Wow

Right now I have 26 short stories under consideration at various markets. I think that's a personal all-time high mark. I'd have 28, except that two sold in January.

And I have several others that are fairly close to being able to go out.

I wonder if I could get up to 30 stories under consideration by the end of the month, or if I'll end up with more stories than suitable markets.

My Story Is Now Live

I've spent the last week wondering whether I had a sale or not, and just as I am about to query, I get a message that yes, they're ready to publish my story. Maybe I should've queried right after the message that looked like a server burp.

But the story is up now. It's The End of Her Line and it's at Every Day Fiction, which publishes a short-short of 1000 words or less every day of the year.

Do I Have a Sale?

Last night I got a really weird e-mail from an online market to which I'd submitted a story. A single line of text rather like code, which looked more like a server burp than a rejection.

Today I get onto their website, and they're definitely having problems. A bunch of pages return me messages that look more like SQL database errors. But I was able to get onto their submission tracking page, and it looks like they may have accepted the story.

So now I wait to see whether it's true or it was an error. I so hope it's for real, and doesn't evaporate on me like so many other sales in the past.

Like I Need Another

short story to write, that is. I just finished drafting "The Sound of One Child Crying" and was getting ready to make a major push on "A Brother's Love" when I come across a listing for an anthology of stories set in the Appalachians and dealing with magic. And now I'm thinking of how I could write a steampunk story, sort of along the lines of The Music Man but with a magician who thinks it's all flummery to better con the marks, but maybe there is some real magic in the world, whether supernatural or merely metaphorical.

At least the deadline on it isn't until June, and it looks like the editor isn't going to be making final decisions until sometime in July, so at least it's not like I've got to immediately plunge into it. So I can make a few notes and let it simmer.

But I'd really like to get back to work on Briar's Children, because I am really a natural novelist, and short stories don't come easy to me. Not to mention that novels are really where the money is.

So Much for That Plan

I thought that I would be able to do one last polishing pass through one of my Okeanos novels and then send it to a publisher. However, when I sent it to some people who hadn't read it before, the response was very negative, and they basically want it completely torn apart and redone -- and they don't like several of the fundamental premises of the world.

So it looks like I'm going to set it aside for a while and continue working on Briar's Children, in hopes that a simpler storyline in a less-complex world will have a better chance of making that critical and so-difficult first sale. Which of course means having to get it moving again, since I seem to have gotten stuck while I was at Archon.

All Is Grist for the Mill

I got into a lengthy and rather heated discussion on issues of race and privilege when I really should've been working on Children's Crusade, and as it rapidly went south, I realized that it's quite possible that some of these same patterns will come into play in the huge discussions after the Lankhidzist Revolution about the proper role of the various clones, especially those of Stalin's henchmen.

I can completely imagine Kolya Vornosky, faced with someone harping at him about the terrible crimes of Nikolai Yezhov and privilege derived from Yezhov's role in Stalin's crimes, firing back, "And what am I supposed to do about it?" And the other person becoming angry about his even asking, treating it as just this sort of affront, a presumtious demand based upon privilege, and assuming that he is acting in bad faith -- which is of course going to succeed only in getting his back up and ensuring that the discussion will devolve into an ugly confrontation that will resolve absolutely nothing and lead to even worse bad feelings.

The biggest question is whether this happens before or after his biggest and messiest political antic.

Do Two Wrongs Make a Right?

The more I delve into the history of the Soviet cloning program in the Lanakhidzist Revolution universe, the more my stomach turns. I'd known that they were using the geneset of disgraced secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov as their primary test bed for biomods, and that it often involved making clones and testing them to destruction, sometimes as embryos or fetuses, but also as born babies.

But now I discover that the lab in Stalingrad was also cranking out enormous numbers of baby Yezhov clones for Soviet chemical and biowarfare programs, once they had artificial uterine environments. They'd ship the "little hedgehogs" (yozhika, a play on "Yezhov,") in huge crates like day-old baby chicks -- except human babies don't have a yolk to sustain them for that day of travel, so the labs in Siberia would often find a quarter to a half of the airlifted shipment dead or dying. But they were just Yezhovs, so they were disposable.

