Write What You Want—Eric James Stone

For several years, the Codex Writers forum has held a contest called "Weekend Warrior." For five straight weekends starting in January, several writing prompts are posted on Saturday morning, and contestants must submit a flash fiction story based on a prompt by Sunday night. Last year, on the final weekend, the prompt-giver included a very open-ended prompt: "Write anything you want."

Naturally, I had to find a way to put a twist on that prompt, so I decided to write a story about writing what you want.  And because I sometimes like to experiment with style and form while writing flash fiction, I decided to intersperse things people wanted between each paragraph of the main storyline.

I'm not sure exactly how I came up with the plot, but it was probably something similar to this train of thought: OK, so people write what they want on a piece of paper, and someone does what? Grants the wish? Too straightforward. How about he takes that want away? That might work. Why does he do it? Because sometimes what we want gets in the way of our own happiness.  So he's a good guy for doing this.  But where's the conflict? What if someone comes in with a want that shouldn't be forgotten?  And at that point I had the basic plot.

Most of the stories I write tend to be about people who face a problem and overcome it by the end.  This story is not like that.  I did write an alternate ending where the main character tricks the girl's father into writing something so that the magic could be used against him, but after writing it I felt that ending trivialized the problem of sexual abuse. And I don't think that's something that should be trivialized.

 

--Eric James Stone

Constance’s Mask- Nick T. Chan

This story emerged directly from my writers of the future volume 28 story, The Command for Love.

My first draft of that story was an abysmal attempt at an artificial intelligence story, featuring lots of incomprehensible jargon about Turing Tests and Chinese Rooms. It didn’t work . I wanted to meet the deadline for the quarter as I’d just decided I was going to enter every quarter of Writers of the Future until I won or died of old age.

I had no idea how I was going to re-write it until a conversation with another writer, Jennifer Campbell-Hicks, sparked the idea that I should re-write it in a different genre. I was reading Gra Linnaea’s Writers of the Future volume 25 story A Life in Steam at the time, so the decision was made for me: Steampunk (luckily Fifty Shades of Gray wasn’t around at the time).

After writing the story, I sat back and realised two things: I enjoyed writing in the world I’d created and I knew nothing about the Victorian era where a lot of steampunk draws its inspiration. I wanted to explore the world further and I wanted my explorations to fit comfortably within the steampunk genre.

I started to read about the Victorian-era. Because I’m lazy, my research petered out after a few days, but one of the books I read was The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna. It was a fascinating and disturbing read. By any standard, Oscar Wilde was a sexual predator, but the dark side of the Victorian era was the intertwining of sexuality and class. By the time he’d accepted his sexuality he was doing to young underclass men what many (or even most) respectable Victorian gentlemen did to young underclass women; he exploited them for his own pleasure (and some of them exploited him back via blackmail). He was a complicated and courageous man who was also a selfish monster. Like many martyrs for a cause, he wasn’t necessarily an admirable man on a personal level but he was a talented monster who was willing to sacrifice everything for his beliefs.

Oscar had an unhappy marriage to Constance Lloyd. He’d married her out of genuine friendship, a mistaken platonic love, ambition, and the desire to “cure” himself of what was socially unacceptable. Constance Lloyd was a pretty young woman who was tremendously psychically scarred from a difficult upbringing. It wasn’t hard to make Constance the centrepiece of the story and make her scarring physical.

As time went on, Oscar became more determined to be open about his sexuality and to use his art as an expression for that sexuality. Society be damned; he was what he was and he refused to back down from his principles even when it was the smarter thing to do.

All that went into a story set in the same world as The Command For Love, which eventually became Constance’s Mask. By the time Constance’s Mask was in its published form, a lot of the common-world story had been stripped out for reader comprehensibility, but the core remained. It was still about blackmail and masks, the discrepancy between our public and private selves, genius and monsters, the power of stories to both enslave and liberate and bringing your true self into the light.

-- Nick T. Chan

Sojourn for Ephah—Marina J. Lostetter

Sojourn for Ephah is really a tale of two characters, and each came about in their own way.

I have to thank my brother for Ephah. If we hadn’t been having our worst fight since we were kids my neurons might not have fired just right, and Ephah might never have been.

No need for all the details, but essentially we both said some bad things that had nothing to do with what the fight was about. I was so angry I began wringing my hands while chanting, “Calm down. Just calm down.” Almost like a prayer. But I wasn’t speaking to a deity, I was speaking to myself.

I began to wonder under what circumstances a being might pray to itself. And thus Ephah--along with her brief stint in a foreign universe--was born.

Thomas, on the other hand, was a direct reaction to what I’d been reading. It seemed like every spec-fic story containing a monotheistic religious leader wound up the same way--with the individual denouncing their god, fleeing from faith, and in a few cases, killing themselves. All because some new scientific discovery clashed with their dogma. I think this is an unrealistic--and now, rather stereotypical--take on people of faith.

Human beings don’t tend to let their worlds come crashing down that way. Someone of real conviction (religious, political, moral, etc.) tends to respond to new, contradictory information in one of two ways--either they deny it, or they incorporate it.

What happens when you have a political conversation with someone whose views strongly oppose yours? What happens when you present facts that clash with their beliefs? They either explain how those ‘facts’ are nothing of the sort, explain how those facts actually make their point, or they accept the facts and let their beliefs evolve. It’s doubtful, I think, that they’ll do a one eighty--denouncing all of their pre-conversation convictions--or crumble into suicidal oblivion.

New scientific principles aren’t likely to be seen by a religious person as a tragedy there’s no escape from, because that’s just not how people are built.

So, I wanted to write a character that embodied the real-world tendency to incorporate new information, and came up with Thomas (I suppose I also wrote a character that embodies the rejection aspect: Bishop Krier). Thomas is intelligent and open minded, and never backs away from his faith simply because he’s learned something new.

