Great Mother, Great Father - by William Saxton

Hurricane Katrina and the Weltangschauung

On Monday, August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The destruction was horrendous.

All that week, every news program focused on relief efforts. What was wrong? Was the government doing enough? But people weren't content merely to watch TV talking heads report; they wanted to help. Universities nationwide offered free tuition to displaced students. It seemed every web site I saw had at least one link: "Click here to help Katrina victims!" By Thursday the general discussion group at Hatrack (sister site to this one in a way -- they're both Orson Scott Card's contributions) had three threads sharing places to donate.

Then, Sunday, the New York Times published an editorial by famous novelist Anne Rice, decrying America's indifference to the suffering. "During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us 'Sin City,' and turned your backs."

The world she described certainly wasn't one I'd been seeing. What kind of world would it be, if her perception were accurate? (This question led directly to my story "Great Mother, Great Father," in which people truly do turn their backs on the weak and the suffering, and are proud of it.)

Imagine a world in which the nation could look at a city in terrible trouble, shrug, and say, "Why should I care?" As John Lennon would say, it isn't hard to do. We all, I believe, have selective areas of compassion and disregard: abortion, the death penalty, or the suffering of animals. But these days, most of us at least pretend to care when an innocent and articulate adult is in jeopardy of life or limb. (Hypocritical, sometimes, but hypocrisy isn't the worst thing: At least it shows you have standards.)

It didn't have to be this way. Consider the Maya. In their religion, one of the marks of wisdom was cultivating indifference to the suffering of others (and, to be fair, to one's own). The ancient Maya might well have shrugged at reports of hurricane-caused deprivation. When you've stood by and watched people being ritually mutilated, it shouldn't be a problem to hear that people are at risk of thirst or rioting.

Consider also the imperial Japanese. Brutality to the weak was not simply human failing; it was custom. If their treatment of Chinese forced laborers is any indication, they wouldn't have seen a point in getting clean water to the Astrodome.

Finally, consider the Nazis. They did support benevolence to their own kind (that is, ethnic Germans), but cultivated brutality toward others as a virtue. They would have been happy to have Katrina save them the trouble of killing non-Aryans.

Rice's op-ed to the contrary, our civilization looks good by comparison. Admittedly people often don't live up to their beliefs. Even if your world view says "love all mankind," you still might ignore the suffering of others, or even inflict it, as history has shown. But it could be worse: our society could urge us to stifle our compassion, to instead stick it to the loser and torture the helpless. Too farfetched? Remember the Vikings. For that matter, remember fourth grade.

Did we just luck out?

In a way, if you believe in luck. The view of right and wrong that has spread itself over most of the world came from a tiny corner of the Middle East. There, the only God whose opinion mattered kept telling his people to give to the poor and help the helpless. By our standards, the ancient Israelites were brutal -- but our standards came from their standards. Their moral competition came not from Mother Teresa or Up With People, but from the Canaanites, who burned their babies for the god Moloch. We can condemn Abraham and God in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac for even considering human sacrifice, but the big news then was that you could be totally devoted to your god and still not murder your family. I consider this progress.

We've made more progress since, and a good thing. But we made it by expanding and deepening this standard of humane treatment. Good thing we didn't expand and deepen the Assyrian view of the world. Then we wouldn't be angry about the Spanish Inquisition and witch-burning; we'd wonder why it had to stop just when it was getting good.

But in another sense, our current state of affairs wasn't luck at all. It's a fair bet that if a society condones some horrific practice (cannibalism, say, or sex with children), that society is a small tribe in a remote area. Something about such practices cause the societies that promote them not to prosper enough to spread themselves. By contrast, the world views that spread themselves and their societies the farthest have this in common: they accept the dignity of the individual. When people say, "All religions teach pretty much the same thing, so if we just adhered to that core..." I always want to say, "All the religions we think about today, you mean." There have been plenty of others.

We shouldn't be complacent: horrible world views may die out, but it's not inevitable and not instantaneous. Human sacrifice lasted for a long time. Slavery lasted millennia after that. If Hitler had gotten the bomb, today mercy to strangers might be merely a quaint custom in areas the Nazis hadn't gotten around to colonizing yet.

So let's be grateful to the giants whose shoulders we stand on, and determine to be giants ourselves. Somebody has to. We might have another hurricane.

The Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race - by Cat Rambo

As part of my free-lancing existence, I write the occasional encyclopedia article, with topics that have included Technology and Science in the 80s, Lydia Pinkham, modern Christian philosophy, poetry, video games, Thenmuli Rajaratnaam, and Dean R. Koontz. I love the grab-bag quality of these assignments – the press sends me a huge list, I send back a much shorter list of perhaps a dozen of the things I'd be interested in writing about, and then I get assigned one or two.

No matter what I end up writing about, it's a chance to do some fine-tuned research of the kind that uncovers story ideas. Many of the articles focus on a period of history that fascinates me: late nineteenth century America. I love the era as a font to draw story ideas from – it's the collision of a number of social movements, including abolition, women's suffrage, spiritualism, free love, temperance – the list goes on and on. And characters abound there, including Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Elizabeth Blackwell, Lucretia Mott, Sarah and Angelina Grimke. I've written several stories so far written in a fantasy-influenced version of that period and I have a rough idea for an alternative history novel centering on the figures of Victoria Woodhull and Lucy Stone somewhere down the line, in which Barnum may play a part as well.

I discovered Jumbo as the result of one such assignment, for an encyclopedia of historical events: a brief essay on the acquisition of the Ringling Brothers Circus by Barnum & Bailey. The more I researched circus history, the more interesting the stories became, until one in particular pushed at me to become fiction as well. The majority of the details are modeled from the oddities of real life history: Jumbo's end is true to life, as well as the details of what happened afterward. Barnum's telegram is taken in its entirety from one he sent, and Matthew Scott did raise the elephant from the sickly infant he rescued from a Parisian zoo. The original title was taken from Barnum's billing for Jumbo: "the towering monarch of his race, whose like the world will never see again," which Edmund made me cut in half.

Feelings about the rights of circus animals cover a wide range, and I tend to fall on the liberal side of the fence, but here I've presented Jumbo as one of the characters because the story is primarily his. At the time I wrote it, I didn't think that writing from an elephant's pov was particularly daring – I'd just seen a friend's story from the pov of an intelligent weapon published and received well. I make no pretense of knowing how an elephant thinks, but research for the elephant part included Temple Grandin's ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION and THE PIG THAT SANG TO THE MOON by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Some readers who've seen my work elsewhere may remember the picture painting elephant, Khwaam, in "Foam on the Water" – there will undoubtedly be more elephants in works to come, and I'm hoping to see another Barnum-related piece or two as well.

