If it's okay for Billy

I'm a great believer in it being bad karma to talk about stories before they're picked up by a venue.  So it's proved with my rewrite for Solarpunk, which they didn't like enough to take.  Win some, lose some, move on.

So, let me test the writing-gods once more by relating another rewrite request.  This one's for Shoreline of Infinity, for which I have a certain fond regard.  I've exchanged emails with editor Noel Chidwick, who comes across as genuine and approachable. It's British - proudly Scottish - so I get the sense that we're a bit more aligned in our sensibilities compared to some of the more overly-focus grouped and offended-on-behalf-of-others American venues.  I know the editor of The Best British Science Fiction has a lot of love for it.  Plus I see it's recently put its rates up.  Obvs, it's the last one that really counts.

My story having been with them since last June, this was the feedback I got:

Very well written and observed - it cracks along at a fair pace. At first I was thrown by the genre-mix: cop/crime-alternate reality/fantasy... But by the end, I think it worked. I was convinced. However, the problem I have is that it's a first person story in which the narrator appears to be heading towards her death. So how did she relate the tale? And if she survived, how? If the story could be rewritten in the third person, I think it'd work far better.

Now, I'll say straight up, that I've never had the slightest problem with the idea of a first person narrator - the 'I' of the story - dying.  If it was okay for Billy Wilder, it's okay for me.  And I'm aware that we're not alone, Billy and me.  In fact, I've struggled to see what the objections could be, and this from somebody who would rather be torn apart by wild animals than do up the bottom button of a waistcoat.

The Moonlighting Writer suggests those reasons may be because:

• you annoy your audience (answer: I write to unsettle);
• it's jarring (answer: this particular ending is the cliff-hanger where the narrator may or may not die, so I'd say it's a natural ending); or,
• it robs you of the possibility of a sequel (answer: it's a short story, and I don't think I've ever written the same character twice)

My understanding is that Sunset Boulevard got a fair amount of stick at the time for the device, although it doesn't seem to be coming to the surface of my Google searches.  Perhaps I read it in Cameron Crowe's excellent Conversations with Wilder, which I no longer have, or perhaps I've misremembered?  If true, I suspect it was more the shock of the new than a fundamental feeling of being cheated.  If anything, Sunset Boulevard merely kicked the door open for hoards to follow - just look at the examples on that TV Tropes link. 

Thinking it through, I can only conclude that for you, dear reader, these characters we paint through black pixels on white, or inky scribbles on paper, are real.  They're not the constructs they are for the writer, who builds them from some skeletal armature, chooses their clothes and voice and gait and preferences and tics.  It's a game for us, but, hey, you buy into it.  You really buy into it.  Perhaps that's the fundamental difference between writer and reader.  You don't see behind the curtain.  Maybe you don't even want to see behind the curtain...

Of course, when it came to the rewrite itself, principles disappeared.  I may have just painted the writer as god, but compared to editors...

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And, just to try to balance the karma out a bit, some news on a story that has been taken: Medusa Tales, who publish 'stories of transformation', will be running Devil Ray at the Doorway, my tale of a bad mermaid in a tsunami.

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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.