My newest short story "Twin Engines" is in Black Cat Weekly #217, out today.
As more an more magazines are scanned and come online at archive.org, more of my early stories are available to "borrow" from them.
I've updated my bibliography today. Links in the first section sometimes go to the publishers sales page, but more often go to free-to-read sites like archive.org. I'm in two minds about their "service" - I certainly don't get paid when you borrow a magazine from them - but it is, as Americans say, what it is.
Short Stories
The Technophobe (1988) in Back Brain Recluse #10 ed. Chris Reed
Sensonomicon (1988) in Back Brain Recluse #11 ed. Chris Reed
The Fathers (1989) in Back Brain Recluse, #13 ed. Chris Reed
The Outside Door (1989) in Interzone, #28 ed. Simon Ounsley, David Pringle
Feminine Intuition (1990) in Dream Science Fiction #23 ed. George P. Townsend
Milk (1991) in Edge Detector #3 ed. Glenn Grant
David Cronenberg's "Alien" - Novelisation by J. G. Ballard (1993) in Interzone, #75 ed. Lee Montgomerie, David Pringle
Pace Car (2021) in Interzone #290/291 ed. Andy Cox
Jump Jiving (2022) in Eldritch Science #8 ed. George Phillies
Sundown (2022) in The Writing Disorder, Winter 2022 ed. C. E. Lukather
Blackpool Tower (2023) in BFS Horizons, #15 ed. Pete. W. Sutton
Autonomous (2023) in Aurealis, #157 ed. Dirk Strasser
Sunless (2023) in IZ Digital April 2023 ed. Gareth Jelley
Angel City
Eastern American legends tell of a tribe
who founded a golden city in the far west, led by their divine foremother Eve
Angelica. The Royal Treasurer asked us to determine if her city existed, and if
so, to locate the gold these ancient people amassed and sequester it for our
Queen.
For our trek, I assembled a team of
five women; a geologist, a botanist, two ethnologists who had lived with a remaining
eastern tribe, and an interpreter, Skilar, who was brought up in an east coast
village. She could read several hundred written word-glyphs as well as speak latter-day
Inglish fluently.
The first westerners we met, living
outside the ruins of Angel City, call themselves the Lost Feelies. They do not
know of Eve. They say their founders were white men and women from the east who
all arrived together on iron horses. They call these ancients the “Rubber
Barons,” and say they built Angel City in one hundred years. The Lost Feelies
told us that the tribe now dwelling in the inner city are not related to them,
arriving long after the city was built.
When asked why their people
abandoned the city, the Lost Feelies say supernatural enemies from the Land of
the Setting Sun sent two plagues: “Bee Die Off” killed all the flowers and “wheat
rust” (a fungus) ruined their grain fields. The city dwellers starved or
dispersed. From the size of trees now growing in the ruins our botanist agreed
that a major disaster occurred around four hundred years ago.
We followed the course of the
river, which is a mere trickle in a vast channel some thirty paces wide, now
much overgrown. On once-paved streets near the remaining great buildings, which
they call “Those-Who-Scratch-The-Sky,” there are numerous dwellings made of
ephemeral materials. They include cartonnage boxes and blankets of animal and
plant fibers. There exists a great stock of paper in the abandoned buildings,
which the people scavenge for cartonnage-making. A popular coating for the papier-mâché
homes is a variety of green paper cut into hand-length rectangles. Each bears a
portrait of a man in the center and a selection of lucky numbers. The tribe living
in the streets call themselves “Skidro.” They too claim to be descendants of
those who built the Sky Scratchers. They say they have an “American Dream” that
material wealth will “trickle down” from the Sky Scratcher, and so they live in
its shadow, waiting.
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| A Sky Scratcher |
We asked the Skidro where they kept
this treasure. They pointed to the largest Sky Scratcher and said it is concealed
“inside the block-chain.” Skilar elicited from them that the ultimate source of
wealth is the “bite coin.” Our ethnologists believe this must be gold, since gold
will readily take teeth marks, but I feel the concept of “trickle down”
strongly suggests that wealth was spiritual, distributed by a sky god.
We soon reached an impasse, despite
Skilar’s fluency. I quickly learned that the highest Skidro moral value is
“Freedom of Speech.” They permit and even encourage untruths. They call lies
“Alternative Facts.” They recite a mantra, “Do your own research!” When we asked
for verification of statements, they cry “I plead the fifth,” and “We refuse
compelled speech!”