I think Thomas and Ephah are a perfect philosophical and psychological match, and I hope you enjoy their story.

--Marina J. Lostetter

The Butcher of Londinium—J. Deery Wray

I came up with the initial idea for "The Butcher of Londinium" while skimming through a Jack the Ripper book for information on police procedure in 1880's London. At the same time, I was watching the first season of Spartacus. The two merged in my head, and I began to toy with the idea of a serial killer, sentenced to die in the arena, who made a deal with a Lanista to survive. Could the gladiators come to accept him? If so, why? What about a man who'd lost everything because of him?

Since I had Jack the Ripper in mind, I set the story in an 1880's alternate version of England where the Romans had never left. Surgery gave me a link between the first and second question, as well as a reason the Lanista might be willing to deal.

Still, it didn't seem like quite enough to me. I needed something more, an emotional center that could tie everything together, and put the two main adversaries, the serial killer and the wronged man, in conflict not just because of past events, but also in terms of present ones.

So Stolo was born.

Once I had Stolo, I knew I had all I needed to start the story. But then I hesitated. I began to doubt if I could pull off a first person story from the point of view of a serial killer. Maybe I should just move on to some other, easier idea? I decided to go ahead with the story anyway as I realized I'd fail harder by not trying at all than by trying and not pulling it off.

I'm glad I did.

-J. Deery Wray

The Flower of Memory—Michael Haynes

This story was written not long after I returned to writing from one of many long hiatuses. At that point, I was experimenting with all sorts of ways of finding story inspirations. One of these, which only lasted a very brief while, was to have visitors to my blog vie to present me with the most interesting prompt they could find for a short story. I'd then write the story and present it on my blog. The idea didn't really catch on and this series on my blog ended after two iterations.

For the second iteration, I was given an image of a rose against snow. I played with a couple of story ideas. For my blog, I wrote a story about college romance -- the rose here being a peace offering discarded by its recipient.

But the imagery stuck with me and the other idea I'd had, about a flower in a ruined greenhouse and a landscape prematurely gone to winter, didn't want to be cast off. The J. M. Barrie quote used in the story is one I'd come across when considering epigraphs for a now-trunked story about a memory-recording service. The image and the quote came together to create this story, which I'm very glad to have seen published in Intergalactic Medicine Show.

-- Michael Haynes

Riding the Signal—Gary Kloster

So, monkeys.
    I don't have a problem with monkeys. I don't want one, but then I firmly believe that you should never have a pet with thumbs. And while the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz freaked me out, but that was a long time ago, and I've recovered.  Monkeys are fine. They're fun to watch at the zoo. Some have mustaches, and that's great.
    I'm cool with monkeys.
    The first sci-fi short story I wrote had a monkey in it. She was the protagonist's romantic interest. Maybe I should unpack that. She wasn't really a monkey, you see, she was a biologist on a spaceship who had uploaded her brain into a computer along with the rest of the crew, and the monkey body was just a VR thing she was doing to… Well, it gets complicated.
Science fiction's like that sometimes.
    Anyway, I had a monkey. Not an evil monkey, though. She was just being a monkey to annoy my protagonist. The guy that liked her. That was part of the reason, at least. Like I said, complicated. So maybe that character had a thing about monkeys.
But that was just something about him.
    Recently, I wrote another story with a monkey in it. A cute, helpful, friendly monkey, who wanted to help my protagonist and his family out. Maybe. That part's unclear. It's definitely a monkey though. An alien monkey, who is possibly (probably) a robot, but not evil. Maybe.
   Having the alien look like a monkey, that made sense for the story. It was just camouflage. No deeper meaning.
    Now this story, Riding the Signal. Another monkey. An evil robot monkey, with sharp claws, a skull face, and a mouth full of terrifying laughter and poison. A monkey that hides and stalks, tortures and kills.
    So maybe I do have a thing about monkeys. Maybe my cousin had one of those wind-up cymbal banging monkey toys that would just stare and smile at me whenever I visited. Maybe cute moustaches can't quite cover long, sharp teeth. Maybe I've spent too much time imagining tiny little hands with tiny little thumbs easing locks back, silently turning doorknobs, creeping across dark floors… Yeah, okay, monkeys kind of freak me out.
    Still. Three stories about monkeys, and every one has sold.
    Maybe I should think about that. Or maybe not.
    Thinking about wind-up clockwork flying monkeys isn't going to help me sleep at night.

--Gary Kloster

Dark and Deep—Holli Mintzer

I started this story a couple of times. I knew I wanted to write something about backcountry witches, and about the relationships between sisters and mothers and daughters, but it took a few tries to figure out how to set up my narrator's situation in a way that grabbed me. I wanted my narrator to be in a situation that, to her, is perfectly ordinary, but hint at the unsettling details of her life without giving to much away.

I deliberately left the exact era vague-- the only clue as to time period is the tintype, which places them sometime after 1853. The sisters and their mother are far from civilzation, and they're pretty old-fashioned anyway. Their magic is a mix of medicine and superstition and pure willpower; there's probably fancy city wizards with strings of letters after their names in this world, but in the woods it comes down to what you can do with the tools at hand.

One of the things that started the story, oddly enough, was the idea of a helpful zombie. Zombies are the servants of magical practitioners in some traditions, but I didn't want that exactly. I wanted someone who was too stubborn to stay dead, and so dedicated to the living she'd left behind that she keeps going as long as she can. That mixed itself up with my thoughts about old-timey witches, and then I had a story.

--Holli Mintzer

For Lenore—Kenneth Kao

Ah, the story behind the story.  Well, lucky for me, there's a story behind "For Lenore" that I don't have to exaggerate one bit.  And it's crazy.

It all began with a fight with my wife.

See, my wife has this irresistible urge to take things, even if she's entitled to them.  Usually, she takes things in the form of too many napkins at a restaurant or a roll of toilet paper from a public bathroom, but when it comes to construction equipment and road signs...

