When I wrote my first “novel” in elementary school, I created this character, Celeste. She was a snarky robot from the future with little regard for human life. She was the one facet of that work that survived its re-writing in middle school and again in high school. I loved writing her snappy come-backs and wanton destruction. At first she could transform into a motorcycle or one-person helicopter, but I abandoned those parts of her early on as “too derivative.” (I was a big fan of Knight Rider and the Transformers.)
Come to think of it, Celeste may have started as a play-time make-believe, as I pretended my bicycle was a motorcycle with an intelligent AI I could talk to as I toodled around the neighborhood.
Years passed. I never published that original novel (you’re welcome!) but I kept playing around with Celeste as a character when I got bored writing “serious fiction”.
Back in 2005, I wrote a quick vignette of Celeste playing chess. I was obsessed with the musical “Chess” at the time, and jotted down the title “Celeste and Bobby Fisher” and just went from there, creating a quick thousand words of back-and-forth banter.
It wasn’t a story, quite. It had a punch line, or rather it had several punch lines, but no set-up.
Still, I sent it out to a few places that take flash fiction and gathered rejections.
I wrote other Celeste stories. “The Silver Dame and the Box of Mystery” actually got accepted… and then the magazine folded. “Volatile Memory” I wrote during Clarion and has yet to find a home. I started selling stories, but I’d never sold anything with my favorite character in it.
About a year ago, I was cleaning out old files on my hard drive and found that quick flash piece again, read it and said, “Huh, this is pretty good, actually.” The jokes still landed. I tried to add more of a situation and setup to it. I expanded it to over 1,300 words, then panicked and started cutting it back down so it could still go to flash markets.
I ended up mostly cutting things I’d just added, and the piece that appears in Daily Science Fiction now is not that far off from the original vignette! I added a new opening sentence to give it a setup and a new last line to give it a feeling of an arc.
So… could I have sold this back in 2005? Past-me will never know. But now at last the world can meet my childhood best imaginary friend:
Celeste and Bobby Fisher at Daily Science Fiction.
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