To Accept The Things We Cannot Change by Bobby Harrell

The idea of accepting “the things we cannot change,” when applied to people bitten by zombies, is pretty haunting and disturbing.  That really kept me thinking after I finished the story.  The story uses familiar elements, but juxtaposes elements not often seen together, giving this story a fresh feel.  This is a good technique to use to create originality.  Last night I watched the movie You Kill Me, which juxtaposes hitman/crime elements with alcoholism/recovery elements, creating an original story.  This story, by combining alcoholism/recovery elements with zombie apocalypse elements, also creates an original story.

The general shape of the story seems solid.  The opening makes us think we’re in a standard zombie tale, so the turns the story takes–Larissa discovering she’s taken shelter with alcoholics in the midst of an AA meeting, and then discovering they’ve all been bitten by zombies–are pretty surprising.  Ending with the key idea, as also stated in the title, helps to give that idea impact.  So the premise, theme, and structure all work pretty well for me.

Other elements didn’t seem as strong.  The characters don’t seem to behave in a consistent or believable way.  For example, Clayton and Neil seem to be arguing to let all human beings in, yet they aren’t letting in zombies.  Why not?  Aren’t they human beings?  Don’t they deserve safety and comfort, in Clayton’s and Neil’s opinions?  A page after arguing to let everyone in, Clayton is calling the zombies “sick bastards” and arguing against interacting with them.   So his ideas on this seem contradictory to me.  If he is intended to be contradicting himself, then we need a character to call him on this, so it doesn’t seem like a mistake.  Larissa, for example, could easily raise this point.  If he isn’t supposed to be contradicting himself and zombies aren’t considered human, then that point needs to come out.  It’s not clear now, so I end up pretty lost about what the AA members stand for and what the precise nature of the conflict is.

While the AA members claim to want to provide shelter for the suffering, they don’t even keep watch for people outside who may be suffering and need shelter (or do anything more active to find survivors and help them to the shelter).  They ignore pounding on the door until Tate calls out for help.  This makes their statements about helping others convincing.

Larissa’s actions and decisions are also hard to understand and believe.  I’m pretty much with her up until she remembers the incident on the bus.  I get pretty lost there.  It sounds to me as if the bus came upon a group of zombies who started to break into the front door, and those on the bus tried to get out the back door.  Then I think Larissa helped an old woman get out the back door.  Yet the story, and Larissa, treat this as if she did something bad and, more than that, that she acted like a zombie.  I don’t know what she did that was bad, and I don’t know in what way pushing a woman toward a door is acting like a zombie.  Then Larissa was seemingly bitten by a zombie, though I don’t know how or when that occurred.  After that, I think she went home, looked in the mirror, and thought she looked like a zombie.  I don’t understand what that means, specifically, and I don’t know how she could be a zombie then and not a zombie after that.  So this key section, which leads to Larissa’s epiphany and change, is unclear, and because of that, has little emotional impact.

I also don’t believe the revelation that she’s been bitten.  We’re in her point of view and she knows she’s been bitten, so we should know too.  We shouldn’t only learn about it when she visually reveals it to others.  It’s always problematic to withhold key information from the reader that the point of view character knows.  The reader feels cheated by the author.  I think we could see Larissa being bitten at the start, and see her hiding the bite when she sees the shelter.  That would add tension to the story.

The confusion over what happened to Larissa on the bus is part of a larger issue, which is that the rules by which zombies exist in this story are unclear.  Accepting “the things we cannot change” and having “the courage to change what we can” has no clear meaning when we don’t know what those things are.  For the premise and theme to have power, we need to know what they mean, their implications, so when we read that final line, it will strike us like a thunderclap.  That means knowing how a person turns into a zombie, roughly how long it takes, and whether there is any way the process can be stopped.  For example, if shooting yourself or someone else in the head can stop the transformation, then the “courage to change what we can” seems like it would involve all of them shooting themselves or each other.   Is that what Larissa is accepting at the end?  Or is she accepting something else?

