The Length Problem

After getting a personalized rejection on "The Angry Astronaut Affair" (the first three were form rejects), I'm thinking that I need to give it a serious rewrite to expand it. When I originally wrote it, I was aiming it at a contest with a 4000-word length limit. In order to make it fit, I had to leave out several elements that I really wanted to get in, because I could tell that nips and tucks in the wording wouldn't bring it back down if I added those things.

However, on retrospect, I think that letting them fall by the wayside actually hurt the story more than I realized. Yes, people do miss them, even if they don't know what those specific things were supposed to be. There's still a gap that leaves the reader less than satisfied.

And I'm thinking that I really need more than one POV. Reggie Waite's a difficult character, and in this story he really comes off as a jerk, which is probably making it difficult for him to be the story's protagonist. But if he could be seen through other eyes, so that the reader gets more of a sense of his complexity, it might get past the reader sympathy problem. The Jerkass Hero is a recognized trope, after all, and it's common enough that it obviously does work.

And sometimes a story really does need to be allowed to find its own length, instead of being forcibly crushed down to an arbitrary length.

Well, Drat

I just got a rejection from an anthology I'd really hoped I'd have a chance to get into. It looks like he got a lot of really good stories, to the point that it was really hard to pick between them.

Now I've got yet another story I'm going to need to send through the rounds in hopes of finding someplace it'll stay at. Which is getting harder as I have more and more stories circulating, because most markets don't want you to send more than one at a time. When you've got five or six stories, it's fairly easy to keep them all out at any given time. When you've got thirty or forty, it gets a lot more challenging.

Details

I swear, some readers feel positively threatened by details. If they don't see an immediate purpose for the detail, it makes them anxious, like they need to take notes or they're going to have a quiz on them. They can't just let the details be part of the flavor of the story.

I wonder if some of them have had one of those nasty teachers who thought the best way of testing whether students actually read the story is to give quizzes on the minute trivial details of the story -- the sort that you're apt to read over if you're just reading normally, to absorb the gist of the story rather than to search for details you may be quizzed on.

Just Lovely

As I'm trying to hash out the problem with "The Man I Love Is on the Moon," I'm becoming increasingly convinced that I'm going to have to completely tear out the existing beginning and redo it from scratch. I guess it's better that it's just three handwritten pages I need to toss. It could be 300 double-spaced MS pages on the computer, as happened to one writer I know.

And worse, I think I really need to give more thought to several of the characters before I can really push the story forward. Which means it may need some back-burner time to let the subconscious mind work on it.

At least that will give me some time to focus on getting "The Shadow of a Dead God" ready to send to its intended market.

The Proto-Draft

Sometimes it's called scaffolding. It's that stuff that you've got to write to make part of a story clear in your own head, but doesn't work as finished story. Stuff dealing with the background of character relationships, or (in speculative genres) the hows and whys of the technology, magic or creepy stuff that's essential to making the story work.

In a novel, it may be possible to have an infodump work, especially in relatively hard sf. A lot of readers of Heinlein, Weber, Kratman, etc. actually enjoy those solid blocks of information about the hows and whys of the science, technology and political systems that make the world work. It makes the imagined world read more real for them.

But that's not true for all readers -- I know some readers who absolutely will not read some of my favorite authors because of their information-feed techniques. And a short story won't have room for all of that information, so you have to very carefully choose what's the absolutely essential parts that must be explicitly presented to the reader and find ways to salt them into the story.

As I'm working on "The Man I Love Is on the Moon," I'm running into that problem -- I've just written a lengthy passage in which the protagonist is reflecting upon how the current situation makes her think of a similar space disaster when she was a kid. It's important stuff, both the backstory (which is so critical to how Kitty Strowger became who and what she is) and the current events on the world scene. But it's just her telling the reader all this information directly (since it's written in first person), and I'm not sure that it works as a short story. I've seen plenty of first-person novels that stop the action so the protagonist can directly address the reader and tell about how he or she became interested in a line of work, or suchlike (the one I'm currently reading, Travis S. Taylor's Warp Speed, does, and it really gives you a feeling of this down-home sort of guy sitting there and telling you the story over a couple of beers). But when you've got only a few thousand words, can you spare the room for recollections?

I'm hoping that, as I get a completed text, I'll be able to see how to get the critical information woven into character interactions so it isn't just a big lump of the protagonist telling the reader Important Stuff.

Genre Expectations and the Problem of the Cross-Genre Story

Recently I started writing a short story for a horror fiction contest. I decided to draw upon the image of a faceless colossus in an ancient desert from the list of HP Lovecraft's unused ideas in A Commonplace Book of the Weird: The Untold Stories of H.P. Lovecraft. To make my story distinctive from the one in that book, I decided not to set it on any earthly desert, but on the Moon.

But as I'm writing my story of my astronaut hero's desperate trek across the lunar regolith, heading toward his encounter with the ancient and menacing colossus, I realize that this story is reading more and more like hard science fiction rather than cosmic horror. But I really don't see any way around having the technical details of the problem at the mining outpost, the operation of the hopper he's supposed to be taking to get help from a larger settlement, or how he jerry-rigs parts of it with an old Apollo lunar rover -- it's essential to the growing sense of menace to understand why he's in deeper and deeper trouble, and I don't know how many horror readers are familiar enough with issues of astronautics to intuit how dangerous the lunar surface is, even for someone with equipment half a century more advanced than what the Apollo astronauts took to them, without it being explicitly laid out for them.

At the same time, I'm constantly aware that if it doesn't read like horror, a lot of the gatekeepers are apt to assume that someone sent a straight-up hard-sf story to them by mistake, or without bothering to read the guidelines, and never even get to the point where the protagonist encounters the terrible faceless colossus and all its existence implies, or the terrible effect it has upon his mind.

Of course at least part of this problem could be the problem of being a beginner. When one has established a reputation in the business, there's an implicit trust that one knows what one is doing, that just isn't there for a beginner. The established figure is assumed to know what he or she is about, and is trusted until it becomes clear the story is simply not suitable. By contrast, the beginner, or relative beginner, has to prove up front that yes, he or she is worth being given the time of day.

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.