This week came just after Mabon, which is the pagan holiday at the equinox that marks the end of Summer and the beginning of Autumn. When I was younger I used to loathe the fall as it brought with it the beginning of school, and the end of summer’s innocence. Now that I am much older, and find the heat of summer to be tiresome, Fall comes as a blessed relief. A time (at least here in LA) when one can open their windows again for large parts of the day. Indeed, this morning when I woke it was 60 degrees outside, the house a cool 74. The house has not seen that temperature but once or twice in three months. This, then, is a great relief.

Plus, Halloween is just around the corner, a holiday I did not learn to appreciate until I became a parent, but I digress….

As it happens, something else of import came to me this week. Joel Troutman, the Editor of Baubles from Bones informed me this past Tuesday he would like to publish my story C’mon Boys. This is a first for me. My first professional sale in fiction. After 14 years of attempting to write sellable fiction––part time, and keeping this weird addiction of mine on a shoe-string budget––it has finally paid off. 

This welcome news came in the middle of an otherwise difficult week. I’d been sick since Monday with a head cold that left me achy and dull-headed. I threw myself into work as a respite. It’s funny how when you are tightly focused upon a difficult task, you take little notice of yourself. I took advantage of this trait all week to both make money and to not dwell too much upon my miserable personal experience. Win/Win.

Many of you might know this, but I get up early to write. For years this has been my habit. Every weekday I get up at 7:00, regardless of when I went to bed, and for the first 2.5 hours of the day I work on my craft. I also feed the cats, put away any dishes from the night before, and do other sundry chores, but most of that time I spend tightly focused on the work. This week, because I was ill, I slept in until 9:30 or 10. It was the first time in many years (perhaps 10 years or more) that I went a full week without writing anything. 

This then, is the irony. The news of my first sale came at my least productive point in many years. 

I have no news so far on the sale except that Joel wishes to purchase my story. Once I know the actual date it will be published you can be sure I will post it here. Obviously there will be links to how to purchase it from Baubles from Bones, when that information is given to me. I’m very proud of this accomplishment, obviously, but also very thankful. In a week full of dull and miserable thoughts, when just getting through was about all I could focus on, this news was a blessing.

It is easy to forget, but I wish to point out that all of my hard work would mean nothing if it wasn’t for other creatives out there, like Joel Troutman and the other fine people at Baubles from Bones who are working hard on their own worlds, trying to make magic happen. Success is never singular, no matter how much we might like to think differently. All of it comes from the hands of others, exactly like the food you eat, the wine you drink, and the smiles you give away. 

Because I wasn’t writing this week, I had a lot of time to my thoughts. I came up with at least one story idea based upon Lissa Carter Jones, the protagonist of my novel Speaker for the Dead. It will likely be a short story separate from the novels. I have one such short set aside already, with the idea that if SftD ever gets published I can use it for readings, or some other way to help market the book.

This past summer I wrote something like 2/3rds of Lissa’s next novel, with the rest mostly outlined and ready to fill in. I was hoping to finish the first draft by Halloween, but after this week that seems unlikely. There are still some 15-20k words or more to go. Even on good days I rarely put out more than 1000 words, and some of the final chapters are going to go more slowly as I try to catch every stray point and set it down. 

Also this week I came up with something to fit into the next “near future” SF story I write. I keep a lot of ideas like this stuffed into a series of text files, which I occasionally mine for ideas. It’s not a story itself, just a little bit of world building that seems both humorous and on point. One of those ideas that when you hear your first thought should be, I wish I’d bought stock in that when it first came out. 

But also…. my thoughts this week––especially after watching our current administration become increasingly lawless in its actions, AND seeing how little effect this seems to have upon the population in general––I started to wonder if the stories that we tell each other have suited us well for our current crisis.

I had this thought especially after reading the second story in that wonderful old read from 1989 Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. Like the first story, The Soldier’s Tale is full of intense extremes. Fedmahn Kassad experiences battles in many places, some of which are real, some of which are computer generated. The scope is large, this is Space Opera here and Simmons is happy to give the reader every bit of that depth. The writing is wonderfully crafted, and very muscular. Simmons rightly earned his Hugo award for this work. When viewed against other SF novels you can see how it came about, a more literate way to attempt a SF novel, but one with a deep knowledge of the past SF masterworks. It strikes me as both being unique, and yet also clearly canonical (in as much as any work can be considered canon). It is big, smart, fast-paced, and extreme in scope. The hero of every adventure not only faces great odds, but insurmountable, totally impossible, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me, odds––and yet they still succeed. This is a nice trick to pull off, leaving the reader smarter for having gone down the path with the protagonist. In every way it’s a very satisfying read.

Except, except, at the end of the day it leaves the protagonist alone, and isolated. They exist on a pinnacle of fantastical achievement, but it is a pinnacle that cannot be shared. There are no others in their world. There is only them. It is only their agency that matters, not of the others. Very much a Hero/NPC mindset, in which every “other” the protagonist faces only exists to further his or her story, and have no real story of their own. 

Mind you, this is pretty much the basis for story, at least story from the western (or more specifically, American) lens. My problem is I think there is a flaw to this way of framing the world. Not only in the extremes in which we place our characters (in order to drum up sufficient excitement or interest) but also the way we frame their place in society. 

Heroes are also real people. They exist in the real world. At least the heroes that read these stories do. Remember stories do not exist on their own. They exist in the minds of an audience. A story on its own is not a story, it is nothing. Stories do not exist without readers, without listeners, without an audience. So when we as the audience experience a story of a protagonist facing a living hell, completely alone, are we not taken to that place ourselves? Of course we are. We live their experience. This is why we enjoy being a part of the audience. We get to experience their struggle, without facing any of the risks. And certainly the larger the struggle the greater the payoff. That is the underpinning of much of western story, at least the popular ones. Big powerful, emotive experiences that are also safe. 

But are they helpful?

I ask this because right now our country is going through a clearly transformative time. Much of what we know and believe–in terms of how and why a government should act–is being questioned, and at times upended. We are living in a time that is going to be talked about for years afterwards. It is a time of great change, a change that is transformative as well as extremely damaging. Sadly we have no idea how it’s going to end. We don’t even really know the theme yet for this time. That will come to later historians. All we can say for sure is that living in the middle of a time of great movement is fucking terrifying and bewildering. And the thing I keep seeing is that we are drastically unprepared for it. I mean most of us knew that Hitler was bad, and yet a healthy portion of the population seems to have happily embraced our very American version of that leader. This is not a good thing, by any measure––postwar Germany was a literal hellscape, talk to someone who lived it––and yet I cannot help but worry that we are now heading down that path. 

And the thing that really sat in my craw this week, while I was pushing pixels like a diseased madman, or laying in bed at 4 am, unable to sleep, yet too tired to get up, was how massively we seem unprepared for the times we are in. All these stories about heroes, and today with Marvel movies the heroes are truly muscular, and yet we as individual citizens seem too weak to act. 

What I began to wonder in my fevered state was if we told better stories would we have better outcomes? I suspect we need less individual heroes, and more stories of distributed heroism, where heroes are people who work with others in concert towards a greater goal. Stories of community, not isolation. Stories of communal strength, not individual strength. Stories of compassion and care, versus single-minded conquest. 

The truth is we cannot outsmart our villains, not in the real world, and no matter what the actual odds, but perhaps if we work together we can overcome them. For good citizens to be ready for that experience we need to have been bathed in stories that teach us how to be part of a working team, not how to be a stronger individual. 

So where are these stories? Why aren’t they selling? Who is writing them? 

That’s what I want to know. That’s what I want to write.