A SPEAR THROUGH THE HEART - By Cherith Baldry

The story takes place in an alternate history that I’ve used elsewhere. In 1511, Henry VIII of England and his wife Katherine of Aragon had a son, also named Henry, who died when he was only a few weeks old. I have tried to imagine what would have happened if this child had lived to grow up and succeed his father. With the succession secure, Henry would have had no need of a divorce; there would have been no break with the Roman Catholic Church. England – and later Britain – would have remained politically and culturally much closer to Europe. However, as the story indicates, some things would have remained the same…

The first version of this story focused much more on the relationship between Crispin and Lucas. I’d written about half of it, and was finding it heavy going, when my computer’s hard disc crashed. This story and one other – which had already been accepted for publication – were the only items not backed up. Clearly Version One was never meant to see the light of day. By the time I stopped complaining and settled down to write Version Two, I’d seen ways of opening up the story so that it took a much wider view of what might have been taking place in seventeenth century Oxford.

The story touches on several areas that I find interesting: history, art, alchemy and theology. The Oxford setting is close to my heart as I studied there, and important events in my life took place there. Cardinal College was the original name of Christ Church, founded by Cardinal Wolsey, who fell from power because of his failure to arrange Henry’s divorce. In this time-line Wolsey presumably retained his office and saw his college project to completion; I’ve assumed, however, that the college would have developed in a similar way and I’ve retained the bell, Old Tom, which hangs in the gatehouse and still rings 101 times each night to call each individual scholar home.

My main difficulty in writing Version Two was structural: where to begin, how to guide the reader through the various preliminaries – Crispin’s meeting with Stanford, his commission, his discovery of Stanford’s alchemy and meeting with Lucas – which had to be established before getting down to business with the Grand Inquisitor and the demon. The solution I came up with was to use the painting of the altarpiece as an introduction to the story and as punctuation throughout until the two time-lines come together at the death of Fr Alfonso. That enabled me to introduce danger at the very beginning and – I hope – make the reader curious about the reason for Stanford’s trial and its outcome.

The other thing I hoped to do as I wrote the story was to leave room for ambiguity. Is Lucas a demon, intent on destroying the good wherever he finds it? Did Crispin murder Fr Alfonso with his hatred channelled through the painting? Or was the death coincidental, no more than might be expected when an old man is placed under a lot of stress? Is Crispin a rather unstable young man with a vivid imagination? I’d like readers to make up their own minds.

When I wrote A Spear through the Heart I never intended it to have a sequel. But just recently I’ve started to wonder what Crispin was doing, starving in a garret in Oxford. He must have studied in the studio of an established artist, so presumably he left or was thrown out. Why? I have a few ideas, which I’m currently playing with and allowing to ‘compost’. Maybe some time they will emerge as another story.

The Price of Love - by Alan Schoolcraft

Edmund asked me to write a few words, an essay of sorts to let IGMS readers know what was going on in my head as I wrote The Price of Love, where I got my ideas, inspiration from… and I immediately panicked. Write about myself? Where I get my ideas? Heck, if I knew that, I’d set up a pail or some other large vessel to catch the steady drip-drip of ideas, and never turn a wrench at my day job again.

The genesis of this story is actually two stories that merged into one. One half came in the late summer of 2005. I had just finished what I hoped was the final rewrite of my second novel, Shifters, and I looked for a way to not lose my writing “steam.” I had always struggled with short stories, because my brain works so quickly when I get a new idea, that before I ever put pen to paper the little acorn has blossomed into the mighty oak of a novel.

I had just read a collection of science fiction short stories that I’d picked up at a local Dollar General for… yeah; you got me… a buck. It had some interesting things in it, by some famous authors, and some I’d never heard of. The theme of the collection though, is what inspired me to pick it up; fairy tales had inspired all of the stories.

What a marvelous idea, I thought. Surely, after getting an idea of how these writers did it, I could find a way to craft a decent short story. And since none of the stories contained within directly referenced Pinocchio, I would try my literary hand at reconfiguring that tale.

The other part of the story began not quite two years before, when I discovered that despite all my best intentions and better judgment, I had fallen in love with a woman (and she with me) whom I had been friends with for several months. Her situation at home closely paralleled that of Valerie Hinson in my story, and the relationship between her and I closely paralleled that of Valerie and Alvin. Unlike stories though, real life is much more complicated; there’s no author to magically whip up a deus ex machina to make everything okay and bring about a happy ending.

As we drew closer to what we both knew would be the logical parting of ways, I found I needed some kind of catharsis, some way convince my heart that level heads knew best, this time.

These two unrelated situations, coupled with that old writer’s maxim “Write what you know” collided like a supernova in my head. I worked through the loss of my best friend by trying to capture the spirit of what we had in this tale of becoming human, learning to live, to love, and learning what the true worth of love is. That it’s not always knowing when to hold on, but when to let go.

Night of The Falling Stars - by Steven Savile

It's never easy to talk about the genesis of an idea - especially  

when you are working toward creating something of *scope* that  

resonates with the reader while at the same time entertaining...  

because that is what it is all about, after all. Forget longevity and  

fame and all the rest, your reader chooses to lay down cash they  

could have spent on beer or cigarettes, movies, a nice chair or a  

latte down at the coffee shop, in other words anything that eats  

disposable income. They make that choice, your words over some other  

form of enjoyment, so it strikes me you owe it to them to make those  

words entertaining.

        Okay, rant over.

        So, about eighteen months ago I was on a nine hour drive back 

from a convention knowing I needed to come up with an original back- 

ground for this fantasy novel I wanted to write. I always thought it would  

be interesting to look at fantasy land where the hero hadn't crossed  

over in time to save the day - where he had refused the call to  

action and instead stayed home to grow old. What would have happened  

then to this fabled land of elves and dwarves and pretty maids?  

Nothing good, that's for sure... so that was the starting point, a  

world gone to hell because it's chosen one decided it wasn't worth  

the effort of saving them. Lee and I (my co-editor on Elemental for  

Tor) back and forthed ideas, having a blast simply creating. That's  

one of the drawbacks of doing stuff like Dr Who and Warhammer and all  

these other IPs, you get to exercise your writing muscles but your  

creativity ones begin to fester. The drive disappeared in a flurry of  

world building and by the end of it we'd essentially mapped out an  

entire world, elements of its past and future, and of the fall.

        Then like all good ideas it got to sit on a shelf for the best part  

of a year, building into something more.

