May 2014 Writing Contest Results

Here're the results of my writing bet with my friend Robert for May 2014:

*For The Atlanta Incursion, the sequel to The Thing in the Woods, 3,740 words. I imagine I wrote somewhat more, since I'd thought the bet had lapsed and wasn't careful during the first week. I ended up accounting for this by putting 2,500 words under "various." I took the prologue to my writing group that meets in Lawrenceville and got some good feedback there, including advice on how to expand the section to make it more action-packed. The expanded prologue gave me some direction on the military technology of the antagonists, so that was very helpful. I'm bringing the first chapter before the Lawrenceville group today

*For The Thing in the Woods, 3,357 words at least. The goal is to get it as close to 60,000 words as possible, since many publishers will only put out a print edition if it's that long at minimum. My friend Nick suggested that if Thing and The Atlanta Incursion were both short, they could be combined into a single print edition. There's precedent for this--the Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolf and Chaos Marine omnibuses consist of several short novels glued together into one larger one, and of course there's The Lord of the Rings. Still, if each can be a standalone print novel (albeit a shorter one), that'd be even better than two short e-books and one long print book. My plan is to have it ready for sending to agents before I start taking summer classes at Georgia State and since these classes don't start until the second week of June, that's still doable. The plan is to write three new scenes--all of which have useful character-development purposes--early this week and then send it to the first four prospective agents I've picked out.

*Nick also put together a summer writing bet with the goal of writing a short story per week. Between work on my novels and graduate school participating every single week is going to be tricky, but I used the bet to light a fire under myself to write the first new short story in months if not over a year. I was inspired by this anthology call to write a dieselpunk story, in particular one set outside the Western world. And so in around five days I wrote a 3,230-word story entitled "Man of Iron, Rising Sun" set in the aftermath of the Battle of Nanking involving diesel-fueled powered armor. Nick might want to do something with the different stories at the end of the summer and the anthology won't send out acceptances and rejections until after the August deadline. In the meantime I'll cycle the story through my writing groups and send it to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (noted for its weeklong response time).

*For The War of 2512, 1,372 words. In an earlier blog post I referenced consolidating a short story into the novel and ending up with a new POV character, so now I've got more things for him to do. I have long-run plans for the character (a very long-lived genetically-engineered starship pilot), so I've gotten him involved in a bit of political intrigue.

*The rest of the word count comprises various other projects, including one I'm rewriting from the ground up. Life lesson: Don't delete an entire project unless you're absolutely certain you won't go back to it--and then think carefully, because even if you're absolutely certain, you can change your mind. The current version has a somewhat different emphasis that makes for a better work, but I had to rewrite many scenes I'd have been better off keeping in the first place. I also made a bunch of edits to Battle for the Wastelands before sending it out to several agents over the last month, which accounted for just under 500 words.

In The Grim Darkness of the 1940s, There Is Only War...

I had an idea the other day for a parody of Warhammer 40,000 that made fun of the people (mostly on the political left, like Bill Blum) who complain endlessly about American foreign policy post-1945 but overlook or even defend the exact same thing the United States did during WWII.

(Frex, complaining about US support for dictators in Latin America, never mind that they defend similar allegedly "defensive" imperialism by the USSR in its own border zones or U.S. aid to Stalin during the war, complaining about civilian deaths in bombing during Vietnam or Afghanistan and not caring about Hamburg or Dresden, complaining about McCarthyism and ignoring how Trotskyists and isolationists were tried as seditionists alongside legitimate fascists during the war, etc. Blum went so far as to claim in the edition of Killing Hope I read in high school that the United States was beloved after its victory in World War II but squandered this goodwill by "intervening" everywhere.)

Here goes:

It's a dieselpunk 1940s. The Western Allies are dominated by a United States united in worship of the comatose Franklin Delano Roosevelt kept alive in a gigantic golden wheelchair and sustained by the daily sacrifice of Japanese-Americans from the internment camps. The United States Marine Corps serves as the vanguard of the armies of the United States and the other Allies as they fight to destroy the armies of the Axis all over the world, all of them sustained by the US, Commonwealth, and what remains of the USSR's vast military industrial complex. Hoover's FBI and Beria's NKVD hunt for enemy agents and seditionists within the Allies, since only through unity of purpose can victory be achieved.

Ranged against them are the dread forces of the Third Reich, forced back into their own homelands in the west but compensating by occupying vast swathes of what was once the USSR, sustaining their war effort by offering Jews and Slavs in human sacrifice to supernatural evil forces. In the East the ever-victorious Japanese have placed Hirohito on what was once the Imperial Throne in Beijing and harnessed Asia's vast manpower in service to the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

In the grim darkness of the 1940s, there is only war...

This started out as a bit of political snark, but this could actually be a really interesting war-game. For example, the Australians could be played very similar to the Cadians, since they'd be on the front lines against uber-Japan like the Cadians are against Chaos, or possibly the Catachan Jungle Fighters since they'd be fighting in the East Indies and New Guinea a lot. Soviet or Scandinavian Allied troops could be like the Valhallan Ice Warriors and the "Desert Rats" of the North African war like the Tallarn Desert Raiders. On the other side, the Ahnenerbe could be played something like the Thousand Sons Marines and Ahriman, while Admiral Yamamoto could be a saner and less ridiculous version of Ghazghkull.

