Anthology sale!
Mar. 23rd, 2006 08:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydamorehouseI just found out a couple of days ago that a short story of mine "ishtartu" will be included in a collection of lesbian erotica. It's edited by Lynne Jamneck and will (hopefully!) be out some time in early 2007. It's tentatively titled "Periphery -- Erotic Lesbian Futures."
For anyone out there who might be a fan of my AngeLINK universe, this story takes place in it -- though not with any characters from the books. There is a lesbian in the AngeLINK series (Rebeckah), but I decided against using her because I wanted to write the story in a future Minneapolis, for one, and with a character who has a religious crisis, which Rebeckah isn't known for. :-)
This story was actually really difficult for me to write. I rarely write to market, but the guidelines for this particular anthology excited me so much that I took the time out of my novel writing time to devote to this short. One of the reasons I don't write very many short stories is that they're very hard for me, and the amount of time I spend with them doesn't ever seem very cost effective -- I think I "wasted" three months on this, and three months is a lot to take away from a novel under contract (especially given that a sale is not guaranteed).
Anyway, the story went through at least three complete drafts. The last one was a complete and utter overhaul. The characters remained the same throughout, but nearly everything else supporting them changed (including, of all strange things, setting.) My second to last draft had our heroine Edie, the holy prostitute whose had a crisis of faith and has vowed to do one last job before hanging it all up, travelled to rural Wisconsin to visit the client. I ended up ditching that setting because it took too long for Edie to get there and, in the end, there was no good reason to keep it. The only thing I'm kind of sad about is that you almost never see future rural settings. I was really hoping to score with the future farmers of America with this story.
But, seriously, when do you see farms (or farmers) in science fiction? Okay, so Luke Skywalker was a moisture farmer on Tatoonie. But, there the farm really just represents something to break free from. He's not the hero BECAUSE he's a farm boy (he's the hero because he's the classic cliche of a lost heir with the hidden superpowers to defeat the evil empire). Okay, so James T. Kirk was from Iowa. That does not a farmer as hero make.
I was really hoping to get a story in print that had a heroine who was living and managing the farm of the future. It was fun too, because although I'm not from a farm, I lived near plenty of them when I grew up in LaCrosse, WI. It was fun for me to try to imagine how, if at all, farming would change in the next, say, hundred years. A lot, I decided, especially given how family farms are becoming more and more run as part of larger corporations (and, anyway, this sort of political statement worked nicely in a cyberpunk future.)
I also really wanted my farmer to be a black woman. Why? Because you just don't see that enough, either.
I think that once the short story is published, I might post a few snippets from my previous drafts, just for people to see.
'Nuff said. I've got to go keep my blogspot blog going too. (Ah, the life of a pseudonym!)
For anyone out there who might be a fan of my AngeLINK universe, this story takes place in it -- though not with any characters from the books. There is a lesbian in the AngeLINK series (Rebeckah), but I decided against using her because I wanted to write the story in a future Minneapolis, for one, and with a character who has a religious crisis, which Rebeckah isn't known for. :-)
This story was actually really difficult for me to write. I rarely write to market, but the guidelines for this particular anthology excited me so much that I took the time out of my novel writing time to devote to this short. One of the reasons I don't write very many short stories is that they're very hard for me, and the amount of time I spend with them doesn't ever seem very cost effective -- I think I "wasted" three months on this, and three months is a lot to take away from a novel under contract (especially given that a sale is not guaranteed).
Anyway, the story went through at least three complete drafts. The last one was a complete and utter overhaul. The characters remained the same throughout, but nearly everything else supporting them changed (including, of all strange things, setting.) My second to last draft had our heroine Edie, the holy prostitute whose had a crisis of faith and has vowed to do one last job before hanging it all up, travelled to rural Wisconsin to visit the client. I ended up ditching that setting because it took too long for Edie to get there and, in the end, there was no good reason to keep it. The only thing I'm kind of sad about is that you almost never see future rural settings. I was really hoping to score with the future farmers of America with this story.
But, seriously, when do you see farms (or farmers) in science fiction? Okay, so Luke Skywalker was a moisture farmer on Tatoonie. But, there the farm really just represents something to break free from. He's not the hero BECAUSE he's a farm boy (he's the hero because he's the classic cliche of a lost heir with the hidden superpowers to defeat the evil empire). Okay, so James T. Kirk was from Iowa. That does not a farmer as hero make.
I was really hoping to get a story in print that had a heroine who was living and managing the farm of the future. It was fun too, because although I'm not from a farm, I lived near plenty of them when I grew up in LaCrosse, WI. It was fun for me to try to imagine how, if at all, farming would change in the next, say, hundred years. A lot, I decided, especially given how family farms are becoming more and more run as part of larger corporations (and, anyway, this sort of political statement worked nicely in a cyberpunk future.)
I also really wanted my farmer to be a black woman. Why? Because you just don't see that enough, either.
I think that once the short story is published, I might post a few snippets from my previous drafts, just for people to see.
'Nuff said. I've got to go keep my blogspot blog going too. (Ah, the life of a pseudonym!)
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Date: 2006-03-23 08:38 pm (UTC)Interesting point about the farmers and science fiction. I can think of plenty fantasy novels that feature them, but no science fiction (unless you count the Matrix with the "fields" of humans grown for the program.). Perhaps that will be a future project for you.