Appreciations

by contributors and Don Webb

Over the years, Bewildering Stories has received, practically every week, kind words from contributors who’ve appreciated our contact, whether their submissions have been accepted or regretfully declined. We wish we could thank them all. They tell us we’ve been accomplishing our mission.

What is that mission? In June, 2002, Jerry Wright and I agreed with aspiring writers that they needed a place to start. In science fiction, particularly, writers’ only doors to public exposure were fewer than a handful of print magazines, but the Internet soon changed all that. For starters, we agreed that we must never tell contributors merely, “No, thanks” or the equivalent. If we couldn’t accept a submission, we must say why. The result has been BwS’ extensive compendiums of guidelines and articles on writing, all of which regularly prove useful.

Recent contributors have again offered kind words. One of them says:

Given how chaotic the world has become, each day since 2016 has been a linear increase in social entropy until all of our homes and all of our projects reach tipping points. Bewildering Stories is one of the more cogent, resistant projects out there, still going strong. Also, as one of the internet’s older creative archives, we don’t know how important BwS will be a year from now, five years from now, a decade from now. It’s hard for centralized powers to defund and destaff a project that runs on shoestrings and volunteers. I’m glad to be part of it. Keep going, please!

Now that’s taking a long view, and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed the success that our contributors have brought us over the years, because it means we’ve been helping them. However, a long view implies time and, with time, comes age; at which another contributor marvels:

I don’t know how you manage to keep all those balls in the air, not just at your age, but any age,

My age? Any age? I was born at the beginning of WW2. My mother worked in a U.S. government department and was the typist selected to compose letters and documents free of corrections for the benefit of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Meanwhile, my future wife and invaluable life support was born in the middle of the war in both place and time. Her family fled towards Free France when it had become clear their only choice was Stalin or Hitler; they wisely emigrated away from the dictator who threatened to have the longer career. Since 2016, to cite our first quote from contributors, the mistakes and perils of the 1930’s seem to have been forgotten only to be repeated.

Keeping Bewildering Stories’ “balls in the air” is easy for me. I use Optima Page Spinner as the manual HTML editor, Mariner Write as the word processor and Fetch as the file transfer protocol. All three are many years out of date but would be irreplaceable by anything as user-friendly and efficient if I updated my Macintosh operating system. For more than 20 years, all the pages of Bewildering Stories have been made from the Page Spinner templates I’ve designed.

Most of the work consists in proofreading each issue, which depends on the expertise and assistance of a Review Editor, Charlie Cole. Gratitude is built into the system with the acknowledgement I’m always happy to send: “Thanks, Charlie; all corrections made.”

Who’ll keep Bewildering Stories going after I keel over? Any volunteers? At least we may be able to provide for its survival as a library. After all, that is how it was first designed.

Don Webb
Managing Editor