Bewildering Stories News

Up to Date? Looking Good?

Page index
The Darrell Award (news extra)
Bibliographies Proofreading Appearance	The Queue Newsletter?

As “In Times to Come” says, we do give priority to new contributors, but that doesn’t mean we neglect our regulars. We take our welcome greeting to heart: we do want to hear from you again. And that may include your lending us a helping hand with such things as:

The Biographies & Bibliographies. A few contributors have sent e-mails pointing out titles that had yet to be posted and, in one case, a title that had been placed in the wrong Biography. We’re very grateful to be told about things like that. A previous news bulletin bears repeating: such reminders are not horn-tooting; we depend on you to help with the housework.
Proofreading. One or two contributors have pointed out errors in paragraphing. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen often. Paragraphing can get lost in transmission, and formatting texts is an intricate process. I try to catch everything, but run-on paragraphs can be hard to spot. We want your work to be easy to read and to look good on line.
How things look. We depend on you, the readers, to tell us when something goes awry, because we can’t always be sure. Jerry uses a hotshot Linux-based browser; I use Safari in Mac OS 10.3.5. The fonts display according to the readers’ browser preferences, and, thankfully, font sizes have become more standardized across platforms in newer Net browsers.

However, graphics can cause problems. If you can’t see a picture, we may have to convert the graphics file; not all browsers can display .tiff files, for example. Browsers don’t all handle floats in the same way, either. Please let us know if a picture overlaps with text in your browser.

The “queue” has been mentioned once or twice. What is it, exactly? Well, it bears no resemblance to people waiting politely in line at a British bus stop; it’s actually a pool. Whenever Jerry forwards me something new, I transfer it to AppleWorks 6 or Mariner Write (I no longer use Word or WordPerfect) and file it with all the rest in the next issue. I try to keep in mind what’s oldest.

If a particular story seems to be taking a little long, we may be expecting revisions or just looking for a good place to put it. Unless a story is coming up in the next issue, we won’t be able to say exactly when it will appear. We don’t have tables of contents made up in advance; they’d change constantly and take more time than they’re worth. And they’d take time away from other Big Projects we have in mind.

One of those big projects might be a plain text copy of the Readers' Guide to the current issue, as a kind of e-mail newsletter. But would that be superfluous? Would you consider it spam? The opinions would probably range from “bad” to “good,” but you could always opt out. If the idea gets a favorable response (please use the e-mail link, below), we’ll give it a try.

So there you have it: glimpses of life behind the scenes, and some practical reasons why we like to hear from contributors and readers alike.