A New Story—With Prerequisites

I guess I've known Neal Shusterman:

     For about two decades now ever since I joined the Orange County Fictionaires, a writing and critique group that's been functioning here in southern California for more than 50 years. Of course, Neal's been living in Florida lately, but that turns out not to be a problem. The pandemic, y'see, has made our group's meetings virtual since 2020, so Neal pops by whenever he can.

     After one of our meetings early in 2021, Neal sent me an e-mail asking if I'd be interested in co-writing a short story with him for a collection he was putting together set in the world of his Arc of the Scythe series. I said, "Sure!" then went and read the trilogy. I hadn't actually gotten around to it yet...

     The basic premise, like so much of Neal's YA SF and fantasy, is just terrific. Neal has the true SF writers gift of asking one "What if..." question, then exploring how the answer to that question could change the entire world and everything in it. So after reading Scythe, Thunderhead, and The Toll, I was definitely on board for doing a little work in that universe.

     Neal thought I'd be perfect to write this story with him because he wanted to look at how animal intelligence might arise in the technologically advanced world of the series, and, well, talking animal stories are my bailiwick. I wrote a first draft, Neal gave me comments, and I wrote a second draft. Neal then took that and wrote a third draft, I gave him comments, he wrote a fourth draft, and that's pretty much the one that's in the book.

     Because I was involved, the story's a little bit silly—the main character has patterned his life after the person he sees as the greatest philosopher of humanity's previous era, W.C. Fields—but folks really have to read at least the first book in the series to have any idea what's going on. Still, I'm quite happy with the way the story turned out, and we got to give it a happy ending! Kind of...

     The collection is called Gleanings, and it's coming out from Simon & Schuster on November 8th.

                              Mike

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Scent's Assent

Image
He saunters, not a hint of awkwardness About his movements, flowing sweet as fire. Dolores, trying not to stare, selects A protein bar, a heated argument Among her schoolmates raising ruffled fur And growls. The guy's a feline, after all. The student body's ninety-eight percent canine. The whole school's aware. He hears them, Casey does, their yips and all Alive with bitter scents of awkwardness. Remaining smooth, he doesn't look, the fur Beneath his shirt on edge, a tickling fire He knows. It follows matching arguments From other schools his science course selects. Universities should be more universal. "Should" is the key word. In class, Dolores carefully selects A seat in back of Casey, watching all The rest digress, off-topic arguments Concerning species, full of awkwardness. The room of canines almost seems on fire With ears and whiskers folded close to fur. Students of science should be— There's that "should" again. Stupid subjunc...
Read more

And Now, A Short Story

Image
          If you'd rather read the story than all my falderol about the story, clicking on the "My Little Pony Meets Magritte" image or the title later on in this sentence will transport you to the Zooscape website and my piece " The Sleep of Reason ." But if you'd like the backstory, too...           See, for the past six years, I've been involved in the online writing contests/critique groups at Writeoff.me . They started with monthly My Little Pony Friendship is Magic fanfiction contests, but the whole thing has since expanded into original fiction, poetry, and visual arts as well.           The usual way it works has the registered members submitting a word or phrase as a potential prompt during the first 24 hours of the contest, everyone then voting on the prompts for the second 24 hours, and the one that gets the most points ...
Read more