A few other quick points.  This story involves a major realization and change by Larissa, which means that her character is an important part of the story.  To believe her change (convincing the reader of significant character change in a short story is one of the most difficult things to accomplish), we need to have a strong understanding of her character at the start, to see her growth or internal conflict developing, and to see the causes of the change.  But this story is focused mainly on action and dialogue, and the action and dialogue provided doesn’t carry much subtext, which could provide insights into the character.  So Larissa seems mainly like a stand-in for the reader, someone with the typical desires a typical person would have in this situation–safety, survival.  The last half page suddenly provides additional information that makes Larissa seem very different from what we’ve thought, and when we look/think back over the story, we don’t see much evidence to support this different view of her (at least I don’t).   So this feels like the author forcing the character and the story in a new direction, rather than the character and story developing as it naturally would.  I think either the action and dialogue need to carry more subtext, giving us a richer sense of the character, or the story needs her point of view (her thoughts and perceptions) to be more fully developed.

Finally, I think some of the details in the story could be better chosen.  Some details contribute to the confusion.  For example, this description–“The chairs around the scratched white folding tables were a mix of steal folding chairs and plastic diner stools on wheels”–makes me picture about 7 tables and 28 chairs, most of them filled.  It takes me a long time to realize that only 3 people are living in this building.

In other cases, the details seem excessive and distract from what’s important.  For example, this description–“he was deeply tanned, had perfectly brushed back white hair, a grey droopy mustache and wore a green plaid shirt tucked into blue jeans”–seems to include a number of details that aren’t significant (the droopy mustache, the fact that his shirt is green plaid and his pants are blue jeans) and doesn’t point me clearly toward what’s important, which in this case, I think, is that Clayton seems untouched by the chaos outside.  The fact that he’s deeply tanned sends me off on a tangent–does he have a tanning bed?  Has he been to Florida recently?  The white hair suggests he’s elderly, which never comes into the story.  I think you might say, “He was the first person she’d seen in clean clothes in a week,” and that would convey something significant.  If you want to give us a more specific image, you could say something like, “His plaid shirt and jeans struck her as strange.  Then she realized they were the first clean clothes she’d seen in a week.”

The story has a really interesting, unique combination of elements and the potential for a big impact at the end.  I hope my comments are helpful.

–Jeanne Cavelos, editor, author, director of The Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust

Shrinking by Taliyah St. James

“Shrinking” caught my attention this month through its incredible thematic work, its emotional intelligence, and the way it puts a persistent genre trope through the kind of intersectional examination that creates stakes, investment, and impact. So this month, I’d like to talk about how multifaceted takes on a theme and wider context make our characters’ choices meaningful, and why we can get more character connection out of specific, richly-characterized protagonists than more loosely-drawn blanker slates.

The core idea of “Shrinking” is one many genre readers have seen: a dystopian, financially oppressive future where poorer people sell their very feelings to the rich to survive. It’s in the thoughtful, multifaceted, deliberate, and deft execution of that idea—the specific story “Shrinking” builds upon that idea—that it absolutely shines. The thematic idea it’s working with—poverty, what different versions of poverty are on a nuanced and systemic level—is woven through every paragraph.

On the plot level, “Shrinking” is a story about a woman, historically and in terms of class location better off than her partner, who walks to a feelings-selling clinic and chooses her old lifestyle over her relationship. On the barest level of plotting analysis, it’s a straight line. But on the thematic level, that walk and that choice comment on and reflect an infinite, rich, horrific, detailed context—and become more than they are, because of what “Shrinking” loads into that choice.

“Shrinking” is a story about poverty, privilege, and class, and it situates every single character in that framework immediately through the work of little details. So many offhand comments show how Aimee’s more affluent assumptions and habits persist: leaving the water running, resenting the house for not regulating it for her, not remembering the names of her neighbours, the secret-splurge manicures, legitimately not understanding Mrs. Washington’s reaction to her before they all get screened by security and Aimee, light-skinned, walks right through, thinking poverty is not having the latest phone. And bigger ones, too, like Aimee’s family considering her lifestyle a “phase” and the refrain of “it’s expensive to be poor”. Everything builds that context on multiple levels, subtle or explicit; every detail feeds, in a way that feels organic, into the river that is its main thematic idea.