It always goes down to this: she sees a cone on the road; she wants to take it; I'm the one driving; she leans out to grab it; I swerve away.
Or, we're walking and before I know it she's carrying it with her, or wearing the cone as a hat.

Well, one night, I come home to find her with a sign.  Not just a sign, but a big neighborhood corner sign sitting in the middle of the living room(see attached picture).  She's the cutest thing in the world, so saying no to her--especially after she has her hands on something--is akin to taking an ice cream triple-decker cone from a kid.

But--I'm the stiff, "boring", the ethic driven guy in our relationship.  She's the naughty, playful, and interesting one.  I always have to tell her, "No, return what you took, I love you and you're cute as hell but we can't steal."  When she puts the thing back, the look she gives me always makes me feel guilty as hell.

Anyway, I played along for as long as I could.  I think she was testing me to see how far she could push it before I broke, but hours later and she wasn't showing any intention of putting the sign back.
I panicked, a little, and then a lot as she kept shaking her head and hugging it as reply to my prompts--

I snapped.

I told her it was STEALING, and no matter what, we had to put it back gosh-dang-it.  I yelled at her.  And made her feel bad.  And then I felt bad.  And she put the sign back outside where she'd found it and went to bed all sullen and quiet.

She didn't say a word to me the rest of the night.

So, 3am and unable to sleep, I decide that I'm going to my clinic--I have patients early the next morning.  I'm still seething, mostly from my own guilt, but also angry because I felt like, "Why the heck did you have to push me so far?  You knew exactly what you were doing!"

...But on the drive to the clinic.  There's this construction zone that's been going on for months.  There are these THINGS.  Big, orange, trash can sized reflector things that I've only recently learned are called "tire ring drums.”

They are massive and round and heavy(25 pounds of unwieldy-ness).  And the thought crosses my mind: What if?  It would be epic.  It would be the can't-top-this move.  It'd be romantic!  She'd forgive me, and no matter what the moral consequence is--I owe it to her for yelling, right?

So, in my dress clothes, where a long stretch of road has no lights, I jump out of my car and pop the trunk and lug one of those around to throw into the trunk of my Camry.

Turns out it doesn't fit.  I think they were designed not to fit.

After running around the car and trying the back door, the front door, any way to get the thing in while hoping that no one comes driving down the road, I put it back and get in my car and give up.

My epic plan has failed.  My apology will never come through.  And if I steal something else, a mere cone, let's say--I would always know what could've been, and it wouldn't really mean that much since she's stolen cones before.  Or at the very least, it wouldn't mean what a super-sized tire ring drum would mean.

So I get to the clinic and I write, in my frustration, "For Lenore."
Originally titled: "The Bomb is Greener on the Other Side."

You could tell I was in some sort of mood.

The next day I treat my patients, but I can't get the idea out of my head.  I vividly see how sad my wife looked after I yelled at her.
She was only being playful.  So I visualize the size of the tire barrel thing and my tiny Camry--Why couldn't I have driven the Jeep!--and I purposefully stay late at the clinic.

On the way home, it's only slightly after dark around 8pm, I find a spot and go running out again.  I know a car's gonna come down the road any second because I've been sitting on the side of the road for several minutes, waiting for that brief window of opportunity.  I throw open the passenger side door and drop the seat back.  I seize one of the tire ring drums and put it into the passenger seat head first.  It's bottom touches the ceiling.  But it worked, and perfectly.  And then I'm off.  On my home with a dirty but shining, orange reflector thing next to me.

I imagine what a cop might do if he saw me.  But you can buy these online, right?  That's what I told myself, at least.

I get home, and my wife's making dinner, and I drag it in.

Her expression was everything I could've hoped for.

Gotta say, I felt like a stud.  And don't worry about the Tire Ring Drum, I'm the ethical guy, remember?

 

--Kenneth Kao

InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issue 29

Welcome to Issue 29 of IGMS. There's a drought across much of America this summer, but there's no shortage of good reading here at IGMS.

Our cover story, "The Butcher of Londonium" is a splendid alternate history where the Roman Empire survives long enough to meet Jack The Ripper, who is pressed into service as doctor to the gladiators who fight and live and die in the city of Londonium. Not quite your father's Olympic Games, eh?

Next up is Gary Kloster's "Riding the Signal." When a secret group of high-tech mercenaries get attacked with a variant of their own long-distance animal-robot devices, their only chance of survival rides on two things they've never had to do before: work together, and get their own hands dirty.

Doubling as our audio feature for this issue, "Cloudsinger" is the lyrical story of young teller of tales who goes to great lengths to get the details right, and the special opportunities such attention to detail brings. Written by Jared Adams, the audio version is read by our regular audio-contributor Tom Barker.

"Dark and Deep" by Holli Mintzer brings us the lives of a pair of young witches who live deep in the woods, far from the local towns and villages for many good reasons, not the least of which is their mother, who protects them with the passion and determination that only a mother can bring.

And last but certainly not least, we have a pair of short-shorts. Since they're both under 1,000 words we decided two was better than one, to ensure everyone got their money's worth. The first is Ken Kao's somewhat surreal SF tale, "For Lenore," while the second is Michael Hayne's post-apocalyptic "The Flower of Memory." I'd describe them to you, but they're short-shorts, remember? In the time it would take me to describe them, you could have already read them.

So what are you waiting for? Time to dive in and start reading . . .

Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

P.S. As usual, we've collected essays from the authors in this issue and will post them on our blog (www.SideShowFreaks.blogspot.com) Feel free to drop by and catch The Story Behind The Stories, where the authors talk about the creation of their tales.

The Curse of Sally Tincakes—Brad R. Torgersen

"The Curse of Sally Tincakes" began life as a workshop story in Lincoln City, Oregon. It is the fraternal twin of my Nebula and Hugo award nominated cover story, Ray of Light, which appeared in the December 2011 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact.