        I wrote the first Thera story back in April, for Solaris' Book  

of Fantasy (The Song Her Heart Sang - It's a love story) and then a  

linked one for Meadowhawk Press' Touched By Wonder. When Ed asked 

me to do something for IMGS I knew I wanted to do something in Thera,  

giving one of the legends some life. Most stories tend to be written  

in coffee shops, this one was written on the plane to Croatia, in  

Dubrovnik and on a balcony in Markashka during a hurricane. Little  

bits of Bosnia (Mostar) and Dubrovnik snuck into the story in the  

architecture - which is always something I find difficult to do - I  

tend to just want to say it's a house, it's a place, it's a big shiny  

ball... and leave it at that, but surrounded by so many amazing  

constructs I knew I had to do the visual aspect justice this time.

        Late next year there's a mosaic novel coming out, The Machineries 

of Silence (Bad Moon Books) which will piece together more of the  

legends of Thera while I work on the first novel.

        All that remains is to thank Ed for his work on the piece, and my 

co-pilot on that long drive without whom the world would cease to be.

How Peacefully The Desert Sleeps - by Brad Beaulieu

When I’m writing a story, especially one set in an alternate world, I try to spend a good deal of time in determining the lay of the land: the cultures in play, their histories, their attitudes toward one another. This helps me to focus on what I really want to write about: the characters. In other words, I wasn’t so interested in exploring the conflict between the two peoples as I was individuals within the scope of that larger conflict. Well, wait... That’s not completely accurate. I like to create a world in which there is conflict present, and then I like focusing on characters so that you see how individuals can affect the society at large, and vice versa.

Many of my stories are written with the intention of capturing the flavor of a certain era while adding a twist of some sort, and this is how Desert truly began. I chose the milieu first and played with it until I had the speculative elements that felt right to me. The flavor in “How Peacefully the Desert Sleeps” is, of course, life along the American Frontier. I have strong interest in the Native American life and the way in which it was tragically altered by the introduction of the frontiersmen and their irrepressible thirst for land. Like in American history, the natives in Desert are being pushed ever harder by the pioneers, but they have a weapon the Native Americans did not: the dejda. The tribesmen, over the centuries, had used the dejda as little more than a domesticated animal, largely unaware of its ability to gain consciousness. Without them, the tribesman would have already gone the way of the Native Americans and eventually succumbed to the pressure of the pioneers, but the beetles gave them a distinct advantage that allowed them to create a stalemate along the frontier.

Kallie’s character was the first one that came to me, and she came fairly easily. I liked the notion of taking someone from the more powerful society, the settlers, and placing them in a situation where they were almost completely dependent upon the tribesmen’s generosity. Once I realized that the dejda provided not only protection but also the powers of healing, Kallie’s ailment came soon after, and her character started to form more fully from there.

I had known from the start that Kallie would be the main character, and that she would be the catalyst that would help propel the dejda into consciousness. What I didn’t know was what would happen when this came to pass. I had thought that the Ohokwa Queen, Wattoha, would be the primary foil to Kallie. But as the story unfolded Nilawi demanded more and more attention. Eventually Nilawi and Kallie became two polar opposites. Nilawi came to represent the status quo, the passing of the torch from mother to daughter with the dejda in the same role as they’ve always been, while Kallie represented a new and terrible possibility.

Paheka, much like Nilawi, demanded more page time as the story played itself out. At first, she was simply a crazy old medicine woman, but I realized later that she was acting as an extension of the old dejda queen. She mutated from a character who provided flavor to the primary catalyst for change in the story: the voice, essentially, of the dejda as they struggled to make sense of their expanding awareness that Kallie had triggered within them.

Some stories are gift stories--they come almost fully formed, and you hardly have to work at making them sing. Desert was not such a story. I had to remold it several times to get it into shape, but I’m quite proud of the results. And I didn’t do it alone, either; I would be remiss if I didn’t send my heartfelt thanks to Orson Scott Card and Edmund Schubert for helping to identify its weaknesses so that I could file away the burrs.

Bradley P. Beaulieu

Racine, WI

September, 2007

Organic Wedding Cake Stylists

I have seen a lot of things while working on IGMS for the last fifteen months. I've seen good stories and bad ones, great stories and really insane ones. And don't even get me started on the stuff I see at the cons. But you know what? As much of a reputation at the sf/fantasy community (and especially its writers) has for being a little wacky, they really don't hold a candle to some of what I see in the business world.

Recently I stopped working as executive editor of the regional business magazine that had driven me so nuts over the last year and started working as managing editor of a new national women's business magazine. It was a small step backwards in the title department, but a monumental step forward in the paycheck department, so it was not a tough decision.

It's a new magazine, so I put an ad on Craig's List looking for resumes and writing samples from experienced writers. I was supposed to pick out the top candidates, and then the magazine's whole team would get together and decide who to assign what articles to. The ad was very specific in saying we wanted experienced writers for a business magazine, and that candidates should send their resume and up to three links and/or published clips. No surprise that the resumes came in fast and furious, but what did surprise me were some of the following:

1. A long poem in lieu of a cover letter. Excuse me, a long, cheesy poem in lieu of a cover letter. Obviously I have nothing against poems, I posted one in my last entry. But there are times when this kind of thing is appropriate and then time when writers send long cheesy poems to people looking for business writers. I'll let you do the math.

2. A resume where the first item listed was Organic Wedding Cake Stylist. Made me think of a Vegas-style lounge singer, but with baked goods. And now, for your entertainment, the organic cake stylings of...

3. A resume in a font that - I swear to God - when I first opened it I thought it was Egyptian hieroglyphics. My eyeballs almost turned themselves inside out trying to read this thing (which I spent all of three seconds doing to satisfy my curiosity, then deleted it and moved on as quickly as possible.)

4. The unimaginable volume of respondents who e-mailed me links to 20, 30, 40 or more clips. Think about it: if the ad says send up to three clips and someone sends 50, how much faith does that inspire in me with regard to their ability to follow basic directions?

5. On the flipside of that same issue, don't tell me to Goggle your name and search for articles. Your assurances that I will find many quality samples are wasted, because I'm not going to do it. Instead, I'm going to open a new e-mail and look at the writing samples of someone WHO CAN FOLLOW DIRECTIONS. Anybody detecting a pattern here?

6. A writing sample that was the first 150 pages of a book about a serial killer in Mexico. I guess I shouldn't complain; technically it is just one sample. On the other hand I'm afraid to even think about the implications that might come with this submission.

I could add more, but I've still got nearly 200 more resumes and probably 700 to 800 writing samples to wade through and I really need to get back to it. Kind of makes me wish I were reading IGMS story submissions. Oh well, that's next week...

(BTW, speaking of this week, issue six of IGMS should be out any day now, so check back here soon for essays from the authors of the new issues' stories.)

Limerick

Got this a week or so ago, submitted via the IGMS Contact Page.

I enjoyed the poem at the end so much that I had to share.