The advice of “show, don’t tell” is a bit of a cliché at this point, and it’s been worked over in many ways, but “Shrinking” does an incredible job at showing—demonstrating—who Aimee is, where she’s from, and how she fits or doesn’t fit her current environment and relationships. It allows readers to pick up on how her actions and attitudes align with what she’s saying—or, more importantly, where they don’t, and lets the author communicate important information about this character, this world, our world through those disjuncts. Aimee doesn’t always understand these gradations, but readers can—which creates a tension and interest in the scenes where she’s just in transit, because the conflict between Aimee’s perspective and the narrative’s is a source of readerly fuel.

But the context widens further: Depicting Aimee as a nuanced, complicated person occupying only one position in the bucket of positions that all qualify as “poor”—and depicting other positions in John and Mrs. Washington—does an incredible amount of narrative work. The conflict that drives the story—her love for John versus the gap between their assumed normals that she isn’t really willing to bridge—is brought through at the same time the story’s thematic core comments on how poverty functions structurally in our world, now, today, at the same time as the worldbuilding avoids didacticism or flattening by showing multiple versions of similarly grouped experiences. And this happens at the same time that every detail contributes to Aimee’s characterization, making her a round, complex person—a very specific person, living a very specific experience.

One of the failure modes of dystopia is, I think, the flat landscape: a simplified world where X is good and Y is bad, and one situation fits all—when life is not ever like that. In reading “Shrinking”, I think this piece is a good example of how, while seeing oneself and one’s own situation in a story can be a good connection point for readers—and lead to the temptation to draw characters who are as assumed-generic as possible so readers can project themselves onto that character—empathy or emotional recoil over another’s specific situation, recognizing not the circumstances that caused it but the feelings of love and trappedness and misunderstanding and resentment that are part of it, can be an even better connector. It hooks readers into the space where, for this person, in this moment, everything is this choice. It illuminates spectacularly for the reader how they feel.

So by the time readers reach the explanation of the procedure—the stereotypically technical explanation, near the end—the action has been weighted with so much social and emotional significance that it’s no longer about what it’s about. How the Shrink works itself becomes a symbol of the conflict Aimee feels between her assumptions and expectations and what is legitimately a real, pure love; it’s the culmination of every piece of context the story has offered us so far about what Aimee and John’s life is, the structural barriers of poverty, race, assumption, social censure, personal shame, desire, and mid-belonging she lives in. It’s not even close to a flat choice. So that explanation—the stereotypical explanation of how the Shrink works—becomes the narrative equivalent of the slow click of a rollercoaster going up the hill, ready to drop.

When it drops like inevitability, the impact is terrific.

There are at least a thousand more words I could write on why “Shrinking” functions so very well, how deftly it handles its material, how the very idea Shrinking hinges upon—of running out of money, so making yourself smaller to fit—rings brutally true and familiar. It’s an incredibly well-crafted piece of work, one I think is ready to go to editors, and I very much look forward to seeing it in print.

Best luck!

–Leah Bobet, author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (2015)

Stonoshki by Rayne Hall

When I get to the millipede in the third paragraph, and Ahren throws it away and it seems to come back, I’m hooked.   That creates a good mystery–is there something supernatural about the millipedes?–and makes me want to keep reading.  The story also has some nice description of the millipedes.  I can see them vividly, and that helps to make the situation feel immediate and real.  The strange behavior of the millipedes (and centipedes) exists within a fairly normal-seeming context, with the characters and their interactions feeling pretty believable.  That helps the bugs to stand out and makes the Ahren’s situation easy to relate to.  These elements work well to keep me engaged until the end.

That said, once I get to the ending, I’m very disappointed.  By raising the question of whether the bugs are supernatural or not, the story promises me some sort of answer or resolution to this mystery.  Yet no answer is provided.

Instead, the story introduces, right before the end, the discovery of a new lethal centipede species.  Rather than resolving a mystery about millipedes, the story provides information about centipedes.  Rather than resolving the question of the supernatural, the story introduces a scientific discovery.  The story is kind of pulling a bait and switch on us, promising one thing and providing another.  This leaves the story feeling unfocused and the ending feeling unsatisfying.

