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Or, "What Possessed You To Write That?



Warning! Possible Spoilers Ahead!


Sometimes there is more to a story than meets the eye. I suspect it's true that there is often more to a story than meets its writer's eye. We do not fully comprehend our own complexities, but if we are fortunate, those complexities can still work in our favor.

These short pieces on certain of my stories are my attempts to show what I had in mind for them. You will be the best judges of whether I succeeded or not. I realize this may be akin to the magician revealing his secrets--but then, I'm probably hiding some of those secrets even from myself.

Featured Stories

Mortal Instruments
Live Bait
The Hanoi Tree
String of Pearls

And more to follow.


"Mortal Instruments"

I began writing with an eye to publication in the autumn of 1994. Like so many naive souls before me, I thought I would make a quick and impressive splash. Well, so did the Titanic.

A year went by with nothing but form rejection letters from a variety of magazines. Another six months passed, with no improvement, save a brief letter from Stanley Schmidt, editor at Analog, regretting that a particular story didn't quite meet their needs. The astonishing thing is, I didn't even open that letter. I had grown so accustomed to thin envelopes and what they carried, I simply filed it away unopened, another rejection like all the others.

By the summer of 1996, I was discouraged, though still ramming my head against my chosen brick wall. I doubted myself intensely. I believed I would never sell. Only the stark dread of failure, and an almost pathologically stubborn streak in me, kept me going.

Still, I dwelt on my failure. I wondered what I lacked ... and I wondered what price I would pay, what sacrifices I would make, to gain the ability I so fervently craved.

Being an aspiring writer, I wrote that down as a story idea. Really, half a story idea. Perhaps someday something else would come along to complete it.

What came along was a newspaper article on cybernetic vision, using implants to allow people who had become blind to regain some sight. Practical applications were still a decade or two down the line, but the processes and the hardware had been well worked out.

It began falling together. From cybernetic sight, I leaped to cybernetic hearing. From my own writing frustrations, I developed the idea of a professional musician balked in his ambitions by 'deficient' hearing. Much research remained, primarily in the musical field, but I had my story--my catharsis.

My confidence did not return as swiftly. I submitted the story to a smaller SF publication which has since folded. The editor liked the story, but had no room in her inventory for it. Emboldened by this promising reply, I sent it off to Analog. Fortunately, Stan did have room in his inventory.

How much ordeal and sacrifice would I be willing to endure for success? Thankfully, I may never know. By asking the question the right way, I found for myself a much more lenient answer.

Read "Mortal Instruments"

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"Live Bait"

The question many writers hear, and dread, most often is "Where do you get your ideas?" A variant of this is "Where did you get that idea?" The premise of "Live Bait" is the kind that draws the second question. Fortunately, I have a ready answer: My editor.

Stanley Schmidt wrote a book entitled Aliens and Alien Societies a few years ago, as a guide for science fiction writers wanting to create plausible extraterrestrial lifeforms, from biology to sociology and most things in between. There is a section in the chapter "Engineering Organisms" where he discusses various means of locomotion in animals(and plants, but that's another speculation). One paragraph on water mobility mentions jet and rocket propulsion, used by some octopi and squids. To quote:

However, in those animals it's only practical for occasional short bursts, and it's a little hard to see how it could be adapted to routine, continuous, long-term transportation.

Two pages before that, he also notes that "science fiction writers take statements like that as challenges." Well, I certainly did.

My solution came with surprising rapidity: peristalsis. The same variety of rhythmic muscular contractions that gets your lunch where it's going could also serve as a continuous propulsive mechanism. It would take a lot of specialization to make it work well, but hey, so did flying.

That's where my first idea came from. The second one arose because I imagined these alien creatures as being of whale-like size--naturally more interesting in a story than having them the size of trout. It's only with something that big that anyone could possibly get the idea of--but I think I'll just invite you to read the story, if you haven't already, and find out.

One last thing: if you've looked into my other writings, you may recognize several names that appear in this story. I wrote this tale during my time at Grudge Match, and, well, perhaps I got a little carried away. I promise you, though, there are almost no inside jokes involving them hidden within this story. Two at most.

Read "Live Bait"

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"The Hanoi Tree"

Warning! Definite Spoilers Ahead!

One of the more unusual facts regarding me as a science fiction writer is how late I began immersing myself in the written genre, and how shallow my knowledge of it still is in many respects. This sometimes puts me at a handicap in my writing, because I don't know which ideas are fairly fresh, and which have been mined out. When I decided in mid-1994 to make a serious run at becoming a writer, I had the advantage of having recently come across dozens of back issues of Analog in a friend's attic. I spent a lot of time reading through them, and through collections of classic stories I checked out of libraries in two counties. This self-directed lesson in SF writing helped, but it was by no means exhaustive.

One of the stories I wrote before I started selling involved a teenage girl's friendship with a deeply troubled and introverted classmate. The reason for his psychological distress, which she discovered bit by bit, was that he was telepathically sensitive to others' emotions--but preponderantly their negative ones. It was the first time I had worked in this area of speculation, and nearly my last.

The story never sold. I submitted it to Analog some while after making my first sale to Stanley Schmidt. He, of course, has a deeper knowledge of SF history, so he knew how Analog(and Astounding, its earlier title) had focused a great deal on stories about telepathic powers during the latter years of John Campbell's editorship in the 50s and 60s. Longtime Analog readers had had more than their fill of such stories, he assured me, and only something that broke very new ground could break through that resistance.

Okay. I can take a hint. However, I can also feel the embarrassment of exposed naivete keenly enough to want to erase it, to do better next time. I wanted to visit the 'psychic powers' area again, but obviously it would have to be in very different form. Fortunately, science fiction specializes in different forms.

