Bewildering Stories News

Growing Apace

Bewildering Stories has grown. Time was, Danielle Parker’s “Galen the Deathless” would have been serialized in two issues; and Daniel Green’s “Parasite Text” and Jörn Grote’s “Meme Race Unbound,” in three.

Not any more. We can no longer take our sweet time with short stories of up to 9,000 words. The schedule leaves us little choice but to include them complete in one issue. When you see “novel,” “novella” and “serial,” you know you’re into five-digit length.

Now we can find a place more easily for stories like “Meme Race Unbound.” It’s been in the backlog longer than we liked, mainly because other stories of Jörn’s were shorter and easier to schedule. And one of them, “The Green Fields of Mars,” in issue 129, seemed to be a precursor.

We’re not exactly bursting at the seams, but we do have to move up a size or two. Flash fiction is going the way of poetry in not counting against the issue size limit. It’s not quite there yet, though: we couldn’t have added another fiction title to this issue, which was already one over the limit and will take longer than usual to appreciate fully. Also, the “Excerpt” category is now moribund if not extinct; we might consider including an excerpt as an auxiliary page in the Letters department.

We still limit installments to about 3,000 words, for the reasons stated in our Submissions guidelines. Michael Lloyd’s chapters in Observation One run a little longer at times, but not by much. His chapters also have a lot of dialogue; the resulting white space makes them easier to read than straight narrative. Mike has also mapped out very meticulously how his novel will fit into our format. We’re happy to make an exception in his case. A side note: the story contest is also an exception; all entries are complete on one page regardless of length.

We’re also grateful to Mike for supplying the meta-tag description for each chapter. That saves a lot of work. The descriptions really come in handy for anyone searching the archives, and Ye Copy Editor is not always clobbered by inspiration in composing one- or two-sentence summaries. Want a snappy meta-tag for your story? You write it, I’ll post it.

Keep up the good work, everyone, and we’ll do our best to hold up our end.