Echoes in a Hollow Space

One of my characters, Lunar Magnusson, was complaining to me the other day that he wanted to sell his movies to the SciFi Channel for their Saturday night movie lineup, but he hasn't heard back from them yet. Here's the line up he proposed:

Cockroach! - Atomically mutated giant bugs are seeking mates, so they keep disguising themselves as traveling salesmen and kidnapping women. Unfortunately, the women are proving too fragile to survive the experience. When a maverick exterminator, fired from the mighty Zorkin Exterminators for being too gung ho, uncovers this fiendish plot no one believes him—except the chesty police detective who suggests using herself as bait...

Lasermasters of the Mojave - Big, pink, fleshy things come to Earth from outer space and wreak havoc for no discernible reason. Many things blow up and two teenagers slowly watch their friends and family get "absorbed" before causing one really, really, really big explosion at the end (or is it?) which destroys the spaceship (or does it?). (Featuring the last claymation special effects by the esteemed fx master, Larry Torqmachen.)

Lobster Demons From the Sixth Dimension - A maverick physicist conducting gonzo experiments in his makeshift lab accidentally opens a crack between this world and the sixth dimension. Giant creatures resembling lobsters come through, wreaking havoc for no discernible reason, kidnapping chesty women even though they couldn't possibly mate with them, and refusing to fall for the clever melted butter trick the scientist employs to lure them back into the crack. Finally, he uses the horrifically amplified sound of the lobster mating call to lure the demons into a giant vat of boiling water. Everyone at the picnic afterwards says they tasted a lot like chicken.

Nightmare in the Jacuzzi - Oak Street used to be such a quiet neighborhood, despite all the late-night partying and prevalence of jacuzzis on the street. But one by one, something foul and demonic is turning the waters red, wreaking havoc for no discernible reason. He calls himself Neddy Fluger, but one plucky teen suspects he's the demonic soul of a executed serial killer back from Hell. Can he be stopped? (Featuring an early performance by the now-megastar Jimmy Kleppt who is horribly murdered early in the film.)

The Bog Creatures of Seedy Glen - Seedy Glen isn't what it used to be. The once proud town is looking down at the heels, ever since the chemical factory down by the swamp closed down and left nearly everyone unemployed. If that wasn't bad enough, something foul is stalking the streets, breaking into houses, leaving behind muddy footprints on the carpets of decent folk—and an odor straight out of the septic tank. One stalwart city maintenance man joins forces with a maverick chesty woman deputy to get to the bottom of the mess, armed with bleach and a mop...

This just in from Lunar: SciFi has greenlighted all these projects. Look for them some Saturday night when you haven't got plans and nothing better to watch.


(Yeah, I'm bored. Why do you ask?)

I got a perfectly lovely rejection from Strange Horizons today for "Eudora's Song," the kind of rejection you want to paper your wall with. They liked it, but it "didn't quite fit." Alas, it boiled down to "beautifully done" but "too slight." Which seems to be something of a consensus opinion for most of the Dos Lunas County story cycle. And I can't say I disagree. With the possible exception of the first story in the cycle (as in the one I wrote first, the one my gut wanted to expel), "A Tale of Two Moons," I'd say the rest of the cycle doesn't have the oomph that would make them the kind of stories you love rather than just like.

I say that not in an "I suck" vein but in a writer's judgment vein. It's taken me awhile to get to that place, but I rather like being there. A great deal of hard work was involved in achieving some kind of writer's judgment. When I first starting receiving editorial criticism on "Eudora's Song," for instance, I thought, "X just doesn't understand!" With much writing under the bridge, many other projects, I got to a place where I could see X's point of view—because it had also become my own. These stories have some fine writing in them, I think, but for the most part they are more incidents in search of a novel than true short stories.

I'm a long form writer, not a short story writer. I don't "get" short on some fundamental level. However, making attempts at them does appear to be part of my process. This Dos Lunas cycle is searching for a longer plot, but I don't think all of them will ever be folded into a novel, certainly not in their current forms, but they are explorations of some sort. I have a kind of plot for two or three novels based in this universe, but I don't think any of them really holds up, plot-wise. Not yet. At least one of them will get there eventually. There's a novella, "Hortensia's Man," that is already 30k and has some oomph—but I'd say it's currently unmarketable.

But I'll keep trying to market the other stories. It's good exercise—and I have gotten some really quite lovely rejections on some of them. Who knows? Maybe next time.