Our geologist told us that this
area suffers frequent quakes. Eight Sky Scratchers still stand, but ten or a
dozen have fallen. These cluster, with lower-height wooden buildings (and some
stone) surrounding them as far as the eye can see. Some still have metal glyphs
attached to the upper façade. Skilar told us they were single words without a
common meaning, denoting the name of the god to whom the edifice was
dedicated.
We explored the tallest intact
tower. It is rectilinear at the bottom,
quickly becoming circular, and built in a series of reducing steps, or setbacks,
which eventually shrink away to leave a round tower above, surmounted with a
crown. According to Skilar, the building is composed of 73 “floors” (as each
layer is called, though they are not on the ground). Each “floor” is about the
height of two women and each has many window bays inset into the outer surface.
The core and cladding are made of white “concrete” which Skilar described as a
stone the ancients liquified, then poured from spinning machines, after which
it resolidified. Concrete is usually white but sometimes beige, like a cheap
sandstone but with far more strength (as I found when I tried to chip a piece
off as a souvenir).
From the remains of the roadway,
broad concrete stairs ascend to the “ground floor.” The step height is designed
for women, but they measure a dozen paces in width, suggesting ceremonial
processions ascended the steps. Skidro
told Skilar that workers, both women and men, walked up the steps to spend time
sitting in chambers at the top of the building. We were unable to verify this.
The structure is so austere that it seems likely to me that only priests would
be allowed to enter it.
At the top of the stairs are two
flat, rectangular areas filled with small rocks. Skilar learned these were
fountains that propelled water through hidden pipes into the air, after which
it would sink out of sight. I assume this water was used for ritual ablutions
before ceremonies. The river is a mile away but our geologist pointed out that,
judging by the size of its concrete channel, it must have been a veritable
torrent in the Classic Period. Perhaps the depletion of this resource provides
another reason for the city’s abandonment.
Beyond this ritual cistern, against
the concrete wall, stand four metal sculptures. These resemble serpents adorned with
red, serrated crowns. Each has a glyph affixed which Skilar read as “Fire
Riser.” She did not know what relationship snakes have to fire. I asked her if the glyphs could be an example
of “Freedom of Speech,” but she said that both here and in the east, glyphs
sanctified by the “Fire General” were always true, as the gods required the
General to be literally truthful in all her dealings with the populus.
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| Serpent sculpture at the top of the broad stair. Traces of red paint remain visible. |
The main entrance on the “ground
floor” (many steps above the ground) was originally composed of large sheets of
curved blue glass, some fitted with hinges to form doors. We saw no evidence of fortifications or guard
quarters. The doors lead into an expansive open chamber. Large concrete pillars
inside the space reveal the method by which the immense weight of the building
is distributed to the ground, but the size of the open space is remarkable. It
is some six “floors” high. The space—Skilar read the glyph as “atrium”—retains
traces of wood flooring and there is a long, chest-height counter with remnants
of red-stained wood. Skilar said that easterners believe the ancients stationed
four “recessionists” in military garb behind these counters to repel invaders
and escort invited guests.
Light pours in through the upper
windows, lower windows and doors. It seemed a barren glare to us, but while the
blue glass remained intact on the now open side of “atrium,” daylight must have
been calming and tranquil.
Skilar and I climbed the ribbed
metal staircase at the far side of “atrium.” It leads only to a balcony (or half-floor with
a short wall) overlooking the entrance and “atrium.” Further ascent, Skilar
said, was undertaken in a box winched on cables. We explored, finding two
arrays of the winched boxes and many rooms of unknown use. We saw several
blocks and chains, but I did not find any bite-coins.
We saw several other glyphs Skilar believes
the “Fire General” must have written.
Signs include “Occupancy” followed by a numeral, which must be the
number of celebrants in a religious ceremony, and “Emergency Exit,” a
reference, I believe, to the doorways which are thrown open during an
“Occupancy” and through which Disaster Demons are expelled. From the balcony,
we saw that the principal contents of the vast “atrium” comprises many ceramic containers,
the size of coffins, each one filled with soil. Around them, the Classic Period
tribe placed stools with backs, for comfortable viewing of the vessels’
contents.
I asked our botanist to examine the
plant material remaining in the soil-containers. She found desiccated leaves
and stalks from Swiss Cheese plants, remnants of Bromeliads, dried leaves of
Velvet Philodendron, and stalks of Dumbcane. All of these, she told me, originate
in rainforests far to the south of Angel City. They are all inedible and some are noxious, so
were not grown for food.
