Okay, this entry is going to be concerned with one story of mine, "Last Fare", if you'll indulge me, but I won't get too heavy into the story. This journal is about writing (mostly), so here we go.

As some of you may know, I sent this to Forrest Aguirre for Leviathan 4, and he had some very positive things to say about it, but thought it was too noir-ish for the anthology. I then sent it to Ellen Datlow for SciFiction, and again got some very positive comments from her, and even some questions about the story. Janet, Ol' Mike Jasper, and Jeff VanderMeer have all said it's a good story, one of my best.

I'm fairly certain this is going to be my big breakout story, the one that gets noticed by the big boys, the one that gets me paid more than ten dollars.

So I submitted it to my fiction-writing workshop, run by the young Dr. John Kessel, to get some more feeback on it, but mostly to find out from John what I could do to make it irresistable. It got critiqued last night, and it was very well received by the class, to my surprise. This group of students, as opposed to the one when I took this class as an undergrad, seem to be more open to reading science fiction; more than a few said that they normally don't read sf, but that they really enjoyed the story.

There were a lot of questions about the mechanism of the sf I employed, which I thought were fairly clear, but apparently weren't, even to John. Most of it was about how the dead were reanimated in the first place, to what purpose it was done, what the dead looked like, how they could feel pain, etc. John came up with a good fixall for this one: to change the reanimated dead into people that are alive but infected with some biological agent, a new AIDS or something, to which the bad guys offer a temporary fix to stave off death.

I met with John this morning to talk a little more about it, and he was asking some hard questions about it. He said that if I was going to write sf in the class, that he was going to hold me to a high standard, which I appreciate. There are still a lot of things I need to think about in terms of the characters and the situation, though, in order to make this better. He said that if the story had been submitted to Sycamore Hill, these are just the questions that he and everyone else there would be asking, which gave me an odd sense of pride, that he would even deign to associate the story with that workshop. It sounds like, from what he told me this morning, that it's publishable as it is, but that he wants to see it at award-winning quality, and that it has that potential.

So if any of you out there feel like lending a professional eye (or even a semi-pro eye), email me and I'll send you the story for critique. I was going to try to submit this to Polyphony 4, but at John's request, am going to work on it and study it this semester. This will be my project, to get "Last Fare" in the best possible condition it can be in before sending it out again. Any help would be much appreciated.

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Now Reading:
Little Gods by Tim Pratt

Stories Out to Publishers:
6

Books Read This Year:
37

Zines/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
33