I'm no apologist for Stalin's terror -- Nikolai Yezhov crossed a moral event horizon when he accepted Stalin's commission to be NKVD chief and ran the Terror meatgrinder at frantic speed. But I can't buy into the Asiatic principle that the crimes, however terrible, of one member of a family could stain everybody else -- not even clones, who share 100% of their Senior's genetic material. The Enlightenment principle that we are each individually responsible for our good and evil deeds, that there should be no corruption of blood (as the Founding Fathers thankfully wrote into the US Constitution) is too strongly written in my mind and heart, and I can't see all these clones of Yezhov as anything but innocent children being murdered.

Is it any wonder Kolya Voronsky is not quite completely sane -- growing up there in the Stalingrad lab, knowing full well that thousands of his clone-brothers are being made every year and shipped off to their deaths, that he is spared that fate only because Vladilen Voronsky's adoption of him severed the legal link with Yezhov?

All I can say is thank heaven that in our timeline cloning is not going to be developed as a gigantic out-of-control black project with Cold War fears or their War on Terror equivalent. We've had good, solid public discussions about the ethical issues and why we shouldn't be doing human cloning, even of great leaders, generals, inventors or whatever. It's possible that some rogue nation or sub-national actors might do human cloning once the technology for doing it with animals becomes sufficiently cheap and generally available, but hopefully we'll be able to catch them soon enough and will have the wisdom and compassion to deal humanely with their victims, just as we would a child conceived naturally through rape or any other sexual crime.

Legacy Code

In computer technology, legacy code is stuff left over from earlier generations -- sometimes from the earliest days of computer programming in the case of mainframes. However, even microcomputer operating systems such as Windows often have substantial amounts of legacy code. Usually it results from attempts to make sure that new versions of software remain backward-compatible with earlier hardware and software -- for instance, so that older versions of a program will still run on the new operating system. Other times it is simply the result of programmers carrying over old code unexamined, either out of laziness or more frequently the result of deadline pressure.

Because I've been working on the story of the Lanakhidzist Revolution since I was in Jr. High, I've got almost thirty years worth of layers upon layers of ideas. The earliest versions were quite crude and simplistic, with no real understanding or appreciation of the societies of which I was writing (for instance, I really didn't appreciate the difference between Georgians and Russians, and the scenes set in Gori had the characters having Russian names and eating typical Russian foods), and even in the late 80's when I was studying Russian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and had help from one of the professors, who read a lot of my manuscripts from that period, I still really didn't know how to use sources, or to weave details into the fabric of a story to bring it to life, so the writing was pretty bad.

Not to mention that a lot of the basic ideas still reflected a very youthful view of the world, one that hadn't been tempered with experience in the workplace. So now, as I'm working on Children's Crusade, my current version of the story of the Lanakhidzist Revolution, I'm constantly having to reconsider elements that I assumed would always be integral parts of the story. Should they remain, or is the legacy code a drag on the story that needs to go by the wayside?

For instance, I've corrected a lot of the mis-formed names that go back to the earliest layers of the story, figuring out what the proper forms of them should be (although in several places I've put visibly fake names in the place of the names of actual historical persons who are still living in our world and would obviously have a major role in that universe's fall of the Soviet Union too, such as Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev). But some of the relationships and the technologies that go back at least to the UIUC period now seem a little hard to support, at least not without some major changes in how they're presented.

Growing

On looking back at some old notes from a version of the Lanakhidzist Revolution I wrote in the 1980's, I realize how a number of characters who have turned out to be very important had their beginnings as bit characters whose names were tossed off rather casually.

Tikhon Chalkov was just a friend who helped Iosebi Lanakhidze at a key point in one of the early versions of Children's Crusade. There was never any hint of his being unusual in any way, and he never really held any major postings. But when I returned to the story in 2001, he turns out to be an unusually small, fine-boned man -- and as I realized that the Soviet cloning project was far larger than just a few clones of Stalin, I realized who he almost had to be, even if his name didn't follow the usual pattern in the Soviet cloning program of having the same forename as the original. And now he's not only the Minister of Security, but he's also firmly within Iosebi Lanakhidze's inner circle and a major POV character who effects major changes.