Topic: Letters to the Editor

Comments: Dear Mr. Schubert,

Thank you for visiting Ann Crispin's writing workshop at
Dragon*Con. (I was in the second row on Sunday.) Your
comments were helpful, and I appreciate your taking the
time to be there. Hope you enjoyed the Con and had safe
travels. Here's a limerick especially for you:

Tiny Things (for Ed)

They creep, wiggle, mutate, and may

Blind you with pain, stab and slay,

Rogue monsters enraged?

No, just words on the page

After reading a million a day

Best,

Gwen Veazey

Morganton, NC

Wolverton / Farland Novel Writing Workshop

With the work that I've been doing on IGMS and other for-hire writing/editing projects taking center stage in my life and my schedule, I've written very little of my own fiction in the last year. In an attempt to get back on track I've taken a few steps, one of which is to sign up for Dave Wolverton's Novel Writing Workshop. Dave also writes under the name Dave Farland and is probably best know for his Rune Lords series.

Well anyway, next April ('08) Dave is holding a Novel Writing Workshop. There are a lot of great things about it, and (for me anyway) one big negative, which is that it is being held in Utah. This automatically makes it a pretty expensive proposition, once you factor in air and car and hotel etc., but for a lot of reasons I've decided to bite the bullet and attend. As I've already said, I need to take some serious steps to get back on track with my own writing. I've already traded a few e-mails with Dave and made the necessary arrangements, so I'm definitely going.

There are a few slots left (not many), so I thought I'd put it out there in case anyone else was interested. It's looks pretty intense and comprehensive. It's also only one week long, which is as much time as I can carve out of my schedule, so that's a plus. Also it's specifically about novels, as opposed to Clarion and Odyssey and even OSC's Boot Camp, which are about short stories. Novels are very different creatures from short stories and the novel is something I've not specifically studied yet. I'm excited about going.

If anyone wants more details, check out this page on Dave's website:

http://www.runelords.com/journal/?page_id=27

This Weekend's To-Do List

My wife is very understanding about a lot of things - me being gone for conventions, stints of late night reading to (try to) get caught up on submissions, marriage to an author/editor whose compensation is usually in the form of fame (limited) rather than fortune (any) - but there are some times when I know better than to even ask for her understanding. This weekend, for instance, is one of those times. It's our anniversary.

So even though my to-do list for the next few days includes writing an essay for a friend's forthcoming book, an article for the local newspaper, a proposal to OSC for something I want to do at IGMS (ooh, mysterious), my letter from the editor for the next issue of IGMS, my announcement to IGMS readers that Darrell Schweitzer is going to be writing regular author interviews for IGMS starting with issue six (hey, Darrell; welcome to the Medicine Show), and a few other similar odds and ends (to say nothing of the fact that I'm already several weeks late on delivering edits on my novel to my new publisher)...

...what was I talking about?

Oh, right. I'm shutting my computer down. Walking away. Got a date with a fine woman; see you on Monday.

Unless she makes me a better offer...

Atlanta Aquarium

As I said in my last entry, on my last day in Atlanta I hit the aquarium. It was a most impressive display of sea creatures including whale sharks...









Beluga whales...



A logger-head turtle...

Groupers and rays...

and a surprise or two...

DragonCon Picture Show

You have to see DragonCon to fully appreciate it, so...

I had a good time, hanging out with old friends and making new ones. I met Matt Rotundo for the first time, - really nice guy whose subtle but powerful novella, "The Frankenstein Diaries," will appear in issues 8 and 9 of InterGalactic Medicine Show.

I also hung out a bit with an old friend, James Maxey. James' story "Silent As Dust" will appear in issue 7 of IGMS, more than likely as the cover story. It's an exceptional story - not that that is any surprise to folks familiar with James' writing; he is an immensely talented writer and his new novel, Bitterwood, is getting talked about and reviewed well everywhere. For details about the book check out John Joseph Adams recent write-up on SciFi Wire:

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=5&id=43530


Speaking of Solaris Books (the publisher's of Bitterwood), I enjoyed meeting Mark Newton and Christian ___(?), two editors of that line, as well as Gail Martin, one of their other authors, whose novel, The Summoner, is doing tremendously well, too. Interestingly enough, James, Gail, and I all live in North Carolina. There are quite a lot of writers in NC. I wonder why that is.



I spent some time with an old Boot Camp buddy (Orson Scott Card's Boot Camp, not the Army's), Gray Rinehart. Gray is working for Baen now and I sat in on talk he gave to A.C. Crispin's advanced writing class. He's a natural and I enjoyed listening to him. And he lives in NC, too. Hmm...

Speaking of various editors, I was on a couple of panels about editing, which was something new at DragonCon (at least in my experience). Usually those panels are mostly populated with writers, but the two editing-related panels were very well attended - pretty much filled the room. I hope DragonCon noticed the strong attendance and keeps doing them.

After one of those panels I hung out a bit with Claire Eddy and Paul Stevens, two editors at Tor. Claire and I had a good time because we are both Mets fans and talked as much baseball as anything else.

And speaking of baseball (it's just one segue after another here), I also snuck off to Turner Field on Sunday and saw the Mets beat the Braves. Given how many times the Braves have beaten the Mets in previous years, it was glorious to finally get a little payback. I met an amazing woman at the game, but that's an entire blog entry unto itself, so I'll save that tale for next time.



And - of course - I spend as much time as possible with one of my favorite people in the world, Alethea Kontis. If you've ever met Alethea, you know what I mean; everybody loves Lee and she's the queen of every con she goes to. We played hooky Monday morning and explored Atlanta's new aquarium. But that's a picture show for yet another day...

Issue Six / DragonCon

As I'm getting ready to go down to Atlanta for DragonCon this Labor Day weekend, it occurred to me that I should go ahead an announce the line-up for issue six of IGMS, which is in the final stages of production. The seven stories are:

"The Night of Falling Stars," by Steven Savile
"The Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race," by Cat Rambo
"A Spear Through The Heart," by Cherith Baldry
"How Peacefully The Desert Sleeps," By Brad Beaulieu
"Great Mother, Great Father," by Will Briggs
"In The Beginning Nothing Lasts," by Mike Strahan
"The Price of Love," by Alan Schoolcraft

So that you know, "The Price of Love" is a 16,000 word novella that will be published in two parts. Part two will appear in issue seven. Issue six will have a cover date of October, 2007, but should be on-line some time during the last week of September. It will also include two new stories by David Lubar, as well as a new Ender Universe story by our own Orson Scott Card, who just got home from teaching his annual Literary Boot Camp.

