If You Can't Say Anything Nice...

Derryl Makes Another Sale

This was an interesting one for me, because of the time frame involved. It started when I was at WFC in Saratoga and Claude Lalumiere approached me and reminded me that he was editing Tesseracts 12, and that this anthology would consist exclusively of stories between 10,000 and 20,000 words in length. Since I had previously sold him a story in this range ("More Painful Than the Dreams of Other Boys" in Open Space), he suggested that I ought to submit. Actually, he pretty much insisted.

I came home and started to think about things, and eventually decided to write another story in my "Magic Canada" series, which up to now includes "Cold Ground" from Arrowdreams, "Northwest Passage" from Realms of Fantasy, and "Over the Darkened Landscape" from Mythspring. (Told about this, Jo immediately smelled blood: "Sounds like you have a collection in this!" Yup, that is eventually the plan.) Unfortunately, the first story I started working on stalled, and it stalled only after I had done reams of research and a fair amount of writing. And so I scrapped it, quite late, and got to work on one of my backup ideas.

The new story, "Ancients of the Earth," is a little less research-intensive than some of the other stories - both written and conceptual - because it is based on an urban (rural?) legend. That said, it still took me almost to the bitter end to get the thing written, including about 7000 words in the last three days, four thousand of those in the last ten hours or so. In spite of the rush, I was quite pleased with the final result, and I'm glad to see that Claude was as well. I still have some fixes to do this weekend, and Claude will likely have some specific requests, but we have a story, coming out this autumn.

Labels: fantasy, publishing, science fiction, writing