In the novel that would become The Steel Breeds True, Sergei Gerasimov was originally the least important of the three brothers, almost an afterthought who hung around on the edges but didn't take part in any of the major action. But when I returned to the novel in 2001, I realized that his name had to be significant, rather than just a cool Russian name -- and I finally knew why he and his brothers had fled the Soviet Union. Suddenly he came to the fore, becoming one of the most important characters in the novel, not to mention a critical link with the Lanakhidzist inner circle, once he recovered his other-memories and accepted his identity.

Amanda Lordsley-Starcastle underwent an even more extensive transformation between a couple of early versions of The Steel Breeds True. In the earliest version in which she appears, she is just "the professor's wife," with little or nothing in the way of characterization beyond being named Amanda. But as the story continued unfolding, I suddenly discovered she was a poet and that she wore her hair in an unusual triple braid from a common root. And then she got to be the star of her own side-story, "She's Leaving Home" (yes, the title is taken from the song by the Beatles) -- although some of the backstory in the current version of The Steel Breeds True is difficult to square with details in it (in particular, there is no mention of Arthur Lordsley's alcoholism, which plays an extensive role in the current versions of both The Steel Breeds True and The Ballad of Katie Hart).

Surprise

Isn't it interesting when a character finally comes clean and tells you the truth about something?

I'd been under the impression that Tisha Chalkov got his leg injury in the line of duty, in some kind of gunfight with a CIA agent. Yet it never quite squared with his having been an interrogator from the beginning of his KGB career.

Imagine my surprise when today he finally owned up to it being the result of an ordinary civilian accident. He was going to an outlying KGB office to pick up some papers needed at Lubyanka when the trolley car on which he was riding was struck by a truck driven by a drunk. Apparently he never talked about it, and when he came into prominence during the Lanakhidzist Revolution, someone fabricated a fanciful account of spycraft for an article.

Just a Slight Shift in Perspective

I'd been stuck on a meeting scene in Chapter 7 of The Ballad of Katie Hart for ages. When I tried to move it forward, the dialog fell so flat that even the character in question commented upon the leadenness of his words.

And then I realized that the whole first part of it was solitary introspection on his part, which meant that there was no really good way to switch gears to interaction -- and it was made even worse by the first interaction being a formal address to the group as a whole, rather than interaction with any one individual.

Finally today I had a chance to sit down and rework it. After several false starts, I finally got a good beginning conversation going, and from then it was almost astonishingly easy to keep things moving forward. It also helped to have another character in the meeting scene burst out with a question, so that everyone started chiming in instead of politely waiting for the meeting leader to speak.

It's not perfect, and I need to see how it dovetails with another scene. But at least I think I finally have something I can work with.

At Least this Time I Caught It Early

Recently I've been working on Children's Crusade again, and I had decided to jump ahead to the second book for working while standing in line, etc. However, I'd become stuck on the scene in which Grigory Semyonov is meeting with the Politburo, discussing the significance of the events at the end of the first book. I just couldn't seem to find a way to get it moving beyond the introductory paragraphs.

Today while I was standing in line at the grocery store, I realized that yet again I'd made the critical error of starting the scene with the principal character in isolated introspection, thinking about the situation but not talking to anyone -- and then I couldn't find a suitable bridge to get someone else into the scene with whom he could talk.

So there was nothing to do but throw the entire scene away and start afresh with Semyonov talking with his long-term assistant, Anton Dumar, about the things he'd been thinking about privately in the original version. We'll see if I can get it to go anywhere.

The Black Box

A few days ago, after having several repetitive dreams dealing with someone I knew at the University of Illinois, I decided to pull out The Ballad of Katie Hart and get back to work on it. It had stalled out in the seventh chapter and I'd never been able to get it going again.

And as I was thinking about the scene in which Sergei Gerasimov's clone-brother is talking with two of the Stalin clones and one makes a scathing remark about just what Katie sees in Ferdinand Yabur, and I realized that I had a major logic hole. Never once have I established what exactly had led to Katie becoming so emotionally obsessed with a man who was actively disliked by at least one major POV character, and who was despised by several others because of his obliviousness to the strife his wife was sowing.

Once I saw that logic hole, I also realized that the characters of both Ferdinand and Marie Yabur were effectively black boxes. Their inner lives were completely opaque to the reader, with no evidence of their motivations except those attributed to them by POV characters who had absolutely no reason to think well of them.

