Banshee, and the Slow Cooker Process: 2013 in Review, Part Three

The other big milestone, in terms of what I've been writing, that I hit in 2013 was getting solidly underway on Banshee. 

Banshee is a project that's been stewing in the back of my mind for a long, long time, and has gone through several permutations in that slow cooking process.

Part of the reason I took such a long time to get around to this is the little promise I made to myself to finish the first books of my four "Maradaine" series before I really moved on to a new major writing project.  I'm not entirely sure why I felt I had to do them first, but that's how I felt, but on some level it was probably a good thing.

Because the Banshee I would have written several years ago is not the work I'm writing now.  Not even remotely.  Essentially everything except the central character (Lt. Samantha Kengle) and the name of the ship (and only tangentially) is different now.  And in the older versions, Lt. Kengle was more the nominal lead in an ensemble, and now she's in the central spotlight, the only POV character. 

Part of that had to do with the worldbuilding.  I started the Space Opera setting that Banshee lives in way back in 2002, but it's evolved and grown a lot in the past eleven years.  As have my writing skills.  My first attempts at Banshee, some of which reached nearly 50,000 words, were all wrong.  Essentially fanfic for a universe that only existed in my head.  It was only after I really started to interrogate what the story was, and who it was about, and why it was about them, that the pieces really came together.

When I shipped Way of the Shield off to the agent, Banshee was really ready to go like gangbusters.  And in about three months, it's about two-thirds to three-quarters done.  Not too shabby.

So that was 2013, which turned out to be a pretty good year for my writing. And I have a very good feeling that 2014 will turn out even better.

Way of the Shield, and the Geena Davis Rule: 2013 in Review, Part Two

The next big milestone of accomplishments in 2013 as finishing the draft of Way of the Shield, cleaning it up and sending it off to the agent.  He just recently sent it back to me, so now I've got a last round of tweaks and polishes to put on it before sending it back to him to put out into the world.

Long time readers will be aware that Way of the Shield was something of an albatross around my neck for much of 2012.  I was working on it and it simply wasn't coming together at all.  I had actually decided to put it to the side and focus on other things early this year, but it kept poking at me until I cracked the problem I had been having with the antagonists.  It actually came together when my beta reader/sounding board guy asked me a simple question regarding Way of the Shield, and that brought about a breakthrough in writing out a long and complicated response.  Doing that brought me from a manuscript languishing at around a third of the way done to complete in two months.

Breakthroughs can work like that.

The other thing I did with Shield, both in the original draft and again in the current clean-up, was confound the gender expectations of the old knightly orders that Dayne is a part of.  Druthal and Maradaine are hardly a paradise of gender equality, but I wanted the Orders to reflect the idea that anyone who gets through the training process is considered an equal.

But my first chapter had no female characters. 

Then I was thinking about this bit of advice Geena Davis recently gave regarding female characters in Hollywood movies, advice I think can easily apply to genre fiction as well:

Go through the projects you're already working on and change a bunch of the characters' first names to women's names. With one stroke you've created some colorful unstereotypical female characters that might turn out to be even more interesting now that they've had a gender switch. What if the plumber or pilot or construction foreman is a woman? What if the taxi driver or the scheming politician is a woman? What if both police officers that arrive on the scene are women — and it's not a big deal?

And it stuck me, if I've already established this idea that the Orders have more gender equality than the culture at large, then why not just have Dayne's chapterhouse master in Lacanja (the city Way of the Shield starts in before Dayne returns to Maradaine) be a woman?  I never gave Master Thall a given name, male or female, to begin with, so rewriting the scene involved little more than some pronoun switching.  But, I think, it will have a strong effect on the worldbuilding of the Orders, which will ripple through the rest of the book-- which already has many female characters in a variety of roles.

Regardless, as I mentioned back in May when I finally finished the draft, it felt very good to get this particular project out of its long, slow, "work-in-progress" state.

Jump the Black- 2013 in Review, Part One

On January 1st, 2013, I sold Jump the Black to Rick Klaw's Texas-themed sci-fi anthology Rayguns Over Texas, which was my first pro-level genre sale.*

I haven't ever really talked about the story itself, as it didn't seem appropriate when I first sold it. 
When it was coming out, it made more sense to talk about the anthology as a whole. 

I should preface this by saying I'm really not a short-story writer.  It's just not a format I have a lot of affinity for, and I don't tend to write them without a specific purpose or plan.  However, "invited to submit to this anthology" works very well as a specific purpose or plan. 

So, I received the invite and remembered a nugget of an idea that I had had for a sci-fi story.  It was little more than this: A sci-fi future with a large interstellar, multi-alien community, but Earth isn't a part of it.  Earth is the place you leave to have opportunity.  Earth is Mexico.

I did some research into border crossings, the lengths people go to in order to get in the States.  I thought about "coyotes"-- those who "help" others get across the border, and the methods they use to do it.  The conditions people will submit themselves to, the trust they will place on those bringing them, and the hope that when they emerge on the other side that an opportunity will be there that will make it all worth it.





And I wanted something in there that could be a direct allegory to swimming across the Rio Grande. Thus "jumping the black"-- where the smuggled humans, freshly awoken from the paralytic "sleep" they were put in to avoid getting noticed by the scans-- have to leap through empty space from the smuggler's cargo hold to a port left open on the space station, so that they're off the smuggler's ship before his cargo gets inspected.  If the humans jumping don't make it safely... that's their problem.  Also, if they get caught right when they get in the station, their problem. 

I really enjoyed writing this, and it definitely clicked one big button for me: I could write a lot more of it.  I kept it at 4000 words to make it fit easily in the anthology, but I could easily expand the story to novella length, building out what happens next once the humans make it off the rock.

But, as I said, selling that on January 1st was an excellent way to start 2013, and I was quite pleased to see it in print in September.

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*- My story for The Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction was paid at over a dollar per word, but it was only 21 words long.  Twenty-two with the title.  But it wasn't genre.