As for DragonCon, I'll leave for Atlanta as soon as I can on Friday. I'm in the final stages of editing a business book and that needs to be done before I can leave. My first panel (something about editing SF) isn't until 7pm Friday night, so I could leave here as late as noon and still get there in time (it's about a 6 hour drive from Greensboro, NC). The pocket program is available now on the DragonCon website, if you want to check it out and plan your days. http://dragoncon.org/index.php

Apex Digest Halloween Short Fiction Contest

So now I'm a "celebrity judge." Kind of fun - it's for Apex Digest's annual Halloween Contest. If you're not familiar with them, Apex Digest is a print magazine that publishes dark/grim/creepy science fiction (think "Aliens" and that sort of thing). My fellow celebrity judges on this project are Cherie Priest and Jennifer Pelland. I'm looking forward to working with them.


Third Annual Apex Digest Halloween Short Fiction Contest
The Essentials:

* Theme: Post-Apocalypse
* Deadline: October 15th, 11:59 p.m. EST
* Word Count: 2,500 words or less
* Submission Address: halloween@apexdigest.com
* Entry Fee: Free!

First Prize:
$100, plus Winning story published in Apex Digest issue thirteen and an invite to the Apex 2008 featured writers' anthology. One year subscription to Apex Digest. Signed hardcover copies of Aegris Somnia, HebrewPunk, Temple: Incarnations, and Grim Trixter

(not too shabby for a contest with no entry fee)

Full contest details at:
http://www.apexdigest.com/halloween.shtml

Apex announcement of judges:
http://apexdigest.livejournal.com/62565.html

A Little Trouble Dying

Every now and then I take leave of my senses and post a piece of my own fiction here at SideShow Freaks. Seems only fair; if I'm going to assess and judge and poke at others' stories, you all should occasionally get to poke at mine.

The following is the opening to a story that I think I am about to abandon. I like the opening very much, but every thing else I write after it doesn't work the way I want it to, which is why I think it's time to lay this piece to rest. But as I said, I do like the opening, so here it is. Poke it as you see fit...

A Little Trouble Dying

Waiting for the last contaminants of the plague to pass, I had sat in my underground shelter, surrounded by 55-gallon drums of distilled water and mountains of canned vegetables with peeling paper labels. I scribbled the days and weeks on the wall with a piece of chalk like a prisoner marking time in solitary.

And that, I frequently thought during those miserable years, was exactly what I was. A prisoner. Except I hadn’t been forced into my underground shelter by the state for crimes against society; I had gone down there alone, voluntarily, to escape death.

If only I had known quite how thoroughly I would accomplish my goal…

You see, until yesterday I hadn’t laid eyes on another living being in two-hundred-fourteen years, six months, and three days.

I was having a little trouble dying.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and no, I’m not crazy. I may have become a little obsessed with counting things, but you try spending 3,264 days alone in an underground shelter – no matter how well-stocked it is with books, games, CDs and DVDs - and see if you don’t come out obsessed with something.

And I think it’s important you know I never intended to go into that shelter alone. Despite being told repeatedly what a paranoid fool I was for building the shelter in the first place, I was a social person, quick with a joke and even quicker to laugh at the jokes of others. I loved being around people.

But when I told my co-workers at the lab I thought the N6HV3 virus was about to explode across the planet, none of them grasped the urgency of the situation. And when I told family and friends the same thing, I got the same response.

Reduced from logic to cajoling, then pleading, I finally had no choice but to go into the shelter alone.

Six weeks later they were all pounding on the double-paned, bullet proof window next to the entrance, their eyes bleeding and their flesh flaking from their bodies in great gray chunks. By then letting anyone in, even my sister and her infant daughter, was no longer an option. All that was left to do was talk – and sometimes cry – along with them through the intercom until they died on my doorstep.

I hated every one of them for making me watch them die like that. Hated them with a passion.

A lot of people died on my doorstep. That’s when the counting started; I counted family and friends as they died a few hermetically sealed inches away. I could feel myself age with the passing of each one.

Several centuries later, I’m still in the habit of counting things - but I haven’t aged since.

And I only hate them a little…

TrinocPics

From TrinocCon last weekend.



George R. R. Martin and gnome (George is the one with the hat and beard. Oh wait...)






Obi-Wan-KenGnombi

TrinocCon Report

Well, short report because I was only there for one day. It was a small con with a big Guest of Honor (George R.R. Martin). My first panel of the day was with the GoH, but I didn't know it until he walked into the room. Suddenly this voice in the back of my head was saying, "So that's why this room filled up fifteen minutes before the panel started..."

A group of us - James Maxey, Althea Kontis, Gray Rinehart, Alex Wilson, Ada Brown, and I - had great fun during the lunch break. We spent in inordinate amount of time playing with a grumpy, foot-tall, cast iron garden gnome Alethea brought from Tennessee and a Chicken Dance Elmo that Ada brought. There are photographs - some suitable for public viewing, some not. I'll have to review them closely and get back to you.

Dinner was more of the same, except that we added Stephen Mark Rainey, Alexandra Sokoloff and a few other folks to the madness. By the end of dinner we had the gnome dressed up in a black napkin and wielding a butter knife menacingly, dubbing him Obi-Wan-KenGnombi.

Rumor has it there were other panels and reading s and such, but the gnome wouldn't let me go. I told you he's grumpy cuss...

(BTW, for those of you who don't know the lunatics named above, James Maxey's second novel Bitterwood is out now and receiving fantastic reviews; Alethea Kontis is a book buyer for Ingram and author of several books of her own including the new Dark Hunter Companion with Sherrilyn Kenyon; Gray is the new slushmaster for Baen books, Alex and Ada have published short fiction in such venues as Asimov's and IGMS; Mark Rainey is the author of too many horror novels to count and former editor of the magazine Deathrealm; and Ms. Sokoloff is a former screenwriter turned novelist whose books are published by St. Martins. So yes, the people appearing on panels and talking to you so seriously about panel-stuff are out in public playing with gnomes and Elmo dolls, and no, there was absolutely no alcohol involved. You should see them when there's booze. On the other hand, maybe you shouldn't...)

TrinocCon 8 - Raleigh, NC

Con time. It's been a few months, so it's time to head out again. This weekend is TrinocCon (http://www.trinoc-con.org/), at the North Raleigh Hilton in Raleigh, NC. I've got some other commitments this weekend, so I can only be there Saturday, but I'll be there all day.

11am panel on Heroes and Villains; 1pm panel Religion and Spirituality in SF. That last one should be a lively affair. Lots of friends coming to this one, so only having two panels just leaves more time for catching up with folks.

George R.R. Martin is the Guest of Honor and I'm very much looking forward to him. I know he's best known as a fantasist, but his horror novel Fevre Dream, about vampires on the Mississippi River in the mid-19th century, is one of my all time favorites.

Shameless Plug

Indulge me a moment while I enjoy being a writer instead of an editor.

