Bewildering Stories: In Times to Come
The Third Quarterly Review is scheduled
for September 22, 2024, following issue 1060.
Contributors used to be able to rely on a weekly copy of the official schedule for the next four weeks. By the end of 2022, it had become quite impractical. What’s the point of posting weekly a copy of a schedule that changes hourly?
We used to be able to predict with some accuracy in which issues prose or poetry might appear. No longer. The reason is somewhat complex, but it boils down to making Bewildering Stories’ issues attractive. If they’re too long, the proofreading and editing will be too difficult to do properly, and prospective readers will be overwhelmed by a lengthy list of titles. If an issue is too short; it will lack the variety our readers enjoy. Hence we have an informal limit of about ten or eleven pages in any regular issue.
Ten years and more in the past, prose submissions were frequently shorter than 3,000 words in length and occupied a single web page. Regular issues could feature many titles every week. Since then, prose submissions have been increasing in average length. Since we limit our web pages to 3,000 words for the readers’ convenience, stories of two or even three “parts” (web pages) are now commonplace. And the average number of titles in the regular issues has decreased accordingly.
We can at least attempt a general outlook. “Open” = the approximate scheduling of new acceptances. “Now” cannot mean “immediately,” of course, but it can probably mean “within the next few weeks.”
And we can at least list the “long works pending” in order of appearance. Since we can no longer estimate confidently the wait time for serialized works, we must — sadly — declare until further notice a moratorium on the consideration of works of 9,000 words or more.
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Novels: open in 2025 Novellas: open in 2025 Serials: open in 2025 Short Stories: open now. Flash Fiction: open now |
Poetry: open now Short Poetry: open now Essays, etc.: open now Reviews & Excerpts: open now Artwork: open now; updates continuing |
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Novels Garu Inbinder, Chicago MaxNovellas Allister Nelson, Ashmedai, or the Devil on Three SticksSerials None scheduled | |
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