In 2001, I saw the movie “AI” which was about a robot that was designed to fall in love with a human. The little robot boy bonds to his “mother” and then goes on an adventure which includes a magnificent Jude Law as a gigolo robot and… that’s not the point.
I left the movie thinking, “You know, it’s far more likely, and a far more immediate problem, that people will fall in love with robots. Don’t we already? People fall in love with cars, with boats, with their laptop…” I would later read an article about men in serious, committed relationships with their Real Dolls, and those don’t even talk! (Though now, I’m told, you can sign up for a service that’ll send you AI-generated texts from your doll.)
So I wrote a story about a girl who was in love with a robot and realized she needed to choose between him and moving on in her life. I wanted it to not be romantic love, so I made it “He’s like my little brother!” I contrasted her with another character who had a lovingly-cared-for old car, and I titled the story “The Jalopy”, and I thought it was by far the best thing I had ever written. It had bittersweetness! It had developed characters! It had a sub-theme about planned obsolescence and the right to repair, which was very much on my mind as I had just had my brand-new sewing machine declared “cheaper to replace” by Sears. (I eventually had the machine repaired free of charge by a little old man on Larchmere who called it “a nothing repair. Easy”.)
My writing workshop liked the story and gave excellent feedback. I asked last month if any of them recalled the story from twenty years ago, but they didn’t. Alas, I lost my notes on that critique session. I only have vague memories of Maureen McHugh telling me I needed more of the pressures of academia in the story – that the character had to worry about her dissertation and experiments. I suspect my first draft had academia as more of a setting than a real place. I was working for the university in IT, and when I saw grad students, they were always hanging around anxiously watching me fix their lab unix machine.
I started sending the story out in 2003 or 4, but back then I used a homemade database to track submissions, and I lost that database in 2006 when the laptop died. (Back up your stuff!) In 2007, I started keeping track via spreadsheet, and then in 2014 I started using The Submission Grinder. Just letting you know that when I say I have 35 recorded rejections for the story, well, it’s not the whole picture. It was probably more like 50 or even 60.
I recall at one point there was an anthology call for “women scientists and mentorship” and I revised the story to bring out more of the character of Dr. Narayanan, adding some moments where she’s supportive to Hanh.
I sent it to an anthology titled “Automobilia” in 2016 and added more details about the Ford LTD Dr. Narayanan drives. (Yes, I based this detail on my friend Raj Narayan and his Ford LTD).
Many of the magazines it was rejected by no longer exist. Many only paid token or semi-pro rates. I tried a few literary markets, too.
When I re-read the story recently after yet another rejection, I thought, “Well, heck, I swear this is good! Why does no one like it?” And I noticed that the first line, “James swung his legs off the edge of the workbench, in perfect imitation of the teen boy he resembled,” was misleading, in that any reader would assume James was the point of view character and not Hanh. I moved the first line mentioning Hanh first. “Hanh tried not to look at the greasy fingerprints marking the seams in his skin.”
That… worked much better, for such a simple change. Two sentences switched in order.
Then I realized I had to change the title, because surely this had been rejected at every spec fic market already and they’d be mad at me for re-submitting. I chose “Cheaper to Replace” because it was a refrain throughout the story, and I saw, once I picked this new title, that it made the whole piece resonate differently. A good title does that. I suppose “The Jalopy” was one of those darlings I held onto too long.
So much of writing relies on tiny decisions – which sentence to start with, what title. Moving a word a few places forward or back can change so much.
Newly re-titled, I submitted the story to Clarkesworld, because I always send things to Clarkesworld first, and what a surprise! Neil liked it! He liked it! And so, 22 years after I started the story, my sad robot grad student finally has a home as my second sale to Clarkesworld Magazine.
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