My very first novel, crafted in a yellow folder that held loose-leaf paper on those little metal tabs, was an attempt at autobiography. (There is a certain type of person who feels a need to write their autobiography at eleven, and I was one of them.)
Being possessed of a (frankly horrifying) life story everyone assured me would make excellent fiction, I chose to skip that garbage and instead write about a killer robot named Celeste, who was my secret best friend, capable of transporting me to another world where I was a super spy for a secret agency protecting humanity’s interests in the vast universe. (I also, for reasons only understandable to eleven-year-olds, padded out the space adventures with descriptions of walking to school and choir practice.)
As you do.
By high school I had revised the story a half-dozen times, growing it from kid-novel length to full on bad-first-novel length. Celeste now had a “brother” robot, Kent. His “Could we not kill all humans, though?” attitude was a foil for her. The Agency was less clean-cut as I slowly realized they acted more like bad guys than good guys, what with shooting things and secrets. I created new “good guy” characters to work against my previous protagonists.
I dreamed of Sequels and Trilogies. My sister Grace drew illustrations to encourage me to finish the stories she was the sole audience of. I had a habit of ending on cliffhangers. I knew how to do that. Resolving things… not so much.
In college, the internet sorta happened, and there was an ad in the paper (yes, the actual, paper newspaper!) for comic book creators to interview for a new online comic book company. InfoBän Comics. They would be the first ever! Internet comics! It would be A Thing! A Dot Com!
Yeah, you know, it was the 90s. Everyone was throwing darts at things and saying “Let’s be the first online one of those!”
Grace and I excitedly showed up with her drawings and a script I bashed together for a story where Celeste and Kent were mysterious bad guys, being investigated by Sandra and Andrei, a reporter duo. Andrei was the charismatic front man, Sandra the cyborg camera operator. Andrei quipped constantly and Sandra was silent, mostly narrowed eyes and frowns as she pointed out the clues. She would be the heavy hitter when action came and Andrei gave me an excuse to write snappy one-liners, my favorite medium.
We got the job! No pay, of course, but we would be paid, if the comics company made any money. We just had to produce 21 pages. In full color! We turned in a draft. I remember the comments so clearly.
“You wrote about an exciting Noir future and you drew… taupe. This story is not taupe.”
“Where’s the guy, though? You got a woman looking like THAT [points at Celeste posing triumphantly in a room full of dead bodies] and where’s the guy?”
“Oh there’s a guy! He comes in.” I was thinking of Kent, of course. And not quite understanding what he was talking about. I was naive in the way of “where the heck is my heterosexual tension” complaints.
Grace and I had big dreams, big hopes. We had wanted to do comics our WHOLE LIVES. But in the end, the company never took off. There were problems getting the images to view nicely, problems getting ads to work… these were the wild west days of Netscape 2.0… the project fizzled. We were left with nothing but 20 colored-pencil pages of Celeste: the comic, issue 1.
I never stopped playing with Celeste, Kent, Andrei and Sandra in idle half-drafts of things. I graduated college. I got a Real Job. I failed to Become A Writer. Decades passed.
I wrote a fun short story about Celeste and Kent time-traveling to 1930s Saint Luis after my football team had a rather terrible trip to Saint Luis. Was that 2010? This story actually got accepted! It was going to be my first pro sale!
The magazine folded and sent me a check for a share of their bankruptcy settlement. I wondered if they had only accepted the story so they had more people to give money before their creditors. No pro publication for me. boo.
I went to Clarion in 2013 at the ripe old age of 39, feeling half an imposter, trying to start my career after I was “past it.” But I attacked the challenge with zeal, vowing to write a story every week, and to make each story different. So in week four I decided I should write Action.
Everyone loves action. I was sure my lack of success as a writer was largely due to not writing enough tightly plotted ACTION. If I could pull this off, I was sure it would be my first pro sale.
(Silly me. My first pro sale was about a neurotic twenty-something blogging about work. But I digress.)
I had an idea for an action set piece…. a person would save their antagonist accidentally because they mistook the danger someone else was in. I’d been playing with a story where poor Andrei dies and lives on as a hologram only Sandra can see. Heh heh. It would be so awful for Sandra to save the killer robot Celeste because she thought Andrei, the ghost, would fall down a shaft.
I started right there, with the scene and the sequence of it. Celeste is fighting Sandra. Celeste falls and it looks like she is going to grab Andrei (the holigram) and take him down with her, so Sandra throws a sheet of metal under her to save them both, only realizing her error too late.
I wrote a simple outline of actions in order and easily turned those actions into descriptive paragraphs. It left me feeling powerful, transformed. Hollywood-esque.
I wrote backward and forward from this action climax, feeling good that for once I had a story with an action climax! I sent it to my friends Darrin and Nyla, who were secretly beta-reading all my Clarion stories, and they loved it–especially Darrin. “I see! You’re trying a different type of story each week and this week is action-adventure, and you did it great! This is my favorite story so far.”
I uploaded the story to the class drive after revision, feeling I had at last crushed it and would receive nothing but praise on the morrow.
Yeah no. The Clarion class did not love it. They found it confusing and too open-ended. What is this Agency Celeste works for? What are the motivations? I licked my wounds and revised.
After I got back from Clarion, I sent the story to the Hamsters. They had more pointers to make. Some asked, “Are they, like, dating or something, though? Sandra and Andrei? Do they like each other? You never say.”
UGH. What is with people and wanting there to be romance? I made Andrei gay. Then I made Sandra gay. THEY ARE BOTH GAY NOW STOP ASKING.
I sent that draft to someone and that reader asked, “Why is it so important that they are gay? I mean it’s okay that they are, but they keep thinking about hitting on people? And it’s like a life-or-death chase scene?”
Okay, there was a lot of action to get through and I realized a deadly struggle was no time to talk about your dating preferences, so I edited most of that out, but I tried to make it clear that they in no way had a romantic relationship.
I sent it out, got a personalized rejection from F&SF, one of my first, saying that the ending was too open-ended, almost as if it were part of a larger story. Hee. Oops.
I tried to tie up the plot of 20 years of imagined space epic so that it didn’t interfere with a 3000 word story so much. I thought of a better title, “Volatile Memory” and played that up in the manuscript. Because it was all about Sandra’s memories, see?
Well, so it went. Poor story gathered twenty rejections over the past six years and I almost lost faith in it. I re-wrote the beginning when a taste of slush reading taught me in medias rez violence was NOT the way to bring a reader comfortably into your tale. Then I got rid of all the cursing to send it to IGMS. Another rejection wondered why my main characters had no romantic tension. I gave in and added hints that, if things had been different, Sandra maybe would have liked to date Andrei. But she’s still bi. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?
Just this year, I sold a flash piece I’d written with Celeste! “Celeste and Bobby Fisher” in Daily Science Fiction. It felt like I could finally sell my old ideas?
No love for “Volatile Memory” yet. Revise, submit, reject, revise, submit, reject… I was running out of places I could send the poor story to, and it languished in my stories folder until, lo! Flame Tree had a call for Detective Thriller stories. I almost didn’t send it. I had a few other stories that I thought would fit better, but they were out at other markets. So I took a chance on my battered old favorite.
Sandra, Andrei, Celeste and Kent: It’s been a long, long road for y’all. Welcome to the majors, kids.
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