Bewildering Stories discusses...
Saint Cabbage and Issue 734
with Johanna Miklós
[Editor’s note] Johanna serves as an invaluable member of BwS’ editorial team in her capacity as an Associate Editor (review reader) and Prepublications Manager.
[Johanna M.] I appreciate the work you and the team put into Martin Grise's piece. Well done!
[Don Webb] Thank you, Johanna. “Operation Intoxicar” did get thoughtful reviews from our review readers, who decided it sidestepped our “Dream Stories” guideline. I’m not so sure, myself; dreams take place in real time. However, I’m no spoilsport; I’ll grant an author’s using them to compress narrative time for the sake of economy.
The hard part was making lists out of the orders Augusto receives. Avoiding wasted white space while combining ordered and unordered lists looks easy, once you see it, but adapting the original required careful work.
Other contributors, too, have complimented me on the effort involved in putting together a regular issue. I’m very appreciative! There are two ways to go about it:
Have a website service make the pages for you. That costs money. You also have to take what you get, and it’s liable to look like everything else on the Net.
Take courses in HTML and Javascript. I taught myself, in the early days of the Internet. It took about two years, but I’ve long since had templates for everything. The best part: I can fix anything that goes wrong or ask questions, if I can’t.
When I keel over, I don’t see how anyone can continue BwS, even with option #1. BwS is not only a big operation, it’s probably the oldest and certainly the largest literary webzine on the Net. Keeping it all together has created a rather intricate structure.
[Johanna M.] This is the first time I read the Veggie story. Very entertaining. As I read the last paragraph, I remembered a scene from another book where a chap who hunts his food always gives thanks to the slain animal before chopping it up. I think, if I remember the book correctly, this is an American Indian tradition: showing respect for the life taken.
[Don W.] A very honorable custom, and it’s quite understandable. One gives thanks for food especially when it’s precious or you may not know where your next meal is coming from. Relating oneself to Nature is an equally valid reason.
[Johanna M.] The Cyrano link is also lots of fun. I'm off to have some blueberries and cream and shall thank both the Canadian farmers and the California cows before I dig in!
[Don W.] I shall give thanks that nothing stands in the way of your international breakfast! Farmers may have nationalities, but blueberries and cows have none. Nature says so.
And I’m glad you enjoyed “Go to the Cabbage, and Be Wise.” I’m especially proud of the conclusion I draw from it, if I do say so myself. And I imagine that Cyrano — brave soldier though he was — would heartily approve.
I have no qualms about reissuing episodes. Bewildering Stories owes its continued existence to Cyrano’s The Other World, even though it was completed more than 13 years ago. I wasn’t trying to earn any academic degrees with the translation and annotations; I thought the project was fascinating and a world of fun!
[Johanna M.] I shared the issue on my FB page. Do the other editors, writers and readers actively promote the amazing work on BwS?
[Don W.] Thank you, Johanna; I hope all our editors and contributors do the same as you. As our preview notices say, posting links in social media is good for our contributors and for BwS, too.
In that light, “self-promotion” is a good thing. Who else is going to do it? I do wish that others would post links and discussions to BwS’ FB page as well as to forums such as those of Analog and Asimov’s, to name only two. And what are friends and family for, if not to click on your links and read your stories and poems!
