Peromyscus: Writing and publishing an SF short story

Writing's not always straightforward. My story "Sunless," was recently published. Here's a case history in the hope it helps writers.

Contents

Sunless took 16 years to write.
First drafts of My Last Breath
Reception
Sunless
How did I think of all that weird stuff?
The Funicular—SF Trope
Getting published
Records kept
Signing the Contract
Links

Sunless took 16 years to write.

In 2022, I wrote the final version of "Sunless," which was published in May 2023. It’s the story of a card shark called Tomey who becomes persona non grata after taking in too much money at a big casino. He retreats to a poor part of town, ready to work his way back up again, but gets into a fight with a group of people who don’t like his kind. He is a genetically engineered agricultural worker, green-skinned like the plants he was designed to tend. A woman tells him she can get him off-planet via the space elevator, but once he’s on board ur ernyvmrf ur’f orra genssvpxrq gb fyniref jub arrq crbcyr gb jbex gurve bja terraubhfrf. Ur rkvgf gur fcnprfuvc, erylvat ba uvf cubgbflagurgvp novyvgvrf gb fhccyl bkltra va gur fhayvtug, naq znantrf gb obneq nabgure fuvc. Ur’f haqbphzragrq, ohg serr – naq unf n fgnfu bs pelcgbpheerapl gb fgneg nserfu ryfrjurer. (Spoiler has been Rot13'd for those who haven't read it. Decode ROT13 here.)

Back in May 2006 I first had the idea to describe a marshalling yard – an area where railroad cars are shunted to form trains and assigned a track and a locomotive. My yard, however, was for freight ferried on spaceships hooked up to a space elevator, or as I called it, an orbital funicular. The draft described a green man standing at a fence looking at ships. Four young human boys collecting engine numbers turn to abuse him as a man-made being, a “fabrico.” The description was mostly sensory, centering on the sounds and smells of the heavily mechanical spaceport.

The fabrico, Tomey, was about to bribe his way on to a spaceship heading to (as he sees it) the Promised Land. On the way he meets an alien often said to presage bad luck. As he embarks he sees the same alien hiding in the links between carriages on the funicular. The journey is cursed, and as the ship leaves the funicular and reaches space, he learns that food is tight and he may be thrown out of the airlock.

This first draft was abandoned on 06-11-2006 at 1750 words. I’d intended to go on to describe how Tomey, engineered to photosynthesize like a plant, simply slept in the ship’s hydroponics bay, not requiring food, thus saving himself and allowing the ship to reach its destination.

The initial idea for the piece was based on lines from Blues and R‘n’B songs. The theme was the common one of getting on a train and reaching the promised land – with a science fiction twist.

“The Promised Land” itself is a song by Chuck Berry, describing a trip from Norfolk, Virginia to California. The second line was from Jimi Hendrix’s version of “Catfish Blues,” “But there’s not one [train], Lord, that’s going my way.” The next was “Lien on my soul,” from Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues” and the third was “I see my Black Dog coming” from Blind Blake’s “Black Dog Blues.” “Black Dog, Black Dog, you caused me to weep and moan…I’m quitting your hard luck line.”

I couldn’t drop the idea and revisited it regularly, but never found a way to make it work. I think having the protagonist pay for a ticket and the Retor be the only character who is riding the rails (hiding between freight cars like a hobo) made it hard to fit in with its intended symbolism.

First drafts of My Last Breath

By 2020 I had a different framing in mind (link to story). I took inspiration from Alan Lomax’s folk recording of “Hell Bound Train,” in which a cowboy drunk in a bar dreams he’s on a train to Hell, and on waking up he vows to avoid this fate, along with Chuck Berry’s “Downbound Train,” where a “stranger” drunk on a bar-room floor similarly dreams he’s on a train to Hell. Chuck’s lyrics are filled with vivid Delirium Tremens imagery of devils and flames and bones. The Stranger wakes up and reconsiders his life choices.

