Bewildering Stories News

The color-change buttons are still all there in everything but the “department” pages, as usual. They’re just arranged more economically.

The big news is that we now offer a new feature as a service to our contributors and readers: a Bewildering Stories bibliography. Even if you’ve published only one story, poem or anything in Bewildering Stories and you’ve sent us a biography, you’re all set to have your own bibliography. And the editors will update the bibliographies with each issue.

Beginning with this issue, number 86, a bibliography will be appended to new contributors’ biographical sketches as a matter of course. However, one person can’t compile all the bibliographies for the previous 85 issues. We need your help. The essential information is: titles, issue numbers and file names. If you can send us that, we’ll do the rest.

In this bulletin:
Gathering the information Why bibliographies? What does a bibliography look like?

There are two ways to go about making a list:

I. If you know where the titles are:

Find the issue indexes in the recent editions and Archive and do “Copy this link” or “Copy link to clipboard” (depending on your Net browser).

Then paste the links into an e-mail or word-processor file next to the titles.
This method works well when there aren’t very many titles and you know where they are.

II. If you don’t know where everything is:

Go to “Archive” in the menu and search for your name.

Copy-paste the resulting entries into an e-mail or word-processor file.
This method has the advantage of being simpler and easier than the first. Its disadvantage is that it will return a lot of “false positives.” Don’t worry about it. If you’ve been a frequent contributor and are uncertain which entry is what, just copy-paste the entire list. We’ll know what to discard and what to keep.

We’ll assume that everything is prose fiction unless you tell us or we remember otherwise. That means it’s important to specify poetry and non-fiction. Don’t worry about any other classifications such as short story or flash fiction unless you really want those categories listed separately for some reason.

Then e-mail the list to Bewildering Stories or to any of our contact addresses you may happen to have on file. We’ll take care of the rest.

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Why bibliographies? There are a number of reasons, but I think the most important are:

We want our contributors to know they’re appreciated.

Weekly publication tends to make contributions seem a little ephemeral. We want our contributors to know that anyone who likes their stories, poems, etc. can find them easily. Bewildering Stories has become something more than a webzine: it’s a specialized on-line library, or, if you wish, a database.

Spud’s bibliography of the first 25 issues is a monumental piece of work. However, we’re already 61 issues beyond it, and I doubt anyone is in a position to duplicate it. Nor can the editors make a bibliography for every author: Where would we start? And when would we finish? A collaborative effort will succeed where an individual effort can’t.

Searching the Archive is practical when you’re looking for a particular title; it’s much less so when you’re looking for an author. We want to make things easier for our readers. From now on, we’ll link the copyright lines to the biographical sketches that contain a bibliography, and the names in the Biographies index will have a special color.

At one point we considered making individual anthologies. However, that’s a hard job; it only reproduces what we’ve already done; the results are not as pretty; and again, where would we start?

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What does a bibliography look like?

The current plan is to put an anchor link to the bibliographies in the headers of biographical sketches that are longer than one screen. That way, the bibliography won’t be “buried”; readers will know right away if it’s there.

Please take a moment to send us a list of your titles and URL’s. A partial bibliography is perfectly acceptable; after all, it’s yours.

Examples of contributors’ bibliographies can be found in Bewildering Bios.

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