For Tincakes, our assignment was to write a story about curses.  That was it. Just, curses. Well, I knew going in that the bulk of my compatriots were going to hit it from a fantasy angle: sorcery, witchcraft, occult, voodoo, et cetera. Me being me, I immediately thought -- not of demonic or mystical curses -- but of sports curses. The Curse of the Bambino, The Curse of the Black Socks, The Curse of Muldoon, et cetera. I also wanted to write a story that would be sufficiently science-fictional to sell to the editors who were familiar with and had enjoyed my previous work.

So, my thoughts turned to racing.

Now, the idea of the futuristic or "space race" is a recurrent concept in SF -- the pod racing sequence from the first of the three Star Wars prequels being a notable high-profile example. Contests of speed are as old as human civilization, so it stands to reason that we'll still be having them long after we've become a truly interplanetary people.

And as long as we have races, I suspect we will have racing curses too.

The story itself grew from this assumption.

To tell it classically, I knew I needed a young, somewhat brash protagonist, and an older, grizzled veteran to act as both mentor and foil. I also needed to come up with the curse itself. Racing, like boxing, has a history of parading beautiful women in swimsuits for the delight of the (assumed, mostly male) crowds. I decided to make my story about a curse imposed by a bikini girl done wrong -- which seemed to dictate that my protagonist would also need to be a woman, because when women take on other women it can be a practically evil thing to behold.

Of course, Jane Jeffords doesn't believe in the curse. Why would she? She's a child of her (future) era. Curses? Hah! What a load of crap.

Thus the story unfolded.

The workshop's reaction was generally positive. Dean Wesley Smith in particular seemed to like it. "This is NASCAR on the moon!" he exclaimed. Send it out, he said. Right away.

I did not expect it to get the cover spot in the 28th issue of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. Nor did I expect it to garner such a fantastic piece of artwork. The digital painting by Nick Greenwood is like a photograph from my own mind; he captured the signature image of Jane -- riding her Falcon – that perfectly. It's truly one of the great pleasures (of being a writer) being able to see my words translated through the creative lens of talented illustrators. Nick's piece in particular really knocked my socks off. Is he telepathic? I wonder.

On a deeper level, "The Curse of Sally Tincakes" deals with rejection and loss, as well as the will to persevere: despite the odds, despite setbacks, despite people telling you to quit when what your heart wants is to go all the way. I've said it before in other spaces that I am not a fan of downer stories, trendy and "realistic" as they may be. And while Tincakes doesn't have a Hollywood ending per se, I like to think the message is clear: the real difference between winning and losing, is having the courage to never give up.

Of course, I have to thank editors Scott Roberts and Edmund Schubert for their enthusiasm and insight. It's often said by professionals that no story is perfect, just finished. Or is it that no story is finished, simply abandoned?  Ed's comments were thus: something's dangling there at the end, we need more 'oomph' to make this thing matter.  Redressing the details leading up to the ending, I went in a direction Ed didn't expect. And with a little banging and cutting, it came out rather good. Good enough, anyway, for IGMS standards. Which is plenty good enough for me!

It's been terrific fun seeing my story headlining IGMS for the last couple of months. And I will treasure the Nick Greenwood artwork forever, as a stupendous realization of my character Jane Jeffords at the height of her personal drama: fists gripping the control bars, calves and legs clamped to the sides of the Falcon, the rear engines slewing dramatically as Jane's competitors jockey in the distance. And of course, Sally herself overseeing it all, her Hollywood grin belying a sinister intent. Marvelous. Simply marvelous. Thank you Nick, thank you Scott, thank you Edmund.

--Brad R. Torgersen

IGMS Awards Anthology Free at Amazon

The Kindle version of the IGMS Awards Anthology is free right now on Amazon!

Go get it while it lasts!

-Scott M. Roberts

Asst. Editor

Master Madrigal's Mechanical Man—Scott Mikula

By day I'm a software developer, so I'm well acquainted with the tension between perfection and pragmatism.  When software is "finished" it still has countless bugs and blemishes and I always cringe to see it go out into the world.  But the fact is, millions of people use the software every day and it generally does what they need it to do.  If we waited until it was perfect, it would never get used at all.

But software is business.  You have to make tradeoffs like that.  What about art?  If a painting, or a novel, or a performance has its desired effect on the audience, is that good enough, or does it deserve to be polished to perfection?  And artists need to eat too.  Where's the line between art and business, anyway?

But those questions are where this story ended up.  Where it started was a simple challenge to myself: take a science fiction trope and revitalize it by turning it into a fantasy story.  But what to use?  Computers?  There are a million opportunities there.  Space travel?  Hmm...  Robots?  That struck a chord.  What would be the fantasy version of a robot?  Maybe a golem, an artificial creature created from clay to do the bidding of humans.  No, I wanted a more literal robot.  But since this was fantasy, it would not be called a robot; it would be an automaton, and instead of being powered by electricity and controlled by circuits, it would get its strength from tightly coiled springs and be full of intricate gears and levers and pneumatic tubes.

From there, ideas zinged left and right.  Back to computers, I was inspired by the idea of computerized chess and the quest to develop a machine that could beat the world's best human players.  Deep Blue became my mechanical swordsman (and I suppose Garry Kasparov became Lybron, although any resemblance there is coincidental).  Madrigal's character was easy, but that's because he was a cliché: the too-proud inventor.  I needed someone to clash with him.  It was when I came up with my narrator, Cetta--the not-quite-apprentice, serving as his hands--that the story fully came to life.

