notoriously unwilling to compromise when you want to write and they want to be planted. They have a way of communicating "Plant Now or Watch Us Die!" very succinctly, dramatically, and effectively.
I'm trying something new this year. This time I've mulched between the rows very heavily with ground-up cocoa bean shells. I'm told this is a great way to keep the weeds down without resorting to chemicals, and that by next year the shells will have decomposed fully and enriched the soil. My observation of the moment is that my garden now looks and smells exactly like a giant bowl of Cocoa Pebbles.
Stay tuned for more news as it develops.
The Friday Challenge, I've decided, is something that I continue to do for much the same reason as I plant a garden every year. No, not because hope has once again triumphed over experience, but because I enjoy watching things grow. I love the organic energy of it all; the variability, the chances and the surprises. Predictability bores me. I love to tinker, to experiment, to try new things, even if they're only very tiny new things. What if we try romano beans over here this year, and a row of bell peppers over there?
Predictability, of course, is essential to having a commercially successful career. Fans and publishers love it when you produce exactly the same thing over and over again, like clockwork, a new book just like your last book every six months or a year. If, after Headcrash, I'd listened to all the people in the industry who told me, "Loved the book! Now write me a funny vampire novel! And then a funny fantasy!" no doubt I could have had an at least decently lucrative writing career.
No doubt I would have been bored out of my mind, too. I hate to repeat myself. Sometimes, unfortunately, this character trait manifests as a self-defeating and pig-headed resistance to doing what to everyone else is the obvious next thing to do. Had I not had so many people telling me the obvious thing to do in 1997 was to write a funny vampire novel, I probably would have finished Royal Blood, and who knows what it might have done for my career. Had I not had so many people telling me the obvious thing to do in 1985 was to write lots more cyberpunk stories...
Nah. I still wouldn't have written them. Too much political orthodoxy required to get into the magazines that were big into publishing those sorts of stories at that time.
There is an obvious way to launch a new science fiction magazine, and that is why, while it might look like one, STUPEFYING STORIES is not a science fiction magazine. Look, no offense, but if I was trying to launch a new commercial magazine, I would not be writing it up here. Instead I'd be burning up the phone lines to Gene Wolfe, Jane Yolen, David Brin, and Lois McMaster Bujold, to start with, trying to convince them that they owed me just one more favor. Then I'd make a big announcement in the SFWA Forum, which would give me, in the downtime between hustling potential investors and advertisers, the chance to sift through the same six- or eight-hundred trunk stories that were rejected by Analog three years ago and Strange Horizons last year. Might I even find a few goodies that Stan Schmidt and Susan Groppi missed?
Nope. Not interested.
That would be the obvious thing to do, the safe and smart thing to do—if I was trying to launch a new magazine, and build up its readership, and make gobs of money publishing and selling it.
But that's not what I'm trying to do here. Instead, think of STUPEFYING STORIES as a seedbed, in a hothouse. What I'm hoping to do here is to plant a few half-wild talents, and maybe, with luck, some of them will grow strong enough to be transplanted to bigger gardens, where they'll really flourish. Silly, strange, and not at all the obvious and predictable thing to do, I know.
But personally, I can't wait to see what germinates.
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