In this version, instead of starting at the marshalling yard, I started earlier, where Tomey first gets the notion to leave his planet and head for the Promised Land. Tomey, genetically engineered to photosynthesize like a plant, is green in the first draft but yellow from living indoors under room light in other drafts. Instead of meeting the bad luck Retor, he meets his priest, handing out tracts. The priest tells him he’s going to Hell if he doesn’t mend his ways. “You must fight the Devil to your very last breath,” the priest says. He holds up a Rosary fashioned from the toy we call a Jacob’s Ladder, and as the mirrors turn over and flash, Tomey sees the Devil behind him, at his heels. Entering a bar, he gets into a fight where a Kuru woman saves him and sends him to the funicular.

There he meets the Devadip, who asks him for a cryptocurrency token and gives him instructions on how to get to the passenger terminal. The Customs men are playing chess as he passes their booth. He boards the ship and basks under the cabin lights to green his skin. The Devadip tells him he’s just a Ferry Man who accompanies people to the other side. Tomey puts two and two together and realizes he is not on a spaceship, but on the ferry between life and death, and as the priest said, he’s going to Hell. He tries to grab the Devadip, but the man-bat escapes and flies down. Tomey follows him out of the airlock, letting out his last breath in the thinning air, but the Captain pokes his horned head out and tells Tomey, “You paid the full fare. You’re getting the full ride.” It comes to Tomey in a flash that since he’s not breathing, the Devil must cease fighting him, and he will win. He escapes. This intermediate draft was called “My Last Breath.”

I tried three separate versions of “My Last Breath” (link to versions), redoing the beginning and end, trying to get either a circular story (where he ends up back on New Hawaii, the inference being he never left and the episode was a dream) or an escape story (he gets on an upbound ship and starts a new life).

Reception

“My Last Breath” was roundly criticized by my reading group. I’d worked hard to put in the Hellbound aspect, but I could never make “Hell” up above, in orbit. It seems impossible to make an upbound ship appear to be going to Hell. The critique group didn’t like the priest, didn’t get the implication of paying a ferryman a token, or realize the captain was the Devil. Getting back to where he started, like the cowboy and the stranger in the songs, didn’t key the readers in that this was not a real, physical journey, or why he would turn his life around afterwards. One thing I’m definitely finding as I write is that rock lyrics and blues lyrics just do not translate to prose. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t come over.

Sunless

I ditched the concept of “My Last Breath” after June 2021. I simplified the story. No Priest, no Devil, no omens. I rewrote it as an adventure story of a gambler who lost his credit and got into a bar fight. His rescuer turns out to be a human trafficker, selling him into slavery in orbital greenhouses.

The final version of the story is called “Sunless.” It soon found a home.

How did I think of all that weird stuff?

The final version was the simplest, with a movie-style plot, set pieces of rising action, a final ordeal as he loses his grip on the upbound ship and a happy ending. The supernatural, the mythic resonances, the call-back to Earthly struggles – all gone. But there is a considerable amount of world-building.

The Funicular—SF Trope

The orbital elevator is what’s known as a trope. Not in the original sense, the use of figurative language such as a figure of speech, but the modern meaning: A common element, premise or theme used often in a particular genre.

The space elevator was conceived as a thought experiment in 1895 by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky as he contemplated the Eiffel Tower, and popularized by SF writer Arthur C Clarke in his 1978 book The Fountains of Paradise. Tsiolkovsky was an aerospace engineer. There’s a crater named after him on the Dark Side of the Moon. Clarke was one of the first to publish the idea of satellites as radio relays in 1945 (though of course, Tsiolkovsky had already thought of man-made satellites) which became reality on the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957.

As we writers use these ideas we are standing on the back of giants, and their uncommon leaps of carefully nurtured intuition become our building blocks, our tropes.

Other examples of tropes in literature include faster-than-light travel, alternate universes and alien invasions. None of these things occur in the real world but we have learned about them and how to manipulate them from long familiarity. We know the effects of silver bullets, garlic, and crucifixes on vampires and werewolves. Similarly, we know that a weary police detective, pulled back in for one last reluctant case, will have a major adventure that threatens his very life. We know the drunk, PTSD-ridden fighter pilot will put down his bottle of Jack Daniels and fire up a crop duster plane when the time comes to repel the aliens. These are all tropes.