I dislike twist endings that depend on hiding the main character's thoughts or motivations from the reader.  But this story had a problem: Cetta didn't actually grow or change by the end of it.  Giving the main character some sort of transformation is key to a satisfying story.  I saw an opportunity to do something I normally dislike: use an unreliable narrator to conceal one key motivation (although abundant clues to that motivation are scattered throughout) until after the fact.  The effect, I hope, is that even though Cetta hasn't been transformed, the ending is satisfying because your understanding of her has been.

As for me, do I agree with the choice Cetta made?  Maybe.  I'll say this much: I empathize with her.  I understand where she's coming from, and as far as this story is concerned she couldn't have done anything else.

--Scott Mikula

Thieftaker - By David B. Coe (writing as D.B. Jackson)

A bonus for all you story-behind-the-story fans: I invited David B. Coe, author of several stories published in IGMS, to talk a little bit about the creation of his latest novel, Thieftaker, especially the role short stories played in the shaping of the larger work, and boy did he deliver.

Enjoy.

Edmund

***

 

A week from today, my newest novel, THIEFTAKER, book one in the Thieftaker Chronicles, will be released by Tor Books.  Though this will be my first published book under the name D.B. Jackson, it is my thirteenth published novel overall. (I’m not superstitious.  Not at all.  But after typing that, I turned around three times, threw salt over my right shoulder, and drank water from the opposite side of a cup.  I’m not sure that will save me from bad luck, but my hiccups have gone away . . .)  With all those novels under my belt, you might think that I develop one project pretty much the way I’ve developed all the others.  But THIEFTAKER, a historical urban fantasy, has been different in a number of ways, not least among them the role that short fiction has played in my conception of the series.

            The historical element of the Thieftaker Chronicles lies at the very core of each volume.  The books are set in Colonial Boston in the mid and late 1760s, as the North American colonies are beginning to chafe at British rule.  Each book is a stand-alone mystery interwoven with a particular historical event. So, for instance, THIEFTAKER, the first volume, begins with the murder of a young woman, which coincides with the Stamp Act riots that swept through Boston in the summer of 1765.  With the second book, THIEVES’ QUARRY (Tor Books 2013), I blend another murder mystery with the British occupation of Boston, which began in September 1768.  For both books, the historical setting provides far more than a mere backdrop for the action; it informs nearly every aspect of my plotting and character development.

            Thieftaker and its sequels also differ from my previous books in that they are far more dependent on the voice of a single character.  Ethan Kaille, my protagonist, is the sole point of view character for the series.  My readers experience every event and revelation through Ethan; his perceptions, emotions, and senses suffuse the narrative.  I have sought to make his voice both as authentic and as sympathetic as possible.  This has demanded a fine balance.  I want Ethan to be clearly a man of the eighteenth century.  But I also want my twenty-first century readers to relate to him as fully as they would any contemporary character.

            Predictably, creating a believable setting and an engaging protagonist has required a great deal of research and background work.  It has also required what I would call, for want of a better word, “practice.”  And by practice, I mean the writing of short fiction.

            I should pause here to say that I love writing and reading short stories, and don’t view them merely as something we writers do to pave the way for our novels.  Far from it.  Some of the best work being done in the genre right now is in the short form.  But I would be lying if I didn’t also say that writing short stories is a terrific way for novelists to lay the creative groundwork for longer projects.  In fact, I would argue that working on shorter pieces offers (at least) five distinct benefits for novelists.

-- First, crafting short fiction helps us establish a writing style for the larger work, both in terms of setting a tone for the narrative and honing the voice of our point of view character (or characters).  The more we write in a world, and the more we use a certain character’s perspective, the more comfortable we grow with those narrative tools. 

-- Second, these shorter works give us an opportunity to experiment with story lines to see which ones have the potential to develop into novel-length works.  Sometimes a short story is meant to be just that; sometimes, however, as we dive into a story line, we find that there is more to the tale than we ever imagined, or than a short work can contain.

-- Third, short stories allow us to explore in detail episodes from our characters’ pasts that might be crucial to understanding their personalities, their circumstances, and their emotional reactions to all the terrible things we do to them in the novel.  The details we discover with such stories might never find their way into the book, but they give us more to work with as we develop character. 

-- Fourth, writing in the short form teaches us concision and forces us to be more precise with our wording.  The short form by its very nature demands a leanness and directness of style that can make all of us better writers. 

-- And finally, short stories give us something to market as we’re writing the longer work.  While lots of writers publish novels before they sell their first short stories, it remains true that having a short story sale to one’s credit can facilitate finding an agent and securing that first book contract.

            I had already signed contracts for the first two Thieftaker books before I sold a short story in the Thieftaker universe, but in every other respect I have used short fiction in the ways I just outlined.  I have improved the narrative voice of the books, learned a great deal about my main character, experimented with plot lines that I intend to work into future volumes, and honed my craft, all while managing to sell several stories.

            I won’t mention all of the stories here, but I will point you to a few of them.  One, “A Memory of Freedom,” appeared in the March issue of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.  It tells the story of how my lead character first became a thieftaker.  Another, “A Spell of Vengeance,” has just been published at Tor.com.  It introduces a villain named Nate Ramsey, who I expect will be appearing in future Thieftaker books.  And a third, “The Witch of Dedham,” can be read for free at the D.B. Jackson website (http://www.dbjackson-author.com).  This one is a character sketch more than anything else, but it was great fun to write and allowed me to further refine Ethan’s voice.

            Writing these stories has been its own reward.  I love the way all of them came out, and take a good deal of pride in the sales I’ve made.  But my point is that even if I had never sold any of them, the Thieftaker books would be richer for my having written them.  This will seem self-evident, but writing makes us better writers.  And because of the particular demands of the short form -- the need to construct tighter story arcs, the emphasis on brevity and economy, the close focus on character -- writing these particular pieces can’t help but improve our skills.  Even after fifteen years and thirteen novels (turn, throw, drink . . .) I still find that I learn something new from each short that I write. I have no doubt that the next Thieftaker book will be even better because of the stories I’ve written this spring.