We left the city precipitously, as
an earth tremor shook the ground. The Skidro told us it presaged another “big
one” strong enough to collapse a sky-scratcher.
From our brief visit, I conclude
that the ceremonial cisterns before the entrance, the dim, filtered blue light,
the serpent sculptures and the large ceramic pots filled with rainforest trees
and shrubs surrounded by observation platforms and resting areas—even the belief
that beneficence ‘trickles down’ like drips from trees—suggest an attempt to
recreate the tropical home of their gods. I further believe, contrary to their
own origin myth, that the city-builders came from the south, bringing their
gods with them. The Sky-Scratchers were their temples.
Accordingly, we feel that any
subsequent expedition in search of bite-coin should contact the more indigenous
tribes, beginning with the Lost Feelies (since we have already made contact)
and their neighbors, the Hollyweird.
***
This piece is a travelogue in the
style of Fr. Diego de Landa. It is a fictional account of an expedition to the
ruins of Los Angeles.
The Classic Maya civilization collapsed
five centuries before Father Diego de Landa arrived in Yucatán, Mexico. He set
to learning Mayan history, relying on contemporary villagers’ stories and his own
primitive ethnography. In 1562, de Landa burned the 27 bark-paper books he had
found, believing them to be the work of demons. In doing so, he wiped out
almost all written Mayan historical records. Because of his vandalism, his
account of explorations in Yucatán paradoxically provides much of what we know
about Maya life.
***
07/17/25 - edited the image of ruined LA
Demos, a member of the Atropian sect pledged to end human life on Earth, learns Marilyn may be incubating a young AI. Paul, one of a loose group of her friends, wants her to live--Marilyn, that is, not the AI.
A friend asked me for advice on publishing and promoting a
Science Fiction novel. I’ve never published one, so I researched it. I hope it will be of use to others.
Generally, advice for how to get your manuscript accepted
and published is the same as for non-genre novels: Find an agent or find a
publisher which accepts non-agented submissions.
Finding an agent
You can research agents and track submissions through sites
like QueryTracker, MSWL (Manuscript Wish List), Reedsy and Publishers Marketplace. Some
agents want you send to them exclusively (i.e. they do not accept a
simultaneous submission) but given that they have up to six months response
times, you may prefer to ignore that and send out queries in batches of 5-10
and wait for feedback. Based on the feedback, if necessary revise the query
letter and/or manuscript and then send out the next batch.
In a hurry?
Lists of literary agents for Science Fiction:
https://blog.reedsy.com/literary-agents/science-fiction/
https://literaryagencies.com/science-fiction-literary-agents/
https://www.tckpublishing.com/literary-agents-accepting-science-fiction-and-fantasy-submissions/
No Agent?
Some book publishers accept non-agented submissions. They tend
to keep it on the down-low because when they open up to submissions they get a
flood of manuscripts from writers who have not bothered to read their
guidelines and send unsuitable material. If you want to succeed, read the publishers’
guidelines. If possible, read some of their books. (This goes for finding an
agent as well. Know what they want before you write them.)
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| Unrelated Picture Because Posts Without Pictures Get Less Engagement |
How to find a publisher who accepts unagented Science
Fiction manuscripts:
Authors Publish
send out regular lists of publishers accepting manuscripts.
Aethon Books, Flame Tree Publishing, Arcadia, and Dark
Age Press all have open submission periods occasionally, so you can check
their websites.
A place of intent blog has a list of publishers https://www.aplaceofintent.co.uk/blog/science-fiction-and-fantasy-publishers-accepting-submissions
Science Fiction Book Promotion
Your book is published. Now you have to publicize it. This
goes for both self-published and trad published books. Somehow, your book has
to stand out from the 80,000
other books published this week.
Here are some places you can promote the book.
1. Social Media and Online Communities
2. Book Promotion and Advertising Platforms
3. Newsletters and Email Marketing
4. Book Reviewers and Influencers
5. In person promotion
6. Free and Discounted Promotions
7. Networking and Community Engagement
My story, "Hey, Marilyn," is in an anthology with stories by Steve Rasnic Tem and Gareth Powell - among other legends: Fission #5. I'm over the moon.
I'm looking forward to reading the other stories.
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| Cover of Fission #5 |
In March, Black Cat Weekly published my story The Oathbreaker. A professor is swept up in the saga of a woman doomed to spend eternity with her Viking captor. He is studying seaweed on the coast of Anglesey, Wales, when three women recruit him to save her.