I think at least part of the problem is that the novel had its beginnings as a roman a clef, and Marie Yabur in particular was based upon someone I regarded as an implacable enemy. But to make it work, I somehow have to get inside the headspace of these two characters and find a way to show what is making them go.

Reflections

In the last month I've done very little fiction writing, instead concentrating on writing reviews of various science fiction and fantasy books. Rather than writing brief capsule reviews intended primarily to guide people's buying decisions, I've sought to delve deeper into the works, comparing and contrasting them, examining them in terms of literary antecedents. And I'm wondering how this work will help me when I do return once again to my various worlds. For after all I'm not abandoning my writing, simply allowing these fields of endeavor to lie fallow for a while, in hopes that I can return to them with renewed vigor.

Lying Fallow

Recently I've been getting little or no progress on my writing. It seems as though my imagination has stalled, and I just can't seem to get the grasp on my story worlds any more.

I'm thinking that at least part of it is the simple fact that most of my creative energy is going to my Web design projects, getting my personal webpage and my book review site, The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf, up and running again. There just isn't any energy left over.

However, it may not mean that the process of story has stopped altogether, even if words aren't coming out. I've often found that these periods are rather like having a field lay fallow -- there's still stuff developing, just under the surface.

I just hope that it won't suddenly leap back up and grab me while I'm still busy with Web projects. This spring I had a character suddenly spring up and demand to have his story told, right while I was still struggling to get an enormous mass of backlogged projects cleared and had no time to spare.

Parallels

As I'm working on Steam Heat, the story of the 708 Rebellion in Codyland, I'm noticing just how many parallels there are between it and the story of the young King Rene XIV of the Swamp Kingdom and his battles with his uncle Sebastien, who usurped the Cypress Throne.

In particular, I was fiddling with the question of just how important Archbishop Coquinael, the papal nuncio to Codyland at the time, was in the 708 Rebellion. Sidor, nuncio to the Swamp Kingdom, is a major figure in the novel of Rene and Sebastien, but I really didn't know how much Coquinael did in the 708 Rebellion, or if he was even nuncio yet. I just knew that by Where the Madwinds Blow, the planned sequel to Steam Heat, he and Ligo Rafferty do not get along well, but have to work together professionally.

However, I'm beginning to think that I will be finding out a lot more of him as I go along.

Intrusions and Discursions

Over the Labor Day weekend I was making really good progress on Children's Crusade, outlining the scenes in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 that were holding me back. I was really looking forward to getting back home and developing them more fully.

And then, early in the morning of Labor Day, images started coming in from another of my worlds, one that's been in the back of my mind in various forms since I was in grade school but never seemed to be the sort of thing that would have any commercial potential. After all, it was a world so weird, so disturbing that especially when I was a kid I was very concerned that telling anybody about it (or even writing it down) would be apt to upset them so severely that they'd think I needed some serious mental help.

Of course now I've seen some horror and some cyberpunk that goes a lot further, so it's possible that trying to write it down and get it published wouldn't be a ticket to a little padded room where the nice people in white coats are here to help me. But it's still much more of a longshot world, not exactly the sort of thing that's likely to go on the first time out, from an unknown writer.

But it simply wouldn't let me go, so there was nothing to do but jot down the ideas in hopes of getting them out of my head. And after a week of this, I finally decided it had gone on long enough and it was time to get back to work on Children's Crusade. Except when I sit down to write, the images that seemed just ready to pour out now are dribbling out only reluctantly, and what does come out seems insipid and lifeless.

So I'm now working on a short story in the other universe, which is named for its rulers, the Madrians. "Broken Bird" is something of a side story, and we don't really see the transformation technology that could really disturb readers, but I'm having some real trouble figuring out where it's going. I've got the first part done easily enough, but now that I've gotten Addie introduced to Lord Rathgan and his daughter Venna, to whom she is to be a boon companion, I have no idea where it goes.

Of course it would help if I had some time to just throw ideas around and see how they form up. But it seems like time is always short, and there are far too many things to do with what little I have.

Swiss Cheese

That is how my current project is feeling like -- riddled with holes.