The month of July saw the publication of two anthologies with short stories of mine. The first is the anthology "Crypto-Critters II," a cryptozoology-themed antho published by Padwolf, which has my story "Lair of The Ice Rat." "Lair" is about a group of prisoners who escape from a Siberian gulag in the 1930's only to find unexpected perils in the frozen tundra.

http://www.padwolf.com/cc.htm




Also out this month is the anthology "From The Asylum: Year 3," which reprints my story "About Time." "About Time" is a tongue-in-cheek time travel yarn (a flash-fiction piece) originally published on the "From The Asylum" website back in October of 2005. The antho is available (among other places) here:

http://fromtheasylum.com/interior2.htm

“Rumspringa” - By Jason Sanford

“Rumspringa”

By Jason Sanford

I began writing "Rumspringa" after a visit to Holmes County, Ohio,

 which contains the largest concentration of Amish settlements in the world

 and is only a short drive from where I live. While there, I realized

 how many misconceptions we English-what the Amish call outsiders to their

 order-have about Amish society. I also began wondering what Amish

 society would be like in the future. Hence the story.

There are a number of stereotypes and misconceptions about the Amish in

 the popular imagination. First, the Amish do not consider technology

 evil, as many people think. Instead, certain types of technology are

 seen as harming the Amish separation from the world, a separation the

 Amish base on Biblical teachings. Certain technology is also seen as

 promoting vanity and causing dissension within the Amish community. Anyone

 who has ever watched their children pick TV over playing outside on a

 beautiful summer day can easily appreciate the Amish worldview on all

 this.

There are also different groups of Amish, each with different beliefs

 about how much technology to accept into their lives. When most people

 think of the Amish, the picture in their mind is of the Old Order Amish.

 This group shuns most modern technology, wears the "traditional" Amish

 dress, drives the traditional horse-pulled buggies, and so on.

 However, other Amish groups exist, including the New Order Amish, the Beachy

 Amish, and others, all of whom follow different Ordnung or rules of

 living. For example, the New Order Amish allow the use of electricity and

 mechanical tractors. Some Amish groups are also receptive to solar power

 arrays and kerosene-powered refrigerators. The Mennonites, who are not

 Amish but are descended from the same Anabaptist tradition, follow a

 similar pattern. Their most conservative groups prohibit a vast amount

 of modern technology, while their more liberal groups have no special

 dress requirements and little or no restrictions on technology use.

An interesting fact about the Amish is that they are one of the

 fastest-growing ethnic groups in the United States (although most Amish would

 claim they are not an ethnic group, but a religious order). The Amish

 are known for settling new lands both within the United States and

 around the world-lands which are opening up as more and more English abandon

 farmlands for large cities and suburbs.

Many people today see the Amish as an antiquated group, doomed to

 disappear in the relentless pace of technological progress. I would argue

 that the exact opposite will happen. As technology pushes more and more

 of us English into lifestyles which are more and more removed from the

 land, groups like the Amish will fill that void. And like they have done

 in centuries past, the Amish will continue to adapt and thrive in the

 years to come.

"Original Audrey" - by Tammy Brown

"Original Audrey" - by Tammy Brown

I was at OSC’s original Literary Boot Camp in 2000, and I was desperate for a story idea. To get into the class in the first place, I had submitted the first page to a story that I had never finished. Actually, I had never finished a story before.

I had some story ideas floating around in my head, but I didn’t have any idea as to how I could possibly write an entire story in a few days. Then, late one night, when I was trying to write a story that involved cloning, my mind started wandering. What if cloning really were possible? Would people clone their dead family members, themselves, who? It was at that point that I ran into a news story of the paparazzi going too far, and suddenly I knew what would happen.

The next step was to figure out who they would clone. It would be happening in the future, so it had to be someone with huge star power. Then the first line of the story, “Elvis Presley watched Audrey Hepburn eat her breakfast in front of the Tiffany’s window in the Caesar’s Palace Mall.” came into my head, and the rest wrote itself… almost.

Remember how I said that I had never finished a story before? It turned out I didn’t know how to, not effectively anyway. I worked at it most of the night, and finally, sleep deprived, I slapped on a very generic happy ending and turned the story in for critique.

The story received very high praise from almost everyone in the class, including OSC. At one point, he even guaranteed that with some small revisions it would one day be published, thus inflating my fragile writer’s ego for all time.

After boot camp, I immediately sent the story into F&SF, and it was almost as immediately rejected. The truth was that even though most people who read my story liked it well enough, it was ultimately unsatisfying. The slapped on ending didn’t provide any resolution or closure. I knew it, but I couldn’t seem to fix it.

Over the years since then, every time my writing skills would improve, I’d pull out the story and try a new ending. Each time, it got closer to what I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t quite there. Finally, after IGMS was announced, I dusted it off one more time and sent it in. Quite a while later, I got a response from Edmund saying that he liked the story, up until about page 14 and that the ending “felt like you had simply gotten tired of writing and thrown them together for the proverbial happy ending without any clues as to how either of them changed, grew, and developed into their new, true selves. It was rushed and incomplete.” Yikes! Yet, he also said that if I could fix these problems, he would consider including me in a future issue of IGMS.

He had called me on the carpet, and he was right. At the end of the story, even I as the writer, wasn’t sure about this couple. Had either of them changed? What would their future hold? If as the author, I didn’t know, how could I expect the reader to understand? So I sat down and gave myself an ultimatum, find the climax, find the resolution, or else. By now, I knew Audrey and Elvis like two intimate friends. I knew that Audrey need to break down her perfect façade, and that Elvis needed to be the person who did it. Then, as my mind began wandering, I saw Audrey, losing control in a dish of ice cream. I saw her face covered with tears and whipped topping and I saw Elvis, falling in love, for good.

The moral of the story? I should let my mind wander more often. That‘s when my ideas seem to come. In fact, while writing this essay, my mind started wandering again. I’ve started thinking about Audrey, and Elvis’s future. And you know what? I don’t think their story is over. In fact, I can guarantee that there are many adventures in store for them yet.

IGMS Now An SFWA Pro Market

I am very happy to announce that IGMS is now a SFWA Qualified Professional Market, and that all sales - retroactive to the very first issue - now count toward those authors' SFWA membership requirements.

A ton of credit has to go to Orson Scott Card for agreeing to remove the $500 cap and approving a new pay rate of 6 cents a word for the first 7,500 words and 5 cents a word for every word thereafter. IGMS already met all the other SFWA requirements and that was the last hurdle to be cleared.

Of course, I'll now have to be doubly selective of those stories I buy over the 10,000 word mark, but I don't see that being a major issue. I've only bought two so far.

Congratulations to everyone already (or soon to be) published in IGMS: you've now got one more SFWA pro sale to your credit.

