Bewildering Stories discusses...
External Archives
with Benny Bottema
[Benny Bottema] Hi, Don,
Although I’m not involved in Bewildering Stories, as an aspiring writer I find your articles on writing craft invaluable. And they’re very insightful regarding the English language in general, which is not my native language.
On my internal documentation server, I link to your articles here and there, but as I see more and more web pages move to different addresses or even be removed, I’m scared the same might happen one day with links to Bewildering Stories.
So, I’m thinking about archives and snapshots.
For archiving websites, there are two options: whole website archival (all paid, it seems) and individual webpage archival (free, such as archive.org and archive.today). So I did what any (in)sane person would do: I went through all the links manually and added them in archive.today, to create a one-time complete snapshot for my references. Links I included: all the pages and sub(sub)pages under The Review Readers’ Checklist, The Writer’s Craft and Style Manual and any linked stories.
So even if your website goes down, moves or is removed, an archived version will remain here: archive.ph/8mBy1. Unfortunately the current web design is not great and the menu dropdowns don’t work, but there was a snapshot from 2013 of the homepage already which works a lot better. Other than that you can go directly to the right page of course: https://archive.ph/5J3qP.
Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for your work and maintaining this after all these years and let you know I created a snapshot from your website that will always be available!
Cheers!
Benny Bottema
[Michael E. Lloyd] Benny: may I strongly echo Don’s thanks for your efforts towards preserving Bewildering Stories for posterity! And hopefully you have also discovered the Titles, Authors, Genres, which I publish every week alongside each new Issue. Since this provides four separately indexed links to every significant item published by BwS over the past near-20 years (currently 7827 titles, and counting ...), I feel it would be a useful addendum to your fine set of archived web pages.
[Don Webb] Thank you very much, Benny. If the old saying is correct, that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” then preservation is a high compliment indeed. You’re telling us that Bewildering Stories is on the right track and is fulfilling its mission.
What is that mission, exactly? BwS was founded with a practical principle in mind: we never dismiss submissions with “It didn’t grab me” or words to that effect. Rather, we listen and, if necessary, try to help by making constructive suggestions.
One of our mottoes sums it up: “Authors speak for themselves; editors are the readers’ only voice.” Contributors may agree or not with our critiques but, every week, we receive thank-you notes from contributors who know that real people have been giving the stories, poems and essays thoughtful readings and are trying to bridge gaps in communication.
The pages you cite, Benny, reflect many years of experience. They deal with writing problems that we have found are commonplace or especially important. I very often cite various titles and sections in corresponding with contributors. I wish I’d had something so convenient in bygone times for use in classes in literature and, especially, composition.
Now that Bewildering Stories has celebrated its one-thousandth official issue in this, its 20th year of publication, you’re right to wonder how long we can keep it up, and what will happen to all this valuable information when we keel over.
We do ask contributors to save the on-line versions of their own works for their own records. And everyone is free, of course, to save anything else they think might be useful. The simplest way is to select “Save” in one’s browser and keep the pages on disk as webarchives.
On such saved files, some hypertext links should still work, like this one. As you imply, though, links to other pages at BwS won’t work, because “http://www.bewilderingstories.com/” is omitted as unnecessary in internal links. There’s no way to activate the internal links externally short of recoding the page. And that might cause viewers to wonder whether the copy is authentic.
But it’s hard to see why anyone would bother to tamper with or claim our articles on writing. True, many do contain information that can be found elsewhere only with difficulty, if at all. However, they reflect our particular experience and are worth preserving to the extent that writers and editors find them useful.
Thanks again, Benny, and keep up the good work.
Don Webb
Managing Editor
Bewildering Stories