In addition to shifting its focus, the ending also lacks a strong causal chain.  The bugs seem to behave in a fairly consistent way through most of the story, and then all of a sudden at the end they attack in a swarm.  Why?  Without a why, or even the hint of a why, the bugs seem to attack at the end because the author made them.  That’s not satisfying either.  The reader needs the illusion that events are unfolding on their own, through a chain of cause and effect.  Otherwise, it’s impossible to believe in the story.  Without a why, it’s also hard to make any meaning out of the story.

My suggestion would be to decide what you want to promise readers, and then try to fulfill that promise (in an unexpected way, so readers are surprised but also satisfied).  If the story is promising an answer to the question of possibly supernatural millipedes, then provide that.  And if the situation is going to get much worse (which is exciting), then there needs to be a cause for that.  A why.

So why is Ahren plagued by these bugs, and why does the problem get worse?  Does Ahren himself do something to create and worsen the problem?  Or does Boyana or Willard create this problem for some ulterior motive?  Or does the house hold some secret that causes the problem?

Ahren is attracted to Boyana, despite being engaged to Florrie.  I think the story could develop this more to answer some of these questions.  Perhaps Florrie insists on coming for his birthday, and Ahren gets frustrated trying to get rid of all the millipedes before she arrives.  She comes, and we could feel a lot of suspense as we anticipate an appearance by the millipedes.  But they don’t come.  When Florrie takes a bath in the new bathtub Ahren has put in, a millipede crawls onto her.  She gets upset and tells Ahren she won’t come back until he’s gotten rid of all of them and replaced the bathtub.  Ahren gets more angry.  As he’s pulling out the bathtub, he finds dampness and more millipedes below.  He decides he’s sick of doing everything Florrie wants; he’s going to put in a Bulgarian-style shower, and if she doesn’t like it, maybe he’ll end up with Boyana instead.  He tells Florrie everything is fixed but he won’t send any photos; it’s a surprise.  He stops cleaning up the millipedes.

As this plot heads to some horrific climax (I’m hoping Ahren ends up taking a millipede shower), I think you can see that it has a stronger causal chain.  Ahren starts the story catering to Florrie’s desires, and as she’s not satisfied with his efforts, he becomes frustrated and starts to do unwise things, which have the unintended consequence of worsening the millipede problem.  Unintended consequences are one great way of escalating a situation.

One might see the millipedes, in this sort of scenario, as symbols of his discontent with his life, and as the relationship problems grow, the millipedes become more numerous.

This story has some really nice elements.  If the promise better aligns with what is delivered, and the causal chain is strengthened, it will be quite involving and powerful.  I hope my comments are helpful.

–Jeanne Cavelos, editor, author, director of The Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust

Rookie Chapter 1 & 2 by Saffron Bryant

— Judith Tarr

Tripartite Chapter 1 (Revised) by Taliyah St. James

This is a good opening chapter. It starts off peacefully, defining who Kayla is and what she does. Then the pace picks up; we find ourselves in the middle of unfolding action. We can see what’s happening and to whom, and we catch a glimpse of how the plot will proceed from here. The pacing overall is quick, and the end of the chapter pulls us straight into the next.

Structurally, so far, we’re on solid ground. The prose has some work to do.

The first thing I would point to is an issue with characterization as well as style and diction. Kayla’s emotions tend to ramp up to 11, and to do so in repetitive sequences.

She wanted to talk to someone, but she hadn’t made any friends in Philly, no one who she could really talk to, no one she could tell about the hallucinations, no one who would laugh with her about the man outside Dr. Richards’ office, not even someone whom she could tell about Dr. Richards.

This kind of repetition-for-emphasis can be quite effective, but a little goes a long way. Especially when it’s combined with the ongoing internal monologue about her loneliness and her strange visual malfunction, it presses the issue just a little too hard, a little too long.

The same applies to her estrangement from her family. We’re told about it several times, in much the same words each time, with the same structure of estranged/wishes she weren’t/wants to get back in touch/can’t bring herself to.

