Bewildering Stories News

Holidays

Our contributors and readers are so multicultural that Bewildering Stories can’t possibly keep a calendar of religious or national holidays. We did have a mid-year retrospective at Christmas, though; it seemed so convenient that it looks now like a potential tradition. If we have a story that happens to be appropriate to one holiday or another, well and good, but we can’t plan for them.

The little girl’s paper flowers and her father’s illness, in D. A. Madigan’s “Positive,” seem to justify borrowing the phrase fleurs du mal for the Readers’ Guide. The usual translation “flowers of evil” is adequate but bare: it lacks crucial associations present in the original, namely “flowers from evil” and “flowers from pain.” “Positive,” then, is as close as we come to a story for the Easter season in this issue. Thank you, D. A.!

Contest Wrap-Up

The First Bewildering Stories Contest is finally over: the Editors congratulate the winners and extend our thanks especially to our new contributors. Observation: no title may appear more than once on the winners’ page; otherwise, the authors’ and readers’ selections would have also appeared in the Editors’ choices.

We’ve learned some lessons from this initial contest and will apply them to any future contests we may hold. Some of these “lessons” had to be applied to the current contest.

We’ll wait and see how many entries are received before announcing how many votes readers may cast.
Ballots with only one or two titles will not count; these are story contests, not elections to public office.
Ballots from generic e-mail addresses will not count. We’ll make exceptions for contributors on a case by case basis.
Authors will be limited to two entries at most. We won’t allow one author to use multiple pen names, either; that will be verboten !
The contest must be widely advertised; one of the purposes of holding a contest is to make Bewildering Stories better known on the Net.

There’s a lot more to think about, of course, but those lessons will do for starters. Feel free to suggest ideas for the next contest; who knows, we may hold another one later in the year. However, a contest is a Big Project, and we have a few other Big Projects in the works.