My story “Jupiter Wrestlerama” is now available free on Lightspeed’s website.
Brian and I went to Niagara Falls for the weekend in February of 2003. We walked around admiring icicles and got lost. We ended up in a residential area, with a long slog on un-cleared sidewalks to get back to The Strip. On our side of the road there was nothing, umkempt brambles bare for the winter, and on the other, neat rows of bungalows extending back, block after block. Yet you could still see the colorful lights of the tourist area through the dreary, ordinary trees.
“I wonder what it’s like, living here,” I said to Brian. “For the ordinary people, living in their small houses, this is a small town, but there’s this monstrous mini-city around the falls, full of people who will never come back here.”
We talked and walked and as we did I worked up the idea for a story I started writing when we got back to the hotel. I called it “Jupiter Wrestlerama,” because I was fascinated and repelled by the “Wrestlemania” attraction on the strip. What went on in there?
I was working hard at being an SCA fighter, so I wrote my female main character as having a dream of becoming a wrestler. The journey from non-athletic to competing with men was very much on my mind. I needed a plot, and I am no good at plots, so I decided to make it a murder mystery. “Murder at the Jupiter Wrestlerama” I re-named it.
I never could get the mystery part to work. I tried. I introduced lots of characters and tried out each one as the murderer. Eventually I picked one to be the killer and I added more hints and clues and a climactic fight scene.
It felt forced.
I sent the story out for the first time in October of 2012, after my writing workshop had a crack at it and more revisions. It got seven more rejections, and I tweaked it a little bit after each one.
In May of 2013, after hemming and hawing, I chose it as one of my two audition stories for the Clarion writer’s workshop.
Andy Duncan, our first week instructor, gave me lots and lots of encouraging feedback. “In your next draft,” he said, “which will be 10,000 words long at least, you will not rob your reader of the chance to see a wrestling match.”
Point. I had revised away all the “Karen becomes a wrestler” stuff and now there was no Wrestlerama in it! I re-read the story and Andy’s notes and ended up with a very simple fix – I took a scene that was in a corridor and had it take place instead in the audience of a wrestling match. It didn’t add the 5,000 more words Andy wanted, but I felt it was a stronger story.
I sent that out, and it got rejected.
I should add that sometime before Clarion I decided to take the mystery out of the story entirely – yes, my story about a girl becoming a wrestler that became a murder mystery was now neither. The core of the story had always been small-town life, and I made it a story about that. I felt I had reached the point where I could make it a story just about that. Weirdly, I didn’t have to change the story to much to make it NOT a mystery. I just… got rid of mysterious bits. Had the truth pop out clean and clear right away. It made the story darker. I added an extra paragraph to the end, where I really thought about what the story was about and tried to present that as honestly as I could.
My next rejection letter, from Strange Horizons, said, “It’s a great story but the mystery didn’t work for me. I mean… the guy who did it is the first guy she suspects!” I screamed “It’s not a mystery!” at the innocuous email, and made one more edit.
I cut “Murder at the” from the title and sent it to Lightspeed.
And now, in October of 2014, Jupiter Wrestlerama ends its ten-year journey to be published in the current issue of Lightspeed Magazine. You can read it free online, or listen to it, or purchase the issue. Consider making a purchase – I want editors to associate giving me money with making money. 😀
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