In each case, judicious pruning and tightening will actually make the emotional arc stronger. Find just the right place for each bit of information, and let it resonate through the rest. If it needs to be brought up again, do so briefly and use different words; develop it a little more, add a touch of new information, so that we move forward even while we’re reminded of what we were told before.

A large part of the art of revision is the ability to position each nugget of information in just the right place. Put it there and it changes and enhances the whole novel. This applies to characterization, plot developments, emotional arcs—all the way down to the placement of words and phrases.

For example we’re told she’s in Philadelphia rather late in the chapter, so that for a moment I thought she lived somewhere else and had just arrived in the city. Then the context told me the novel is set in Philadelphia. If I’d had the information at the beginning, I wouldn’t have had that moment of confusion.

There’s another form of confusion that’s actually an attempt to clarify. Particularly when two characters of the same gender are interacting, rather than get tangled up in the pronouns, the narrative offers synonyms: Marla/the coordinator/the woman, her mom/the elder woman. The problem is that every time we get a new synonym, we have to stop and wonder if we’re being introduced to a new character. As a reader I prefer simple repetition of the character’s name or epithet (her mom, for example)—like said, it’s basically neutral, and it helps me keep track of who’s doing what.

While we’re looking at the use of words and the structure of sentences, I’d also like to suggest paying careful attention to the meanings of specific words, and to the ways they fit together. Sometimes when we’re trying for unusual images or combinations of words, we don’t quite hit the mark. Figurative language needs to be straight on point.

The man with the shadows on his face is almost there, but shadows has a different connotation than the shadowy nubs it’s meant to refer to. Face and forehead are two different kinds of facial space, and shadows have their own heft of meaning apart from the vestigial horns Kayla sees. A simple fix (I do like simple) is to change face to forehead. Or change it to the man with the shadowy horns or a similar variation on the theme.

Tears threatened Kayla’s eyelids is a little bit inside out. The context seems to be that tears are threatening to spill over, but the strong active construction actually shifts the meaning from “she’s almost ready to cry” to “tears from elsewhere assault her eyelids (but not necessarily her eyes),” or even “something is threatening to tear or shred her eyelids.”

A frown that dimpled his cheeks is hard to visualize. A frown is the drawing together of the eyebrows. Lately it’s shifted to, or been expanded to include, the mouth. (I’m old school. I say Nope. But English is a living language, and living things change.) I’m not sure how the cheeks fit into it, and dimples usually appear when a person is smiling. I’d like a clearer sense here of what the character is doing.

think it’s good to push the envelope with style and imagery, but sometimes we (and I include myself in this, for sure) find ourselves in a different word-universe than the one we intended.Then we have to pull back, regroup, and usually simplify.

There’s lots of potential here, and I love the way the chapter ends with a bang and a swoop—on to chapter two! Best of luck, and happy revising.

—Judith Tarr

Hotwire And The Concrete Rainbow by RM Graves

“Hotwire and the Concrete Rainbow” snagged my attention this month with the places it departs quietly from archetype: a round spacebound girl who joins a punk band with a backpack of books, whose core emotion isn’t resentful anger but a kind of grief. It kept it with some deft thematic work, but there’s room to grow here too in order to make this piece shine. So this month, I’d like to talk about pacing and its context: how we can look to each scene and feeling in a story to dictate the pace of the last and next.

As ever with this author, I love the voice in this piece: lines like “the power of keeping your mouth shut in a time of commoditised opinion” and “being the size of two bulls shagging” made me laugh out loud. There’s always a wry sense of humour in this author’s work that makes it move and dance even—especially—when in dark places, and it really fits well with a future punk aesthetic. As does the sheer physical grounding of “Hotwire”: lines like “palms tipped up to the drizzle – to cool the throb of my new stigmata piercings – and my head in the clouds”, the space station as septum piercing, the cables and sharing bodily sensation versus plugging into the void, how deeply Sidney feels music, the difference between being dead and alive—all create a tangible, undeniable theme-and-variation on physicality. What results is a story about the difference between scene and relationship, real and unreal, that’s firmly grounded in the body: the fallibility and modifiability of bodies, fake digital bodies, a craving for the real—and then builds into imposter syndrome and image and how adapting the world to yourself fits into the very notion of space habitats, into experiencing the real.

