Publication history: Appeared in M-Brane SF #5. Happily, this issue was reviewed by Tangent Online; “Steve Kendrick’s Disease” went on to make Tangent Online’s 2009 Recommended Reading List

Genesis of the story (SPOILERS ENSUE): I’d been watching a lot of movies where everyone dies at the end, which got me thinking about a college workshop I was in where the professor decried stories where your protagonist dies as cheating. Yet these movies worked. How’d they do it? How could I write a story where everyone dies without it being nihilistic and obnoxious?

First off, I gave them a dangerous, desperate job that would land them in their particular trouble. I wanted to flash a bit of the pink behind my ears by showing how people on the fringes of existence get forced into methods of survival that are much, much riskier than what most of us have to face on a daily basis.

As a slight twist, I decided to give them advance warning they were going to die. I wanted to see how they’d react once they realized all the old rules no longer applied and they could basically do whatever they wanted in the meantime. Those pages were very, very fun to write.

But I didn’t have an outline, and the ending was killing me worse than it was killing my characters. One thing those movies had in common was their characters always redeemed themselves just before (or through) their deaths–in other words, they gave their deaths meaning. Looking back on the logic of my story, the answer suggested itself: they had to ensure what happened to them wouldn’t happen to anyone else.

I didn’t come up with the very last lines until the very end. I’m glad I did. Not only did they add a lot of resonance to the story, it gave me a technique to steal when I wrote my next novel a year later.

Sold not one but two stories to the first Aether Age anthology (Hadley Rille, 2010). The first, “The Inspiration of Philocrates,” is the story of four Greeks on a secret mission on the eve of war–and the man who intends to betray them. (Like that dramatic summary? Learned that reviewin’ movies!) The second, “The Arms of the World,” is about a small society of Persians exiled to the moon and their effort to get back home. Which involves hijacking an airship.

Publication date isn’t set in stone yet, but they’re estimating an August release right now. I am excited with a capital excited.

To Reflection’s Edge. Was a long and frustrating gap between my last sale and this one. It may release in their upcoming December issue, otherwise I don’t think they publish again until the summer.

I’m growing to love working with editor Sharon Dodge. Misleadingly, this was the first piece of short SFF I ever wrote–misleading because I’d written one fantasy and one sci-fi novel already, plus an undergrad degree’s worth of literary short stories–and even after a couple revisions, indeed due in part to those revisions, it had some bloat to it, and once she brought that to my attention, it was obvious. You know what I found out? It’s much easier to kill your toddlers than your babies. With two years of distance from the original draft, I found it no trouble at all to chop all kinds of material out, including at least one paragraph I loved, to eventually reduce it 1300 words. It now weighs in at 5400; right around a 20% decrease.

I hope this sort of info isn’t some kind of trade secret: I always believed in this story, which is why I sent it to her in the first place, but without a sharp editorial insight (and of course my brilliant decision to run with her more-brilliant suggestion), it may never have sold. I think that, like finding good entertainment critics, the key to editors is finding ones you trust. When those ones have something to say to you, you’d damned well better listen to them.