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| Black Cat Weekly cover |
Today, the BBC published an article about a real professor who studied seaweed on the coast of Anglesey, and who is credited with saving the Japanese sushi industry. Laver is a type of seaweed that grows in green-black sheets on rocks and is used in British cooking, particularly as Welsh Laverbread. When Kathleen Drew-Baker attempted to cultivate Laver in her laboratory, she found that seashells in the bottom of the tank developed a reddish growth. She recognized the red growth as a species of algae called Conchocelis rosea. Studying it further, she realized that C. rosea wasn't a separate species at all. Laver has two different lifestyle stages, one as a red filament growing on seashells and one as blackish sheets growing on rocks. She published her findings in the October 1949 edition of the journal Nature.
Meanwhile, in Japan, a series of storms had decimated the production of Nori, the seaweed used extensively in Japanese cuisine, especially in sushi. Sea mines and general devastation of World War Two further reduced the supply. A Japanese professor read Drew-Baker's paper and realized that the closely related Nori could be cultivated the same way. Now, the conchocelis-phase Nori is grown on oyster shells in nurseries. Nets are placed over the shells until the adult phase of Nori attaches to them, and then the nets are taken out to sea, where it grows the thin leaves that can be harvested and processed for food. Drew-Baker's discovery was the key to the recovery of the seaweed beds.
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| Seaweed growing on nets from the Nori Cultivation page |
Kathleen Drew-Baker's story has another angle. Although she was an academic all her life, she was unpaid for most of it. Back then, the university would not employ married women. When she married she was offered the opportunity to continue working, but she was not on the payroll.
If my three angry women had met Kathleen when she came to Anglesey, they would have had a lot to discuss about the very slow pace of improvement in women's rights.
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| Cover, Black Cat Weekly #186 |
Three stories from me and many more in this excellent anthology of speculative fiction. Unauthorized Departures, edited by Rick McGrath, from The Terminal Press.
Publishing science fiction can be a mad scramble between getting it in print and it starting to come true in real life.
My recent story "The Burn Out" (in Fission #3, available here) features a pop star. But he's not the story. Like many rich young musicians, he uses something to keep his edge sharpened, and like many rich young musicians, it's the younger female fans that provide it to him.
In his case it's a combat soldier implant.
The unit was optimized for combat soldiers in shock—like after a bullet wound. It instructed the sympathetic nervous system to shut some things down and dialed other things up to compensate. The telemetry package monitored the activity of the ganglia. Gully Foyle said, and this sounded like much more fun, that the upgrade allowed the user to experiment with changes that beat anything you could get out of a needle.
Because anything that changes the human body or brain is going to be used for porn first and recreation next.
For our hero, use of the technology ends about as well as can be expected, and that's coming from me, the person who hates the trope "there are some things man was not meant to know."
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Evergreen Meme |
Anyway, in the grand tradition of the Torment Nexus, the kind of technology referenced in the story has been invented and is being openly bragged about.
You should be able to get it on the Dark Web within a year (winky smiley) but you oughta read my story before you use it.
I’m a fan. I became a fan when my musical taste came on-line in late 1971—which I think of as “The year Led Zeppelin IV was released.” Since then, fandom has occupied most of my time, energy, and money. Any attention span I have left over, I spend writing. Sometimes I combine the two, as I did in my story “The Burn Out.”
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| Fission # 3 |
I was born at the
wrong time to absorb the British Blues Boom as it happened. Tons of Sobs,
Free’s first album from 1969, was on my Must Buy list as I worked backward from
’71. On the list also were Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck. All the heavy rock bands
worked the same Blues coalface back then, and the similarities between Truth
(Jeff Beck’s first), Led Zeppelin I and Free’s Tons of Sobs are
plain. The band slams through such classics as the barnstorming lust
locomotive, “The Hunter” (Albert King)
and the deathbed macho boast “Goin’ Down
Slow” (St. Louis Jimmy Oden, via the
Howlin’ Wolf version). Free’s sound is raw and aggressive, testosterone-laden
sweat flying from the speakers.
Free comprised
four white British teenagers (15-18 at the time of recording) and it seems
bizarre that they should attempt songs with lyrics begging the listener to
write the singer’s mother and tell her the shape that he’s in (and moreover,
that his health is fading and he needs forgiveness for his sins). They do, they
pull it off brilliantly, and a lot of that credibility comes from the
guitarist, Paul Kossoff, who effortlessly soars through the solos with a
gossamer-light feel underlying a snarling attack that rages continually against
the dying of the light.