There’s also an interesting juxtaposition in Sidney’s hurt, defensive attitude toward her parents and how anguished and avoidant she is about hurting them; how anguished and avoidant she is about letting anybody down. She’s a struggling people-pleaser, someone who’s got a significant amount of independence in her day-to-day life (her own flat, no chip), an ache to be noticed, and boundaries that barely exist, and there’s a painful, hopeful aspect to watching her struggle, half self-aware. I’d be tempted to unwind that struggle with a little more subtlety and gradualness. “Who wants me more?” lays that internal conflict out baldly, and I think that tips the story’s hand a little too early. That conflict’s clearly demonstrated further down in the scene, and it’s an interesting emotional hook to spool out longer, more satisfyingly.

Which leads into the core suggestion I have for “Hotwire and the Concrete Rainbow”: an editing pass with an eye to the emotional pacing and line of conflict. The opening, in particular, feels a little emotionally abrupt, and the turn into Jack and Skart’s breakup and Skart’s transition from rejecting Sidney to accepting her again was quick enough that they inspired a little whiplash. I’m not sure where any of those emotions are rooted—that quick-fire rejection/acceptance/belonging—and their suddenness frays my immersion in the world and the story.

There’s a lot of mileage in interesting worldbuilding and narrative voice, but by the time Sidney’s driving the truck to the gig, the cumulative effect of those quick and shallow-feeling turns meant I found myself lightly disengaging; not enough was, for me, escalating, developing, or changing.

These issues are ones that exist specifically in tandem. The emotional turns feel abrupt because the intermediate scenes are moving slower; the intermediate scenes feel slower by contrast with the emotional turns. When we’re reading a story for pacing, we’re reacting less to an objective measurement than the subjective, contextual one the story itself has already set: just like driving a car, fast feels slow if we’ve been going breakneck already, and vice versa. Sometimes the key to correcting a pacing issue isn’t altering the scenes where it itself shows up: it’s adjusting their context.

So with that in mind, I’d suggest taking the problem on as a linked problem, and attacking it from both ends. Specifically, I’d try playing the grounding and physicality up—play to the story’s strengths. The line of patter here carries the piece far, but I think relying on it too strongly might be the root of some of the story’s pacing issues; it’s a narrative style that takes a lot of page space to maintain, and tends to talk around experiences rather than getting directly to the heart of them. Shifting some, but not all, of that weight to visceral physical detail—playing up those thematic connections around embodiment hard—might pop “Hotwire and the Concrete Rainbow” into colour and assist with the pacing issues all at once. The intermediate scenes come out stronger, more vivid, sharper, and shorter by virtue of cutting a little wordcount; the plot turns look calmer and better-paced by comparison. Neither has to change much; they just meet in the middle more effectively.

The second major issue is the ending, and that I’m not sure the question being asked is the one being answered by Sidney’s choice to connect to the void. The conflict set up is very much to do with acceptance, with being seen and love and fake versus real regard, and the answer given feels abruptly decisive, not entirely built up to, and as if it’s solving a different problem than the one posed. Committing to the punk scene might answer the question of where Sidney’s going to sleep tonight, but I’m not sure it solves that hesitation, that people-pleasing, that deep hurt that characterizes her from the very first scene. I didn’t get a sense of solace or progress for that pain, and the ending doesn’t land satisfyingly for me as a result: I feel the echo of the resolution I’m supposed to feel, but just the echo.

So while looking at the pacing, I’d suggest a strong look at aligning the conflict with the solution, and vice versa, in the same fashion: adjust the problem a little, or adjust the solution. As long as they meet in the middle, the average speed will work out.

All in all, there’s a lot of potential here: a truly interesting protagonist I feel for, a fresh-feeling take on space habitat living, a concreteness I can relish and read with my hands. I very much look forward to seeing a new version!

Best of luck!

