Hang around here long enough you’ll eventually catch me citing the First Rule of Being a Professional Writer, which I’ve stated in many slightly different ways over the years, but which usually comes out sounding something like this:
“Paying work on deadline comes first.”
For the past few weeks I’ve been involved in a First Rule situation of the “Oh my God, it’s still growing! Will nothing stop it?” kind, which is why SHOWCASE has been quiet since March 1. But late Friday evening we finally made the last deadline for the last piece of the project, and on Saturday morning the all-clear sounded, which meant it came just a little too late to get a fully developed SHOWCASE #17 out on-time, but...
But I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to release SHOWCASE #17 on March 17th, and I definitely could not let St. Patrick’s Day go by without publishing “Death Bites” by Bill Bibo, Jr.. If you’ve read “The Wrong Side of the Rainbow” in the October 2012 issue of Stupefying Stories you’ve already met Ramses and Bernie, the oddest odd couple buddy-cop pair on the entire MCSI squad. If you haven’t—well, picture this: ninja leprechauns.
And that’s all the warning you’re going to get.
Also this week, I am delighted to be bringing you “Sport of Kings”, by the remarkable Judith Field. Judith’s work first appeared in our pages in the August 2012 issue of Stupefying Stories, again in the July 2013 issue, and most recently in the March 2014 issue. If you like Judith’s wonderful little stories half as much as we do, you’ll be delighted to know that this is just a foretaste. Before the end of the month, we’ll be rolling out our first-ever single-author collection, The Book of Judith—but more about that in a few days.
Also debuting later this month is our first-ever original novel, Scout’s Honor, by Henry Vogel, an exciting swords-and-planets adventure in the finest traditions of Edgar Rice Burroughs. If you like your heroes heroic, your princesses noble, and your action blazing, watch for Scout’s Honor, coming soon from Rampant Loon Press!
And here we are, at the end of the editorial already and I haven’t even started talking about Tales from the Wild Weird West, Putrefying Stories, Noir: High Crimes and Lowlifes, London Calling, THROWBACKS!, Stupefying Stories In Hell, A Midsummer Night’s Stupefying Stories, the April issue, the May issue, the SHOWCASE site redesign, or everything else we’re planning to roll out between now and June. Guess that gives me a head start on the editorial for SHOWCASE #18.
Now go read the stories!
~brb
Bruce Bethke is best known for either his genre-naming 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his award-winning 1995 novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few readers have known about him until recently is that he actually started out in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI standard and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but now works in the supercomputer industry, doing stuff that is absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.
Bruce has a long-neglected personal web site at brucebethke.com, but if you’re looking for more information about him you’re better off reading the interviews at Wag the Fox, Six Questions For, or Strange Horizons. You can try to reach him through facebook.com/bruce.bethke, and that sometimes works, but you’ll have better luck going through facebook.com/StupefyingStories or the feedback email address elsewhere on this web page.