"When I Wrote the Learned Astronomer" by Jamie Todd Rubin

"When I Wrote the Learned Astronomer"

by Jamie Todd Rubin

When I wrote The Learned Astronomer, I never thought I would work so hard, take so long, and end up with a sale. Up until the moment I started to write the story, my biggest literary success had been a glowing rejection letter from A.J. Budrys for a story about a reincarnated Jorge Luis Borges. It was also, perhaps, my biggest failure. Up to that point, the hardest I worked was scrubbing burned lasagna noodles of the sides of cooking pans in the dorm cafeteria. This made me think twice about becoming a student again, or working in any other profession that involved lasagna noodles (including chef), and which resulted in me concentrating on my far simple vocation at the time: software development.

Tracing back the events that led to my accidental story and sale, it boggles my mind to think that it might never have happened if I had not been listening to that particular program on that particular day. And to think that it all started with that title. Well, not quite...

#

It all started with a poem.

Sometime in 1995, I was driving into work through Topanga Canyon, listening to KNX-1070 news radio and trying to come up with an idea for a story. Winding my way around the canyon curves, Charles Osgood's, "The Osgood File" segment came on the radio. I've always liked Charles Osgood, but this segment was a particularly good one. He was talking about astronomy and humanity's fascination with the universe, something that I had been interested in since I was a little boy. At the end of the segment he quoted, in its entirety, Walt Whitman's famous poem, "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer". I had never heard this poem before, and while I am not the biggest fan of free-form verse, I absolutely loved the poem and the sentiment behind it. I thought to myself: a poem about an astronomer? There has to be a story in there somewhere?

I wracked my brain, only half paying attention to the canyon roads. But no ideas were coming. Then I tried a trick. I decided to run through permutations of the title and see if that would jar anything loose. I tried two or three silly versions, and then just as the Pacific Ocean came into view, I landed on "When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer." I just loved the sound of it. But it had something more: it had outer space, it had romance, it was perfect!

But I had no story, just a title.

#

I am a huge Isaac Asimov fan, and back in the mid-to-late 1990s, I felt that I could write just as effortlessly as he could. This is embarrassing to admit now, as you might imagine, but it is nevertheless true. And write effortlessly I could. But no matter how effortlessly I wrote, I simply couldn't put a story together. Over the space of three years, between 1995 and 1998, I must have made half a dozen "effortless" starts on "Learned Astronomer" each one worse than the one that preceded it. My best effort came sometime in 1999 when, sitting out on the porch, I took my laptop outside and hammered out 10 pages of what I thought was really funny material, but which still had no story to it, and which, in hindsight, was really pretty terrible stuff.

At the same time, I was trying to write another story that I was calling "A Ship That Passes Through the Night". I started to write this story after I read a Robert Zubrin science essay in the August 1994 issue of ANALOG called "How To Find A Starship". The essay talked about the science behind detecting an alien starship (and the descriptions of that science in "Learned Astronomer" owe a debt to this essay). The story I was attempting to write contemporaneously with "Learned Astronomer" was about an astronomer who detects an alien spaceship, and has what is essentially, concrete proof of its existence, and yet the ship is so far away from earth, traveling between two distant stars that there is never any chance of catching up to it. I was fascinated by the idea of discovering the existence of aliens, but never being able to communicate with them in any way. So I worked on "A Ship That Passes Through the Night" and that story went even worse than "Learned Astronomer".

#

Beginning about 1998 or 1999, I got very busy at work. It was the Dot Com boom and it was an exciting time in the software industry. I put in longer hours and focused more and more on my work, winning a series of promotions but bringing my writing to a virtual stop. Only once or twice a year would I fire up the word processor for something other than writing a Requirements Document or Statement of Work. I did write a few stories, and continued to send them out. And I began to notice that my stories were getting better and better. But nothing happened with "Learned Astronomer" or "Through the Night".

#

Fast-forward to April 5, 2004. I had been through a period where I was attempting to write darker stories, which was pretty unusual for me. I'd written three stories in a row, all of which had a darkness to them. I sent out the stories to various magazines and I was getting better feedback on the stories, which means that my rejection slips were no longer form letters. Instead, they started saying things like, "Nice writing, but..." I felt like I was improving but I was also sick of writing dark stories. I wanted to write something cheerful for a change.

I was never a huge fan of Robert Heinlein. That is to say, I haven't read every one of his books. I've read, perhaps 10 of his books, and the only ones that I really like are the older ones, like Double Star or The Puppet Masters or The Door Into Summer or Podkayne of Mars. What I did like about Heinlein's stories was the optimistic tone that he captured. As an exercise--a kind of challenge to myself--I decided to try to write a story that captured a Heinleinesque tone. But I had no ideas.

Then, on April 5, 2004, I remembered "Learned Astronomer" and "A Ship That Passes Through the Night". And I had a thought: what if I combined the two stories into one somehow? The notions I had for "Learned Astronomer" were images of romping across the moon for some reason or another. Clearly, there would be an astronomer involved. And, of course, an astronomer played a key role in "Through the Night". Maybe I could make it work. But there was still one problem. All along, with "Learned Astronomer", I was having trouble telling the story. Maybe it was because I wasn't sure what story I wanted to tell, but I happened to remember two pieces of advice that Isaac Asimov had said helped him in his own writing:

First, he said that John Campbell told him that if you are having a problem starting a story, you are almost always starting it too early. Pick a point later in the story and start there.

Second, know your ending. Think up a problem and a solution, and then make up the rest, but always working toward your resolution.

With those two pieces of advice in mind, I began to combine the two stories together. In my diary for that day, I noted that I wrote 8 pages. By April 8 I had 5,000 words written and I was hoping that the story would be finished soon. I was very happy with what I was writing. I finished the first draft on April 16. After struggling for nearly 10 years with the idea, I had written the entire story in just about 10 days.

Over the next few years, I sent the story to various magazines. It was rejected here and there, but always with favorable comments and suggestions for improvements. I tried to learn from those comments and each time, I'd take the suggestion and try to make the story better and then send it somewhere else. By the time I sent it to IGMS in 2006, I felt the story was just about as good as I could make it.

But it managed to get a little bit better.

#

When Edmund Schubert, editor of IGMS, got in touch with me about the story, he told me he liked it but there were parts of it that didn't work for him. He was then kind enough to take the time to point out what he thought were the flaws in the story--things which were inconsistent or made the story hard to believe. You couldn't ask for a gentler critique of a story, and you couldn’t ask for a more perceptive one either. In each case, I felt that Edmund was right. He asked me for some rewrites and I agreed to do them.

I then sweated more than I have ever sweated in my life over a piece of writing. Now I was writing for an Editor and I didn't want to let him down. I made the revisions over a period of two days and then got them back to Edmund. A short time later, he told me that the revisions were good and he would be taking the story. I had made my first sale!