Recently I had gone back to a project near and dear to my heart: Children's Crusade, the novel of the Lanakhidzist Revolution. It's a project that traces its history back to when I was in junior high, back in the days when the very idea that the Soviet Union could collapse internally was ridiculed as fantastical. Over the years I'd made various stabs at telling the story of of how Stalin's attempt to perpetuate himself and his inner circle for all time through cloning turned awry when the Stalin clone instead replicated his rebel youth. They were for the most part limited by the lack of perspective and general world-knowledge that is part and parcel of youth, particularly youth in a rural community in which library resources were scant at best, and attempting to obtain better ones through inter-library loan would have meant having to explain to disapproving adults why I should need such specialized materials on a subject regarded as suspect at best.

In 2003 I had actually begun a reasonably mature version of it, but events forced me to set it aside indefinitely after the first three chapters and half of a fourth, and the impetus was lost. But in these past few weeks, a friend had suggested that it might be one project that would actually have a reasonable chance of attracting the attention of an agent, and that I should resume work on it. So I got it back out and dusted it off again, and found that perhaps it wasn't quite as hopeless as I had thought.

However, as I got into Chapter 5, I began to lose momentum as I came upon scenes for which I had only the briefest of outlines. Although sometimes even a few sentences will evoke the entire scene such that I need only set fingers to keyboard and type, this was not the case. Hoping to keep moving forward, I decided to skip over the difficult scenes and move on to Chapter 6, and for a while I did get some fair movement. But I had to set it aside over the weekend in order to finish some articles on a deadline, and when I returned to it on Monday, I found that the point at which I had stopped did not lend itself to further forward motion.

Frustrated, I decided to jump forward to the next major scene, which takes the action to Moscow and the decision by the head of the KGB that Andropov and his fellows are not responding adequately to the disturbances in the Caucasus. However, when I actually started writing it, instead of unfolding properly it came out in awkward jerks, without the flow of supporting information that is really needed.

And then I realized that one of the biggest problems is that, since I have not written all of Chapter 5 yet, I do not really know exactly what information has been presented about KGB General Semyonov yet.

So it appears that it is going to be essential for me to go back to Chapter 5 and slowly force my way through each of those scenes, developing all the necessary information. Only then will I be able to go forward to the scenes that build upon it and not feel like the story is riddled with holes.

Reading from the Writer's Perspective

One of the more interesting things about being a writer is how it affects the way you read. Even when you're reading someone else's writing, there's always the tendency to look at the more technical aspects of the work.

This is particularly true if you have had the opportunity to read draft versions of a work. The writing community is a rather small one, and we frequently read one another's works in progress. For instance, I originally read Sherwood Smith's latest novel, A Stranger to Command, in draft form in the Athanarel community on LiveJournal. As a result, I kept noticing differences between the finished novel and the versions I had read.

For instance, in at least one version there was some earlier material in the beginning, dealing with Vidanric's parents observing him fencing and discussing the state of the kingdom of Remalna. However, that appears to have vanished altogether in the final version, which begins with the abrupt introduction of the rather lost young Vidanric at the Marloven war academy. Although there is a certain loss of background, the reader now gets to share Vidanric's sense of being out of place, even a fish out of water, which in many ways increases the sense of identification with him.

Beginnings are always the trickiest part of stories, because the writer must introduce the reader quickly enough to engage their interest and not bore them, but not so quickly as to overwhelm them and thus lose them.

Father of the Man

The child is the father of the man, the old saying goes. And it's always interesting to see familiar characters when they were younger than I've been accustomed to seeing them.

While I was messing around coming up with a new idea for next year for an annual anthology, I hit on a story of Robert Cardinal Dautery's youth. Probably one of the most notorious Heirs to Cody thanks to his extensive Outfit connections and the questions about his becoming Heir to Cody, he loomed large over the story of Julian Falconskirk and the Rebinding of the Isolated Worlds. But even in Anne's stories, in which he's still living, he's always a distant figure.

And now I'm outlining the story of his episcopal consecration, and how it became entangled with the murder of his mother in an attempt on his father's life that went terribly wrong (his father was consigliere to the Boss of Codyland, and thus a legitimate target for a rubout, but the code of honor prohibited the deliberate targeting of family members). And now I can see some of the family politics that have tangled and twisted his life, including an elopement that will have interesting consequences for Anne a generation later.

Now for the time to actually write all this stuff. Of course it would be easier to justify taking the time if someone out there would actually take some interest in my writing and buy some of it.