--David B. Coe

The Snake King Sells Out—Rahul Kanakia

Perhaps I'm betraying my youth and class origins here, but the working world still feels very strange to me. In school, your primary business is the formulation of a personal identity.

The whole basis of the enterprise is that you don't really matter: you're a vessel that needs to be filled up with knowledge and then lobbed at some target. School is all about becoming something.

A school is like a home. It is forced to take you in, and it uses pretty heavy-handed measures to ensure compliance on your part. In school, the focus is on getting away with things and with testing limits and ducking the system.

But the working world is completely different. You're no longer presumed to be valueless. In fact, you're being paid for your time. And there's no longer that element of compulsion. If you don't want to be at your workplace, then they're happy to toss you out. Thus, a workplace contains less need for rebellion and differentiation. In the working world, your primary business is to learn how to generate as little friction as possible. In some ways, work destroys much of the personal development that occurred in school.

When I was in school, all my dreams for the future were subtly tinged by the flavors of school. My dreams were social dreams: I dreamed of myself as the colorful king of ever-larger playgrounds. I thought that success meant having the largest, most faithful, and best-connected clique. I took it for granted that life was played out at the level of the community. But, since graduating, my dreams have become more personal. I've started to see the transience of community. And my dreams have started to work on the level of environment. I've started to dream about inhabiting places (both interior and exterior) that are beautiful and free and full of interesting things.

I wrote this story when I was in the midst of this shift. I'd just left Washington, D.C. and was transitioning towards work as an independent consultant. I was no longer putting on a tie and going to work every day. In some ways, I was trying to go back to school. I'd moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area (where I went to school). I was wearing sandals and sleeping until noon every day. I was associating with many of my old college friends—people who'd never left the area.

At times I thought that maybe I was missing out. I felt like I'd left my community behind, and that it had continued to grow in my absence. I'd enjoyed my time in the jacket-and-tie world, but I was sad that it seemed to have stunted my growth: I felt like I was never going to be the off-beat, self-actualized person that I'd once dreamed of being.

I wrote the first draft of this story in January 2011. The story was originally much longer and ended in a very glum fashion: Perry realized that he could never regain the things that he'd lost.

After several rounds of revision resulted in the removal of about 1000 words from the story, I proceeded to include it in my writing sample for a number of applications to Master of the Fine Arts programs in creative writing.

Nine months later (at about the time that many [though not all] of those programs were rejecting me), I got an email from editor Edmund Schubert saying that he had a positive abhorrence for my chosen ending. However, if I wanted to rewrite the ending, then he'd consider publishing the story.

After several rewrites, I came upon the current ending. During the course of my revisions on this story, I was finally able to move the story past my personal experience and start using it to explore the various changes in the gay community over the past few decades and, more generally, in the evolution of various subaltern groups over time.

The final ending hit a note of hope and progress that I could not have achieved a year and a half ago, when this story was newly-formulated. I'm grateful to Edmund for seeing something
worthwhile in the story and offering me a chance to revise it. Since writing this story, I've had an exhilarating time. I've made friends, found new communities, and done some tremendous self-actualization. But I also feel like I've started to move beyond those school-boy dreams.

I no longer feel like I'm in the process of becoming something.

--Rahul Kanakia

Calling the Train—Jeff Stehman

Calling the Motivation

The prompt: "Write about a musical instrument that controls life and/or death." Short, simple, to the point. And it fell into my brain like a stone into a dry well. No splash, just a dull, distant thud.

Winter is my favorite season. It brings cross-country skiing and the Codex Writers' Group Weekend Warrior flash fiction contest. Five weeks, five prompts posted on Friday night / Saturday morning, a story with at most 750 words due Sunday night. Voting is open until it's time for the next set of prompts. Each writer's top three stories add up to a final score, winner takes all. (Since we're writers, "all" means the rest of us saying, "Hurray! You've won!" It's very prestigious.)

Competition, tight deadlines, an underdog against high-caliber opponents. This is my element. I look forward to each set of prompts with great anticipation, postponing any writing for a day or two beforehand so my brain won't get distracted with unfinished work.

At last the prompts go up, and I pounce! Which is to say I stare at them for 10-15 minutes, a sense of impending doom slowly building in my gut.

No lightning. No inspiration. Nothing to even pique my interest. My muse is asleep in the next room, and I'm not sure she'll ever wake again.

What am I doing in this group? Any moment now someone will point and say, "But he's not wearing any clothes."

To stave off depression, I immerse myself in something that will keep my brain occupied with anything other than writing. I don't actually vacuum the cat, but I sometimes vacuum up leftover pieces of the cat; futile, but time-consuming. A few hours later, my muse's unpaid intern will politely knock and say, "I have a few notes I thought you might want to look over." Yeah, I might be able to work with this.

By the time I go to bed Saturday night, I have a rough draft. And it's brilliant. Or clever. Or funny. I go to sleep happy. But in the night the writing gremlins come, and when I read the story again Sunday afternoon, it's dreck. Can I salvage anything from this? At least enough to submit a coherent story and avoid humiliation? 'Cause let's face it, after the trauma of reading the prompts and drawing a blank, not sucking is my primary motivation.

Fortunately, Sunday tends to be a long, slow day, and I can usually submit a story I'm satisfied with before going to bed. (Voting might imply my standards are low, but after-submission neuroses are a whole different kettle of fish.)

"Calling the Train" was my first flash fiction and my first Weekend Warrior entry, written in response (eventually) to the first prompt listed. It set the stage for all the entries to follow: blank stare; I'm doomed; distraction; well, maybe I can use this...

I can't wait until next winter. I just hope we get more snow.

--Jeff Stehman

Blank Faces—M.K. Hutchins

"Blank Faces" began with a rejection letter. I sent the rejected tale to another market and plopped down to write a new story -- a better one. I'm stubborn. I've always told myself that if I fail at writing, it's not going to be because I gave up. Often, I outline, but for "Blank Faces" I started with nothing more than the notion of writing a Western-flavored fantasy.