Up until that point, I had three things on my List of Things I Must Do Before I Die. Number three was to get my pilots license, which I had done back in 2000. Number two was to fly in space and while it hasn't happened, I'm still hopeful. Number one was to sell a science fiction story. And while I think I had a pretty good story to begin with, it was with Edmund's help that I was able to push it over the top, and for that I will be forever grateful.

#

My favorite part of the story is the ending. I knew how it was going to end, with both Danny and Audrey parting ways, but of course, I didn't know exactly how that would all fall into place. As I was writing the end of the story, I recalled the Walt Whitman poem once more (which I had committed to memory almost as soon as I heard it back on that day in 1995) and realized that the ending was right there. Audrey had left for the outer solar system and she was "out among the stars". Danny stood in his back yard looking for her. He "looked up in perfect silence at the stars". Those familiar with the Walt Whitman poem know that is the final line of the verse. In a way, the story became a tribute to that poem and what it represents.

In another way, the story is a tribute to my grandfather, Paul Friedlander. Most of my friends who have read the story suspected that Danny, goofy as he seemed, was a thinly masked representation of me, goofy as I am. But that was not the case. When writing the story, I tried writing Danny to be what I thought what my Grandpa might have been like when he was Danny's age. My Grandpa passed away in November 2004, but not before he had a chance to read and enjoy this story.

#

When I wrote The Learned Astronomer, I never thought I would work so hard, take so long, and end up with a sale, but as Danny says, it's the things you don't expect that make life interesting. Writing this story was a lot of hard work, but it was also a lot of fun.

Writer Profile Project

Kelly Spitzer has been working for most of the year on something she calls the Writer Profile Project. She interviews all sorts of writers and editors and she interviewed me recently. The results can be found here:

http://www.kellyspitzer.com/2007/07/09/writer-and-editor-edmund-r-schubert-talks-with-the-writer-profile-project/#comments

*

"Under Janey's Garden" - by Margit Schmitt

"Under Janey's Garden"

By Margit Schmitt

I wrote "Under Janey's Garden" in the summer of 2006 while taking part in Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp (Providing devastatingly-accurate, always friendly critiques of your fiction -- with doughnuts). The assignment was to fill out five different note cards with story ideas from an assortment of sources, and after having chatted up the locals and admired the beautiful countryside, I was in the library, hoping to see something there that would spark enough creativity to fill out that last card. I found it in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

“The Hare’s Bride” was not a story I’d read before. But it sparked an idea that tangled itself with everything I knew or had read about rabbits, weddings and brides, including a movie I’d once seen about Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland) called Dreamchild. The result was “Janey’s Garden.”

I think of the people in Boot Camp, only one liked my story right off, and she happened to be a fan of the pastoral style. Almost everyone else groaned and wrote things like “Is this for kids?” and “This is going to be precious!” in the margins. But thankfully, my readers discovered it wasn’t a fluffy bunny story after all.

I am a huge fan of gardens but I don’t have a green thumb. While I can admire the look and smell of a garden, I haven’t the first notion of how to go about encouraging one to actually thrive. If the landlord didn’t come and water my lawn on a regular basis, I’d be living in a dust bowl. But “Janey’s Garden” is the one I would grow if I could, full of flowers and vegetables and trees. A lazy, welcoming place for sunny afternoons – though my ideal would be without matrimonially-minded rabbits.

Margit

"Beauty's Folly" - by Eugie Foster

"Beauty's Folly"

By Eugie Foster

I've always loved fairy tales, starting from when I was a little girl. They continue to inspire me with their resonant themes and archetypes, and "Beauty and the Beast" is one of my favorites. It's such an elegant little tale, juxtaposing layers of stark contrast—the beautiful and the grotesque, savagery and civilization, sacrifice and selfishness, tenderness and brutality—to tell a sweet, coming-of-age story.

I also find Beauty to be an easy character to empathize with and admire. She's strong as well as beautiful, the embodiment of love and sacrifice—two potent themes that appear throughout the fairy tale. Gutsy and headstrong, she isn't the sort of heroine that just naps in her glass coffin or languishes in her tower, waiting for the prince to come and rescue her. On the contrary, she's prepared to give her life to protect those she loves, a young woman who dictates her own fate rather than consenting to the role of passive princess. And also, she possesses uncommon intelligence and depth, capable of seeing beyond surface appearances and transcending societal mores. How can someone not root for her?

There's also room for some interesting examination of Freudian symbolism*. Seen through the lens of Freud/Jung's Electra complex, the Beast is a metaphor for Beauty's burgeoning sexuality as she matures from a girl into a young woman. Beauty, in cleaving to her father with a little girl's devotion, sees all other men as beastly. It's only through growing up, by learning to love the Beast, and perhaps comprehending the human flaws and shortcomings of her father, that she triggers the Beast's metamorphoses into a prince, freeing them both.

Or not. It's also a romantic happily-ever-after, which I'm a total sucker for.

So I've been hankering to write a contemporary "Beauty and the Beast" story, but while it's been mulling as a free floating aspiration, I kept putting it off. I wanted to make it more than a rehash of the fairy tale; I wanted it to reflect updated themes and modern issues. Yet at the same time, I didn't want to sacrifice the integral charm and magic of the fairy tale to the gritty realism that often comes with current settings and issues.

I was doing research for another story, reading up on the plight of the homeless in America, and saw that the figures are now indicating that an estimated one-third of the homeless population suffers from untreated, severe, and persistent psychiatric illnesses—most of whom end up stigmatized and victimized, their plight misunderstood and overlooked by mainstream society who view them as distasteful and/or threatening. Then I got a note from Steve Berman asking if I had the time to write a re-told fairy tale for an anthology project he was pitching to Mirrorstone Books, the YA imprint of Wizards of the Coast/TSR.

With fairy tales at my forebrain and homelessness and mental illness at the back, my inner psychologist and my muse had a powwow. A person having to overcome preconceived notions of the impoverished and homeless brought to mind Beauty's circumstances after her family's dramatic turn in fortunes. What would a rich socialite have to confront in those circumstances? And what would a young woman able to overcome the tenets of her privileged upbringing be like? And what about one who would strike up a conversation with a panhandler in an alley rather than ignore or avoid him? And there I had my Beauty/Annabel. In keeping with the mental health theme, the Beast/Eloy became a gentle sociopath, and his "castle" transformed into a sort of a magical psychiatric ward. And I was off.

As it turns out, I ended up writing a different story for Steve's anthology, Magic in the Mirrorstone (slated for a Feb. 2008 release), but I owe him major snaps for sparking the idea for "Beauty's Folly."

*Disclaimer: I'm not a proponent of Freud's theories!