Koss, 17, almost certainly did not know that he himself was going down fast. He was dead inside eight years.
I never saw Free
live. The ban split up when Kossoff’s drug problem became too hard to handle.
Koss made efforts to get clean but never got back to full health. I bought his
solo album, Back Street Crawler
(1973) but despite its solid white blues feel, and a guitar sound like heavy
whipping cream poured over double chocolate cake, something about it seemed
off—it conjured up its own title, let’s put it that way.
When I heard that
electric folkie John Martyn had taken the faltering Kossoff under his wing in
1975, I was elated. I put aside my anti-folk bias and ventured to Leeds to see
them play together. I went with a friend. As we neared the auditorium in the late
afternoon, we heard an inordinately loud Marshall-amplified Les Paul. The
rehearsal/sound check was underway. Koss was the only person who could produce
those sounds from a guitar, and the realization stopped me in my
tracks.
“Probably just a
roadie,” my friend said, urging me along. I was 16 at the time and that is
still the most cynical thing anyone has ever said to me. I assumed I’d hear
more that evening, so I moved on without objecting. My assumption proved to be
incorrect.
I wasn’t a big
John Martyn fan. I knew his Solid Air of course, and “I’d Rather be the
Devil” (Skip James) but I had little interest in a man who was perpetually
drunk and had what we nowadays call a “problematic” relationship with women. He
was a rowdy folk singer accompanied on this tour by an even rowdier stand-up
bass player (Danny Thompson) and a drummer (John Stevens). I didn’t know, going
in, that shenanigans had started much earlier in the day. Koss had already got
himself punched by the offended boyfriend of a girl he coveted, followed by a beating from Martyn himself for lying about the incident backstage. But I
heard about all that much later.
I knew Koss would
not come on stage until the encore, but John Martyn kept me interested in the
meantime. He played an acoustic guitar with a pickup taped across the soundhole
as well as a contact pickup taped to the body. The signal was fed to an Echoplex effects box, producing a
hypnotic, pulsing reverberation
above which he played chords and melody. Married with his famously slurred
voice, the effect was hymn-like and meditative, an effect that was shattered
every time a song ended and the band recommenced swearing at one other.
Eventually, Paul
Kossoff appeared, swigging from a bottle of Crème de Menthe. The bottle was
half empty and Koss made a strenuous effort to finish it during the set.
Together the band played three songs.[1] I was delighted to hear
him play live but I noticed a significant deterioration between his playing
during the sound check and the post beating, post liquor evening performance.
He had less than a year to live. Koss died on 19th March 1976. He
was 25 years old.
There are two stories out there giving a cause of death. The book Heavy Load claims “Unconfirmed reports have Kossoff picking up some pills before the all-night flight ‘off some dozy bird who was hanging around’.” No source for the information is given in the book.[2] Later, it presents this version:
“Paul’s death certificate read cerebral and pulmonary edema. Drugs didn’t appear to be in his system. Sandie, Paul’s girlfriend at the time, says drugs are what led up to the tragic conclusion that day but did not cause his death on the flight. ‘No one told us that you should not fly with a blood clot condition for about a year,” says Sandie. ‘And after his heart attack and the blood clot in his leg…I think the altitude moved the clot to his lungs’.”[3]
A second book, Free at Last, elaborates on the first claim. Bandmate Terry Wilson is quoted as saying,
“Paul was on his way out. He'd died earlier; his heart had stopped, about a year earlier in England when we were back there after the first record. Paul was in the hospital and they brought him back and told him if he ever did drugs again he wouldn't live.” Wilson goes on, “There were times when Paul had so many friends around who just wanted to comfort him. […] I walked into his room and he had a couple of his friends there that brought some barbiturates and some other stuff. I walked in and was so pissed at the girl who was there. Her name was Leslie I think, but went by the name of Dale. […] A day later we were on the plane going to New York to play Atlantic Records the new album when Koss died—from the very drugs Dale or Leslie or whatever her name was scored for him. It turned out he had gotten heroin, valium and Seconals from her.”[4]
I have participated in various fandoms ever
since that late 1971 musical fangirl awakening. Whether it was Led Zeppelin, or
Star Wars, or Harry Potter, I’ve long been immersed in fan culture and hung out
with the fans. The realization that a fellow fan may have killed a hero
of mine really frosted my cookies.