Remote telepathy is passe? Okay, how about telepathy by physical contact? You say that's impossible in humans? (As if ESP and such weren't impossible, or very nearly so.) Then it won't be in humans. The two juvenile protagonists, and their difficulties in coming to understand each other, I kept. "The Hanoi Tree" may be utterly dissimilar to that earlier story, but two of the underlying ideas in the framework of each story are very similar indeed.

Three notes before I close. First, the turbulent relationship between Kevan Marek's parents is fictional, but the underlying emotions, and Kevan's perspective on them, are very familiar indeed to me. I won't go into personal details, but this is a case where lack of fact does not mean lack of truth. (That is a cliche which I frankly detest when it is applied to real world events, usually with heavy doses of cynicism, self-serving, and hypocrisy. Fiction, though, is its own world with its own rules, which in a sense depends on that cliche for its power. The trouble, I guess, is keeping the two separate.)

Second, this story is rather old. I wrote my first draft in January 1998, and at that time, one of my secondary characters was named Rachel Lewinski. Now, remember what burst onto public consciousness in January 1998? ... She became Rachel Levitski fast.

Third, there are some odd coincidences in the issue of Analog in which this story appears. First, the story is set in the Sigma Draconis system, which turns out to be the setting of another story in that issue: Diane Turnshek's "Hullabaloo." Part of the reason I set the story in that system was so I could make a throwaway joke about the colony's primary computer: Spock's Brain. You may well be familiar with that infamous Star Trek episode, where Mister Spock has his brain kidnapped in order to run the life support systems of an underground colony of women--in the Sigma Draconis system. Well, someone else was familiar with that episode. In Kyle Kirkland's science fact article "Brain-Machine Interfaces" in this same issue, he says his interest in that area was first piqued by the "Spock's Brain" episode of Star Trek!

Stan, did you do this deliberately!?

Read "The Hanoi Tree"

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"String of Pearls"

The action in "String of Pearls" centers around an alien game of the same name, played with tiles representing language units laid onto a multicolored board. This is not the most subtle parallel I've ever written: String of Pearls is patterned directly after the very human game of Scrabble. And I, very human as I am, was a tournament Scrabble player for several years.

I got sucked into the tournament Scrabble scene, fittingly enough, through a book. Word Freak, by Wall Street Journal sports writer Stefan Fatsis, follows him as he explores the world of Scrabble played at its highest level - by becoming a tournament player and striving to play the game at its highest level. He gets to know the fascinating and often eccentric experts at the heart of tournament play, examines the origins and development of both the game and the strategic analysis of the game, and lays open his own mounting obsession with Scrabble as he tries to climb into the ranks of the elite players. It is a sign of good writing when an author can transfer his enthusiasms to the reader - and by that standard, and others, Fatsis wrote a very good book.

So began my own milder (I think) fixation with Scrabble. I studied structured lists of words, encountering plenty of words very few people have ever seen, but which are in the source dictionary for the game and hence acceptable for play. I got weekly practice at a local Scrabble club in Somerville, New Jersey (hi there, Scott), getting to meet several interesting and occasionally eccentric players myself. I began playing in tournaments: some in New Jersey, when I could find them, plenty of one-day affairs in Queens and Philadelphia, and bigger tournaments farther afield. And through it all, I kept studying, kept producing new lists of words to study, kept drilling myself on words I had learned but had to remember perfectly to play at my best.

And as the effort mounted up, as I strained harder and harder for smaller marginal gains, I came to realize that the game had become work.

No doubt this happens a lot in such circumstances. It's difficult to imagine a chess grandmaster having as much fun with his game as a casual player of whatever skill level, especially during his many, many hours of study. Baseball players put a whole lot of practice and physical training into their profession, and while the games themselves are probably still fun, the hours of lifting weights and fielding practice grounders behind each game are far less so. As your skills rise, the room left for improvement narrows, and the more sweat you have to pour into gaining that next quantum of ability. I got a pretty good taste of that.

I also got a taste of something on a more philosophical level, something Fatsis himself observed in Word Freak. Like chess, Scrabble at its higher levels becomes solely about itself. At lower levels, it is a useful tool to train your mind to think better: in Scrabble's case, it can also be a method for expanding one's vocabulary. But as one strives for elite skills, the ancillaries fall away. It becomes an impediment to learn the definitions of your new Scrabble words. You are far better off concentrating your finite brain power on pure memorization of the words themselves, perhaps also learning their parts of speech so you know when you can or can't add a strategically vital S or D, a RE- or an -ING. The words lose meaning as words, and become mere scoring patterns, as some Scrabble masters freely admit. The game approaches something like pure mathematics, which is fascinating in one sense - but in another, costs it quite a lot.

Marcus Parrish reaches such a realization in "String of Pearls." He is concentrating so much on the game as a game, he has begun to forget that it is a means to learn an alien language, not an end to reverse his own humiliations in Bunwadde's household. It is only when he sees and rejects this blind alley that he can start to see their language on its own terms again, and his insight finally comes.

This wasn't why I ended up quitting tournament Scrabble - I had other reasons to make the break - but it is something I learned from the game, something I am liable to remember longer than many of those weird and wonderful words I learned.

Thus forewarned … if you have a sudden Scrabble itch to scratch, and Word Freak isn't enough for you, go take a gander at the National Scrabble Association's website. Who knows what might come of it?

Oh, and just to satisfy the lawyers: Scrabble is a registered trademark of Hasbro. Not trying to infringe, though that ought to have been pretty clear.

Read "String of Pearls"

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