Perhaps because I didn't plan extensively, the ideas flowed from my past. I got my degree studying archaeology. One of the field's messiest ethical questions is if/when to dig up burials. Using bones stolen from Native American graves to power steampunk contraptions set the tone of the story for me.

Another crucial bit of this story came from my teenage years. I was put in charge of an organization and had to ask two other girls to pitch in as assistants. One of the girls I asked usually sat in the back row. She always acted out. "Team player" wasn't her best description -- and I heard adults complain about her frequently.

I don't think anyone had trusted her to be responsible before. The change was dramatic. She appeared to all meetings early, notes in hand, ready to work. In truth, I did almost nothing -- this girl volunteered for every task and delivered on her promises. The notion crept into my fifteen-year-old head that people often live up to the expectations of others.

Conversely, I liked that I was able to take a character who'd spent most of her life as a victim -- as a slave -- and have her be somebody remarkable. I've read a number of stories where the evil villain comes from an abusive background, and it inevitably depresses me. Where's the hope for recovery? Maybe I'm optimistic, but I loved writing Miss Annie. I couldn't help but think of Bishop Myriel from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, and the plot unfolded from there.

On the downside of writing without an outline, the story took several heavy revisions to get right. In the original draft, the curse only made people more violent and prone to steal; some of the characters doubted the curse even existed. It led to a flat, ambiguous story where the steampunk elements seemed disconnected from the whole. I tossed it in the drawer for several months before coming up with the idea of blank faces. The story now had something concrete to stand on, and better yet, dehumanized vision dovetailed nicely with treating human remains no differently than a lump of gold.

--M.K. Hutchins

Our Vast and Inevitable Death—S. Boyd Taylor

“Our Vast and Inevitable Death”, or OVID, as I like to call it, sprang from the collision of a variety of different ideas and memories. Tracking it’s genesis and evolution goes back not just years, but decades. You may find this surprising for a 750-word flash piece, but I do not. A lot of my writing is like this.

Let me start at the beginning: Somewhere around 1992, I read On the Beach, Nevil Shute's 1957 novel of what happens after a nuclear war. Basically, most of the world is dead, except for Australia -- no one had any reason to nuke them. So the last American submarines go to shore there, and everyone waits for the radiation that will eventually come in and kill them all. The book is about how different people react in the face of certain death, which is fascinating, and -- even though I was only 16 years old --  I swore I would one day write a Fantasy-genre paean to it.

The plan was to write a novel, of course -- specifically a huge, depressing, novel about villagers and soldiers and everyone else trapped inside a castle with the Boskee sitting outside, grinding away at the defenses with zero hope they could be stopped. Since I was 16, however, and as I had not ever written anything longer than 5,000 words, the novel soon fell to pieces and went off on tangents about completely unrelated things -- the moon crashing into the earth, the death of elves, blah blah blah.

But those damn Boskee would never leave me alone.

Fast forward about ten years, and I’m reading about Genghis Khan, and how he would slaughter every man in a city, if it resisted him (and sometimes even if it didn’t!). He was unstoppable, a force of nature. In the central square of Samarkand, the blood was waist-high from the beheadings. But for some reason, historians really seemed to like Genghis. One guy I read -- I cannot remember who -- kept going on and on about how he developed this huge communications network, and how quality of life improved for those under him, but I kept remembering all that blood in Samarkand. That stayed with me too.

And then one day not long ago, I’m trundling along, and I think -- I need a flash piece. I haven’t written anything close to standard Fantasy in years. Okay. So Fantasy.

How about I make it Epic Fantasy? Doing an epic in flash, that seems really tough. So I’ll need a huge war, people dying... Imagine here, if you will, the sound of gears clicking suddenly into place and the doors of an ancient tomb grinding open. And out comes Genghis Khan and the Boskee and On the Beach, and they all demand to be heard.

Suddenly there is Warlord Grig striding along the battlements ala the ghost at opening of Hamlet, and there is a conversation -- and then there are mountains with the name “Shan” after them (“mountain” in Chinese”) -- and then I am challenging myself to cram as much emotion as I can into this piece -- because emotion is the powerhouse of fiction -- and then, AHA, I know what I need, I know what will make this piece ring: I need a flash-forward!

Here’s my dirty little secret: I love flash-forwards. Too many people undervalue fiction in future tense. Heck, a lot of writing books skip it entirely, while they have an entire section on Second Person.

Cormac McCarthy does an excellent flash-forward in “Blood Meridian,” a really powerful scene where you find out that at three of the major characters will be dead inside a year. That’s where I really fell in lust with the technique and saw what it could do.

So I decide -- since it’s a powerful and rare technique, the flash-forward will be the emotional climax of the piece. The reader will see how everything plays out and how things progress, and then I will come back to the present for the denouement/falling action.

And then -- BOOM. It’s done. Standard editorial practices apply: a re-read later, then a first reader, and then submissions. And, wow, it turns out IGMS wants a story about the Boskee, Genghis Khan, and On the Beach. Who knew?

--S. Boyd Taylor

P.S. - The irony should not be lost on you that this blog post is almost as long as the story itself.

A Memory of Freedom—D.B. Jackson

Writing “A Memory of Freedom” was, in many ways, a journey of discovery for me. I have been writing about Ethan Kaille, the lead character in my Thieftaker Chronicles, for a couple of years now. The first book in the series, THIEFTAKER, was finished long ago, and will be released by Tor Books in July 2012. The second volume, THIEVES’ QUARRY is already in production. I have written several other short stories set in the alternate Colonial Boston I created for the Thieftaker series. But while I have known for some time the details of Ethan Kaille’s life, there have been certain elements of his history to which I hadn’t given much thought.