Having an orbital elevator to hand, I thought up what would come down (tourists and money – a tribute to the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”) and what could go up (the things that normally slip over borders – refugees and trafficked humans).

Photosynthetic skin is not a new idea either, but it’s normally been avoided as the amount of energy the 1.7 sq m of human skin can absorb (at 300 watts per sq meter in the noonday sun) is not nearly enough. (A few dozen kilojoules a day could be generated, insufficient to power the 10 million joules a day a man would require.) I hand-wave over that. Tomey has plenty of stored fat for a few days. He just needs the oxygen generated during the chemical reaction. I used neo-chlorophyll as an extra hand-wave, just to up the efficiency a bit. (Plants are not at all efficient energy creators. They don’t need to be.)

So, the pieces of the story were already lying around. Putting them together was what took all the time.

Sixteen years.

Getting published

I use The Submission Grinder, which tells me the markets that are currently open for the kinds of stories I write. Plug the details into the search engine, look for a likely candidate, then read the website and, if unfamiliar with the magazine, read sample copies before submitting. I take the submissions guidelines seriously. If the publication wants manuscripts less than 2000 words in a sans serif font and two inch margins, that’s what I send. It can take four months for a submission to be read and generally no feedback is given (except for “This is not right for us at this time.”).

“My Last Breath” went to four magazines with no luck. The new version, “Sunless,” was accepted 8/18/2022. It was published 8 months later. Payment was on publication.

Some stories are much easier. “Blackpool Tower,” a story about a young girl from a broken home whose adult friend turns out to be the king of an alien planet, was written in a few hours and accepted by the second market I sent it to. “Autonomous,” about a call-center employee troubleshooting self-driving cars, took a long time to write and critique but was accepted by the third market. “Nine Dioptres,” recently published by IZ Digital was sent directly to them.

Some are as difficult as “Sunless.” “Nerves of Steel” was written in 2006 and sent out ten times. It was overhauled in 2020, taking out all references to rock guitar and changing them to Harry Styles/Boy Band references, and renamed. It was then accepted by the second market I sent it to (details will follow when I have them).

I want to thank my reading/critiquing group for helping push all of these over the finish line.

Records kept

In my records, each story has three identifiers. The original name (in this case “My Last Breath”) is the primary identifier. The second is the name of the current major version, “Sunless.” The third is a random number from a generator, which changes each time any changes are made.

For example, if I’d sent “Sunless” to an Australian magazine, it could be in my records as My Last Breath, version Sunless, filename Sunless 757.docx.

If I then sent it to an American magazine it could be in my records as My Last Breath, version Sunless, filename Sunless 858.docx.

If both rejected the story, I would be able to tell which one was in Australian English and which was in American English for future use.

You may be surprised how markets differ. Some want single-space manuscripts, no author’s name anywhere, and some want double-space, 1 ½” margins, author’s name, telephone number, and address. Some want no headers or footers, some want page numbers in the footer. All of those would get different numbers in the file name for ease of cataloging.

I also keep a file of cover letters because boy, are editors picky about what goes in the cover letter. I need to know what I’ve said about myself and my publishing history.

Signing the Contract

All online and print magazines should have some kind of written agreement or contract. If they don’t have one, write your own and get them to sign it.

Sunless’s contract has the following, which is quite typical.

· 1. “Planet wide” and “English” rights mentioned upfront.

· 7. “First Electronic rights in English,” exclusive for six months after publication.

· 9. There’s a carve-out for Best of the Year anthologies, as they typically appear quickly after publication.

· 11. Publication agrees to place a copyright notice on the work.

· 13. I agree to provide a photo of me they can use whenever they want to for publicity purposes.

· 14. I warrant I have not previously published the piece.

· 22. Sets down which state or country’s laws govern the agreement in case of dispute.