I'd be leery of trying to market a game like this, since I would imagine I'd catch a lot of hell from pretty much everybody--making the WWII U.S. into some kind of super North Korea complete with a personality cult, depicting an East Asian polity as a vast army of warlike barbarians crushing their enemies beneath their numbers, etc. Given how it took me quite some time to find a source on the 1944 sedition trial in the US that didn't come from some entity like the Institute for Historical Review (cough *Nazis* cough), I could easily imagine my customer base would consist of people who try to drag the US and (Western) Allies down into the mud so they can claim moral equivalence with the Nazis, whom they secretly sympathize with.

However, there's a dieselpunk anthology accepting submissions until August and I could write something more subtle in this vein...

Writing Update...

So here's the latest on my writing:

*Battle for the Wastelands has been sent off to several agents after the latest rounds of revisions. These were made at the request of one agent willing to take a second look and were an overall improvement to the story--one character had very little physical description before and differentiating two characters helped better develop one. I think I'll send it off to one more agent and then I'll let it rest for a bit. Many agents don't mind "simultaneous submissions" but other agents do. I've been careful not to send it to agents whose profiles online or in my (2011 Novel and Short Story Writer's Market) say not to send simultaneously, but still.

*I finally managed to get The Thing in the Woods up to 50,000 words. It's actually 49,557 words, but after years of nit-picky word counting in my short story submissions, I was told to round. Even if the rounding is to the nearest hundred and not thousand (i.e 49,600, not 50,000), I've printed the whole manuscript for another round of revisions. One of my writing group members who took the time to read the whole manuscript warned me about some problems with antecedents (i.e. it's hard to tell which "he" is which character in a conversation) and a general need to show and not tell. I'd like to get it to 60,000 words, since several presses will only put out print editions (or even publish at all) novels if they're that length minimum. I've got some ideas to further develop the female lead and her relationship with the male lead that'll surely help. Fingers crossed.

*Printed and marked up the novella "Son of Grendel." Haven't plugged the edits into the document yet. If things work out with Battle for the Wastelands, I'll need that novella sooner rather than later.

*My friend Nick is having a summer writing contest in which participants write a short (1,000-2,000) word story per week. At the end of the summer, participants vote on the best ones and they might be packaged as a Kindle collection or something. He said they must be completely original--i.e. new characters and new worlds. The goal is to write something different from what one is already writing. I haven't written any sword-and-sorcery in a long time and I haven't really written any dieselpunk (other than 1,000 words for a novel about this character who's basically Indiana Jones if Indiana Jones were a racist with PTSD from WWI and the bad guys were Japanese instead of Nazis). I think I'll try to do some for this, especially since there's a big dieselpunk anthology with a deadline at the end of the summer.

*The collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire continues gestating. I'm thinking I'll have some tidbits to tantalize you with soon.

*I'm doing a new cover for "The Beast of the Bosporus." More tentacles and more Ottoman architecture. I'll post it when I get it from my artist.

Steampunk Star Trek Augments: A Fan-Fiction Idea

On my alternate-history message-board, the member whose handle is Analytical Engine has been writing a Star Trek alternate timeline. Since it's posted in a members-only section of the forum, you'll need to be forum member to access it (although I've suggested he start posting it on fanfiction.net much like how I've done with "The Dragon and the Bear" to allow wider access), but it diverges from our history in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the Soviet Union reforming rather than collapsing (New Union Treaty). The Eastern Coalition forms in the aftermath of a global depression triggered by economic problems in China and the collapse of various dictatorships in the Islamic world. World War III begins in 2053 and lasts until 2057, with Khan Noonien Singh and Col. Phillip Green making their mark on history after the war--in fact, after First Contact with the Vulcans.

One of the consequences of this situation is that the sleeper ship that Khan and his loyalists flee on, the Botany Bay, is equipped with an early model warp drive rather than a slower-than-light engine. I suggested a consequence of this might be that Khan and friends find a world to settle and establish a new Augment society relatively soon after they leave Earth or they contact one of the canonical races of Star Trek before the Federation does. AE said his plan would be that they'd run out of fuel and get found by the Enterprise in a similar manner to the episode "Space Seed."

Oh well. It's his story. That being said, since the Botany Bay has a warp drive, that will definitely put it in a different location (probably significantly farther out) than when the Enterprise encountered it in canon. That means if Khan and friends try to take over the Enterprise and fail and Kirk maroons them as he does in the show, they'll be on a different planet, one that will not suffer the tribulations of Ceti Alpha V. In "Space Seed," Spock was concerned about the consequences of Kirk's actions a century down the line (i.e. during the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation). Spock was probably concerned about what the Augments might do with a virgin world and nobody to keep an eye on them, but things turned out rather differently.

I suggested to AE that a sustained Augment colonization of a different world with only the Botany Bay itself and supplies loaned from the Enterprise would end up at a probably 19th Century frontier level of development due to lack of infrastructure (although they'd have some gadgets and modern medical knowledge), but what if, say, a warp-capable alien ship were to crash there? The Augments, who'd have 22nd Century knowledge (Khan's reading the Enterprise's technical manuals and whatever Lt. Marla McGivers knows as well) even if their physical technology has regressed due to lack of infrastructure, might be talented enough to repair the ship or reverse-engineer technology from it in order to return to space. Given how their tech base would be rather primitive, whatever they could cobble together would have a distinctly steampunk or dieselpunk look to it.

AE has not gotten back to me, so I don't know what he'll do with Khan in the distant future of this timeline, but for those of you who are Star Trek fan-fiction enthusiasts, consider this a challenge. Take my scenario of Khan and friends colonizing a different world and run with it into the TNG era at least. Be sure to use steampunk space technology. Bonus points if Khan himself lives long enough to trouble Picard, Sisko, Janeway, or others from that time period.

(Hmm...an older Khan throwing down with Worf like he once did with Kirk? That'd be hilarious.)