–Leah Bobet, author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (2015)

Dream Hunters (Working Title) Chapters 1 and 2 by Debra Sylver

I’m impressed with this submission not just because of all the thought that’s gone into the plotting and worldbuilding, but because of the dedication it takes to stay with one’s characters through four complete novels. That’s worthy of much respect.

An Editor’s Choice review is a little bit different from others in that it tries to look at issues of more general interest as well as those that are specific to the individual submission. Here I’d like to talk about the challenges of beginning the fourth novel in a series. On the one hand, many readers will presumably have read the first three books and be familiar with the characters and their stories. On the other, some will be picking up the series for the first time here. What’s an author to do?

It’s a balancing act. The author has to sum up previous events and reintroduce characters clearly enough that the new reader gets the picture while the longtime reader appreciates the reminder without feeling over-reminded. The pacing needs to be brisk especially at the beginning of a fantasy adventure, but not so brisk that the reader (both new and old) loses track of who’s who. On the other hand, if it’s too leisurely, the story will stall and the reader will wander off.

As a new reader, I very much appreciate the capsule synopses in the author’s note, though when I read the chapters I put those aside and tried to read as if I’d just picked up the book. With a published novel I’d have the cover copy to guide me, and that would be it.

I found that I wasn’t having a great deal of trouble keeping up with the characters. The action is clear enough at the beginning, and there’s plenty of clueing-in to the identities of characters who have appeared in previous volumes.

What I would suggest especially at the very start is a deep pruning of Caitlin’s internal monologue, paring away repetition and making choices as to where those repeated phrases and chunks of information would be most effective. For example the first chapter, and therefore the novel, starts with a line of dialogue, which is a tricky thing to do; it can be quite dramatic, but it also needs some quick framing in order for the reader to get the context. The framing here is lengthy and tends to repeat the same ideas in different ways (and sometimes in the same ways—the repetition of fault for example, and Caitlin’s ruminations on different realities, including the frequent reminders that nobody in this reality would believe the other reality exists). For the most part we’re inside Caitlin’s head, with brief intervals on the outside as Liam takes his martial-arts class.

For me as a reader, it feels as if this balance should be reversed. Less internal monologue, more external action. Less description, too, and less backstory. Just give us what we need to know right here and now. The rest will come up later as it’s relevant.

When I’m revising a draft in which I’ve put in everything I as the writer need to know in order to build my world and story, I ask myself what does the reader need to know now? Can I pick one or two essential details, and let those contain the rest? Do I need to describe the entire setting (or go into detail in describing a character) or just the elements that are important at this particular point? If I leave anything out, is it still clear what’s going on?

Another thing I would like to suggest is a bit of re-framing on the sentence level. I noticed as I read that Caitlin tends to think in a certain pattern, and it’s often in negatives. The structure is subject – verb – object – but:

He seemed to be a natural, but

Caitlin wouldn’t ask him directly, but

It was inevitable that she would meet them again, but

The cumulative effect is of ongoing negation of whatever the initial thought happens to be. We’re set up for one reaction, then told nope, not happening. It’s an interesting insight into Caitlin’s personality and thought processes, but it’s also a bit disorienting.

There are other forms of negativity as well, which add to the effect:

Not that it was dirty—in fact, the room was spotlessly clean

It didn’t escape her that

That didn’t really clear anything up.

wasn’t sure how

was never that excited

Note how in each case, instead of stating a fact straight up, we’re told what it’s not. It made me wonder as I read, how Caitlin would come across if all her negatives were switched to positives. Would she be a different person? Would that affect how she acts and reacts within the story? Would the story itself change?

It’s certainly an interesting story. I love Caitlin’s were-lion persona, and I like that she’s so invested in making the different realities safe for Liam—as well as giving him the tools to protect himself. It not only makes her a good sister/foster parent, it gives her more depth as a character.

–Judith Tarr

The Gray Tabby by William Stone

I know this piece wasn’t intended as a complete story but more as a sketch or exercise.  But I was drawn into it and wanted to keep reading, and I think it could become a really engaging and involving story.  So I wanted to offer this feedback in case it’s helpful.

