It was the second week of Clarion. My first story written the week before had mixed success. The classmates were too nice and the instructor told me plain it wasn’t good enough.
I started with humor hoping it would be a softball. Not so much. Licking my wounds, I decided to write something Serious(tm) for the second week. I would show them (and me) I knew how to do this writing thing!
I worked hard all week on a story that wasn’t working. It was ambitious – multiple points of view, hard science bits, and a need to research autism. I sent drafts frantically to my friends Nyla and Darrin – cheating by having my stories read before workshop.
Before I knew it, I had less than twenty-four hours to turn in my second week story. The story that would become “Keep Talking” was nowhere near done.
I looked over my notes. A few days before, during discussion, I’d written down “Infinite boyfriends from infinite dimensions.” It was a line someone had said in response to some other line, a cribbed crumb of conversation. I seized on it.
But it was a funny line, a humor idea, and I’d said I was going to be serious! Damn it, I’d always found humor easy. Well, fine. Deadlines make decisions easier. I was going to write humorous stories until one stuck.
Premise: A mad scientist has the ability to pull people from alternate universes, and uses it to pull infinite boyfriends. I made the mad scientist my friend Stacey, and I gave her the Green Road Observatory as her Secret Lair.
This draft flowed from my fingers like water. It was so fun and easy. It just wrote itself. I decided that Stacey was helping a friend– made her more likable. I decided the friend had been dumped by a real terrible boyfriend, and Stacey would help her by trying to find the ideal version of her creep ex-boyfriend in the multiverse.
It was a hit! A modest but successful hit. At least, no one said anything about it that made me cry or doubt my ability to write.
After Clarion, I revised the story with my classmate’s notes, and I submitted it to my regular workshop, the Cajun Sushi Hamsters.
Other than one of my male colleagues (and yeah I am pinning it on him being male) declaring that the main character was “a complete bitch,” it went over well. Plus I got some new ideas how to make the ending worse… *cough* I mean… better.
In Feburary of 2015, the story was accepted by Sci-Phi magazine, a brash attempt at a science fiction magazine focusing on Philosophical science fiction. I was delighted. It would be my second sale of a Clarion story.
Yeah… Sci-Phi folded. There was a long, agonized period of hope that the magazine would continue, maybe online-only, but the rights reverted to me.
Darn, I thought. No one is ever going to know about Stacey and her guinea pigs and mad science.
Nine more submissions followed with rejections. When the “Women Up to No Good” anthology was announced, my heart was in my throat. Could there be a better description of my story than Women Up To No Good?? I submitted it. The 21st submission for this story, counting one previous acceptance. It was accepted on July 29th, 2017.
There was a kickstarter for the anthology that did not kick nor start. 🙁 It’s now up to you, friends, and the second kickstarter, to make sure the world knows just how viciously sarcastic I can be about ex-boyfriends, and the need for women to have friends (who are mad scientists.)
You want to buy a copy of something I wrote anyway, right? So pre-order your copy via the kickstarter and help it happen!
In case you missed the fact I put links there, here is the link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1431077765/women-up-to-no-good-0
Do it for mad science. For the dream of Infinite Boyfriends in Infinite Combination.
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