I understand a
fan’s dedication to the object of their fandom. The word is a shortened form of
‘fanatic’ after all. Anyone who has observed a weeklong argument on social
media over whether a Star Destroyer could defeat the USS Enterprise
knows that fandom is serious business, and anyone who has seen a young girl in
tears outside a concert hall because she got to touch the star’s hand knows
that emotions run sky high. I was 55 years old when my current crush answered a
question of mine on a fan forum, and I told everybody who would listen that
he’d written back to me. I didn’t wash my eyes for a week. I’m quite aware what
a fan will do to get close to a star.
Write what you know, they say. To get the bad taste out of my mouth, I wrote a short story about a tween fan who gives a gift to the member of the boy band she most admires but then has to watch helplessly as the gift puts him on a self-destructive path . I’m a science fiction writer, so the gift is not a drug, but a technology.
That story, “The Burn Out,” is featured in Fission #3 from
the British Science Fictions Association (BSFA). The online anthology is
available to BSFA members and the print
version can be obtained from Amazon right now.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_at_Leeds_(John_Martyn_album)
accessed October 15th,2023
[2]
Heavy Load: Free by David Clayton & Todd K. Smith 2nd Ed., 2002
p 248
[3]
Ibid, p 249
[4]
Free at Last: the story of Free and Bad Company by Steven Rosen, 2001 p 168-169
Coming soon:
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| Artwork for Fission #3 via BSFA website |
I am extremely pleased to let you know I have a piece in Emanations Zen (ed. Carter Kaplan) published just yesterday, October 3rd.
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| Emanations Zen Cover Artwork |
My story, "Cargo Cults," is an observation of an alternate reality, where South Sea Island "cargo cults" serve to bring bounty from aerial vehicles that use the landing strips. The story explores an aspect of cultural appropriation and its ramifications.
I have not had a chance to read the other stories in the anthology yet, but the list of authors is extremely promising.
You can buy Emanations Zen from Amazon today.
A reminder that you can read two of my stories, Sunless and Nine Diopters, at Gareth Jelley's remarkable IZ Digital, the webzine companion to Interzone magazine.
Full disclosure: It's actually "Nine Dioptres" but you're unlikely to die from reading half a dozen words spelled in British English.
Tomey placed his feet carefully on the network of life support tubing, grabbing at handholds as he moved from the cable side of the Rambler’s hull to the outward side. The ship slid upwards, cables screeching.
Soon, the ground vehicles were no longer visible. To the west, green veins of copper ore shot through the orange rock of the treeless Lono Hills. The mangled ground formed a circle near the foot of the funicular, the green, white and yellow squares of farms filled the horizon to the east, and to the south the garden-roofed skyscrapers of the city flourished like a jungle streaked with black crevasses. The cold, hard metal of a liquid oxygen pipe burned Tomey’s hands, and he switched his grip, cursing under his breath.
‘I can’t see that far,’ said Aminah, and bit her lip. Why admit that to the stranger? Suddenly overcome with self-pity, tears came to her eyes. Nuada waited until the black-robed figure was ready.
When Aminah spoke, it was with a sob: ‘I’m going blind, Nuada. Every day I see less and less!’
Nuada led her below. ‘Wait here. I can help you,’ she said, and got her bag. She took out her left eye and fitted a microeye into the socket. She peered into Aminah’s eyes, one after the other. Then she sat back, calculating something. ‘You aren’t going blind. It’s just myopia, which is easily corrected with lenses.’
‘I couldn’t wear a machine on my face,’ wailed Aminah.
Writing's not always straightforward. My story "Sunless," was recently published. Here's a case history in the hope it helps writers.
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.
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).
“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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
6-11-2006 Funicular Story https://peromyscus.blogspot.com/p/funicular-story-version-6-11-2006.html
06-26-2021 My Last Breath https://peromyscus.blogspot.com/p/my-last-breath-version-06-26-2021.html
My Last Breath 3 alternative endings https://peromyscus.blogspot.com/p/my-last-breath-intermediate-drafts.html
Lyrics to Hell-Bound Train, Downbound Train and Catfish
Blues
https://peromyscus.blogspot.com/p/lyrics-to-hell-bound-train-downbound.html#hellbound
https://peromyscus.blogspot.com/p/lyrics-to-hell-bound-train-downbound.html#downbound
https://peromyscus.blogspot.com/p/lyrics-to-hell-bound-train-downbound.html#catfish
Final, published version of Sunless May 2023 https://interzone.digital/sunless/
Nine Dioptres, IZ Digital, May 2023. https://interzone.digital/nine-dioptres/