One of these was the simple question of how he first became a thieftaker. That was what I sought to figure out as I began writing this short story. I started off with a set of givens: Ethan has served nearly fourteen years at hard labor on a sugar plantation in Barbados for his involvement in a mutiny aboard a privateering ship; he is a conjurer, but he has eschewed spellmaking for years in part because he blames his conjuring talents for his involvement in the mutiny that ruined his life, and in part because he fears being hanged as a “witch,” a fate that befalls many conjurers in eighteenth century Massachusetts; he has returned to Boston broke, disgraced, alone and desperate to find some way to support himself; and while he is embittered by his past and all that he has lost, he has not yet given up his humanity. I also had some faint inkling of the small mystery that would present itself during the course of the story.

But as I started to write, I didn’t know how he would turn his current circumstances into a new life, nor was I certain how he would rediscover his aptitude for spellmaking.

Quite often, when working with characters who have become familiar to us, we writers give up planning and outlining, and simply trust that the characters themselves will tell us what we need to know in order to write their stories. That’s what I did with “A Memory of Freedom.” I don’t think I have ever known any character as well as I know Ethan, nor have I ever trusted a character so thoroughly. He didn’t disappoint me.

In the end, his embrace of a new trade and his return to conjuring allowed this tale to mark the transition from his old life to the new one about which I’ve written in other stories.

I should also take a moment to comment on the historical elements of this story and the Thieftaker books. I have a doctorate in U.S. history, and had long looked for a way to blend my fascination with history with my love of fantasy. In the Ethan Kaille stories, I finally have found the perfect vehicle for this combination. The Boston I have created for the stories and books is as true to actual history as I could make it, save for two rather significant historical conceits.

First, while there were thieftakers -- private citizens who recovered stolen items and, for a fee, returned them to their rightful owners -- in England throughout the eighteenth century, and while there were a few thieftakers in cities of the New World early in the nineteenth century, there is no evidence that anyone worked that trade in pre-Revolutionary America. There was no established police force in Boston at this time. The night watch was not an effective crime fighting force, and the Sheriff of Suffolk County had no officers working under his command. So it is quite easy to imagine that thieftakers could have worked the streets of the city. But as I say, there is no historical evidence suggesting that they actually did.

And second, as far as I know, there were no conjurers in the Boston of the 1760s. But I could be wrong about that.

-- D. B. Jackson

In the Fading Light of Sundown—Nancy Fulda

"In the Fading Light of Sundown" began as an entry in the yearly Codexian Idol story contest.  Codexian Idol is a beloved tradition in my online writers' group (which, if you haven't already guessed, is called Codex.)  Inspired by the popular tv show American Idol, the contest is run in three rounds.  In the first round, authors upload 500 words of a newly-written story.  The submissions that rank highest in the voting proceed to Round 2, in which the authors upload the next 1000 words, and the top-ranking stories proceed to the final round, in which the entire story is submitted.  Since the authors are writing the stories as the contest progresses, there's a sort of frantic scramble to keep up with your story as it proceeds from round to round.

Now, it so happens that my Nebula Nominated short story "Movement" began its existence as a Codexian Idol contest entry, exactly one year before I wrote "In the Fading Light of Sundown".  A lot of things went wrong for me in that contest.  I'd fumbled the opening of "Movement" a bit, and it got voted out in the first round.  This was good in many ways, because it helped me hone in on the critical conflict of "Movement" and put it right there in the opening scene; obviously a good decision given the way that particular story has taken off.

But... dang.  Getting booted out of the first round of Codexian Idol was a bit bruising to my esteem.

So when I wrote "In the Fading Light of Sundown", I took great care to introduce a vivid world, a character with heart, and a central conflict early on.  I also wrote the entire story during Round 1.  (This is legal.  It even says so in the contest rules.)  I'm often an organic writer, and I frequently go back and tweak a story's opening once I've finished the first draft and actually know where the plot is going.  Since Codexian Idol forbids you to change your first 500 words once they're submitted, the only way to be certain I'd gotten the opening right was to write the whole dang story at the outset.

The story seed for "In the Fading Light of Sundown" was a fabulous picture located by our contest coordinator.  The picture showed a boat, pulled up on a sandy shore, with roots sprouting from the planks and gnarling their way to the ground.  That picture became the basis for the Livewood and the central speculative premise of the story.  In choosing a character to sail my boat, I consciously chose to use an old man.  Why?  Because I was in the middle of writing several stories with young, spunky female protagonists, and I wanted to stretch myself.  With Tobis I was forced to tread new ground, look at life from a new angle and discover a kind of story I wouldn't otherwise have written.

I am very, very pleased with the way it all turned out.

--Nancy Fulda

Asst. Editor’s note: Ms. Fulda mentioned it above, but I thought I’d re-mention it for those that read quickly: her amazing short story, MOVEMENT has been nominated for a Nebula award.  The ending alone is strong enough to recommend it for a win, and that’s without considering the extremely well-composed beginning and middle. 

Here’s a link (in case you missed the one provided by Ms. Fulda in her write-up.

LINK

-- Scott M. Roberts

Free IGMS ebook - This weekend

The ebook version of the IGMS Awards anthology is going to be free on Amazon this weekend, from Saturday, March 24 through and including Monday, March 26th.

InterGalactic Awards Anthology Vol. I is a collection of stories from Orson Scott Card's award-winning magazine InterGalactic Medicine Show, spotlighting the winners of the magazine's readers' poll for best artwork and best short fiction.

Edited by Orson Scott Card and Edmund R. Schubert, this anthology also includes other popular stories from the magazine's six year run, as well as a new introduction by Peter S. Beagle.

Includes stories by such award-winning authors as Peter S. Beagle, Eugie Foster, Aliette deBodard, Marie Brennan, Alethea Kontis, recent Nebula-winner Eric James Stone, and many more.