It never rains, but it pours. At least that’s how it feels when you’re an author waiting for stories to sell, and then waiting for those stories to crawl into print. It’s been six months since “Three Knives” appeared in On Spec, and then suddenly two stories of mine dropped within a week and a half of each other. This happened last fall when “Discontinuity” and “The Librarian of Babyl” came out, and now it's happened again. My new stories this month have a special connection, which I’ll get to in a minute. But first, a taste:
“Bigger Fish” ~ Aurealis #155
“Here’s the scoop,” Hector said with a smile. “The planet Brobdin wants to eat you. That’s what it does. This world has nothing even remotely resembling plant life. Aside from some microbes that feed off thermal vents, everything here eats everything else. It’s a ‘kill or be killed’ world, and you’ll probably get eaten anyway for your trouble.”
Mora steered three cameras at once. She kept one in orbit around Hector’s head while another recorded the view through Gulliver Station’s meter-thick window, just beneath the surface of Brobdin’s world ocean. Hector gestured wildly for his imaginary audience.
“There are a billion hungry leviathans on this nightmare water-world. Stick with me and we’ll ride the back of one.”
Between one moment and the next, a god stood in front of my table. He’d squeezed himself into the form of a man wearing a gray business suit.
“I am Wealth. Don’t pretend not to worship me. Your presence is commanded by the Highest.”
Always knowing when people were lying made life among humans a headache, but being around gods was even worse. Everything they said was true by definition. When a god as powerful as Wealth called, it was more than a half-breed like me could resist.
What's awesome about these two stories coming out together is that, in their original forms, they were both written at pretty much the same time.
Turn the Wayback Machine to
2014, when I was gearing up for my 8th
NaNoWriMo. The year before, I’d done a serial novel which became my first draft of
The Whisper. This year, my goal was to write a month of short stories, from which I’d later pick the best, polish them off, and send them out for submission. My NaNo project that year was a success. The follow-through... less so. Instead, I let everything I wrote that month languish in authorial limbo and focused on my library career.
Fast forward to 2018. I’d quit the aforementioned library career and was busy circumnavigating South America with my wife (as chronicled in
The Escape Hatch). I also decided it was time to dig into that trunk of first drafts I wrote in 2014 and see if any were worth a second look.
The first one I tackled was “Bigger Fish,” a follow-up to
“River Ascending” that put the same characters into an even hairier dilemma. “Bigger Fish” had originally been written with the same non-sequential framing device that I employed in “Discontinuity,” which I’d finished in the first month of our South American odyssey. Not wanting to use the same trick twice, I flattened out the older story’s timeline so it flowed in a traditional, linear manner. By October (in Lima, Peru) I had it whipped into a shape that made me happy and started sending it out to editors to see if any would bite.
“The God In the Bottle” was a harder nut to crack. It’s a noir-ish urban fantasy with a tone I really love, but I felt it needed a heavier rewrite to get it into publishable form. I dug into it deep while trudging through Brazil in March, 2019, but I wasn't happy with it until May when we were in Columbia and almost ready to come home. I started sending it out in the summer as I was writing the first draft of yet another novel - one that will hopefully see the light of day soon.
Scroll ahead to the present, and both of these stories are out in the world! If you’re watching the clock, that’s a month shy of eight years between initial conception and publication. Four of those are my own fault for letting them sit in limbo so long, but the other four years just show the glacial pace of submitting short stories and awaiting publication. But now the wait’s over and both stories have a home. Follow the links and check them out today!