An intriguing character in an unusual situation can very effectively draw readers into a story.  You don’t need to be flashy or extreme.  You just need an intriguing character, such as a college student so irritated by having to clean the toilet and change the toilet paper while his roommates do nothing that he decides to move off campus, in an unusual situation, such as commuting to college from an out-of-town trailer park, where he rents a trailer that was previously home to a cat who was killed.

That, along with the fairly smooth writing, drew me into “The Grey Tabby.”  As the story goes on, though, I don’t think these elements are developed as strongly as they might be.  The intriguing character, who seems particular and easily irritated, becomes laid back and not very emotionally involved in anything that happens.  So the characteristics that initially drew me in seem to fade away, and the character moments I anticipated–the narrator becoming dissatisfied with his new place and irritated by the irresponsible people around him, and this building to a climax–never happen.  Writers can certainly reveal a character to be different than what readers anticipated, but the character needs to be at least as intriguing as he initially seemed to keep readers satisfied.  Instead, the narrator becomes less intriguing, mainly serving as a camera through which readers experience the story.  Looking back on the story, the narrator kind of seems to be doing what the author needs him to do for the story.  He seems to get irritated at dorm life only because the author needs him to move to the trailer park, not because that’s a part of his personality.  Someone who moves out of town because his roommates won’t take their turns cleaning the toilet is not someone who will pick up the poop of the neighbor’s dog without taking steps to stop it or move.  Instead, after one brief complaint, he gives up.

If the narrator’s initial traits lead to increasing conflict through the story, the character will feel more consistent, readers will remain intrigued, and suspense will increase.  This connects to another area that I feel can be strengthened, which is that the narrator needs to be struggling to achieve a goal.  He easily finds a new place to live, the trailer park, and after that, he forms the goal of getting the dog’s owner to keep the dog out of his yard, but he quickly abandons that and seems to have no strong goal after that.  So he’s not struggling to achieve anything.  He goes to school, works, interacts with the cat, and the story starts to feel kind of repetitive.  He’s mainly a bystander.  He’s not present for the climax, when the cat kills the dog.

Similarly, the unusual situation isn’t developed as strongly as it might be.  We see that the cat scares the dog, so when the dog is killed by running in front of the car, we know that the cat scared him.  But this doesn’t involve building conflict or suspense.  It’s simply an explanation provided for an event.  The story is structured as a revelation story, with the last line revealing the cat was the ghost of the one previously killed.  But most readers of horror or supernatural fiction would figure this out very early in the story.  Once we learn that a cat that previously lived in the narrator’s trailer was killed by the neighbor’s dog, and we see a mysterious cat show up at the narrator’s door, we know that cat is the ghost of the dead one.  I formed that theory as soon as the cat appeared with its “shining yellow eyes.”  About a page later, when the cat frightens the dog, I’m sure my theory is correct.  So structuring the story with the big reveal at the end that the cat is a ghost doesn’t work well, because most readers will already know that.  Instead, the story needs to get that revelation out of the way quickly and allow this unusual situation to develop and twist in unusual ways.  For example, perhaps the cat wants the narrator to leave the trailer that once belonged to his owner, so the cat starts pooping (spectral poops, I suppose, which could be nasty) in the toilet, creating a worse mess than the narrator had to deal with in the dorm.  Then the narrator could struggle to get rid of the cat (so he’d be struggling to achieve a goal).  Or the narrator could fall in love with the dog’s owner, so he’s got an internal conflict between his desire to help the cat get even with the dog and his desire to keep his love happy (which means keeping her dog alive).  Both of these seem like they would take the story in a somewhat humorous direction.  For a more frightening option, the cat might have been killed not by the dog but by an abusive boyfriend of the cat’s owner.  The ghost cat shows up, looking for the boyfriend to exact revenge, but finds only the narrator.  The narrator has a different girl over every night–perhaps this is why he moved out of the dorm.  He’s not a nice guy and doesn’t treat them well.  One morning, he has a fight with the girl, pushes her, and the cat attacks him, scratching him up badly.  At this point the narrator thinks the cat is the ghost of the one the landlady said was killed by the neighbor’s dog, but the dog doesn’t seem very fierce.  Frightened, the narrator tries to secure his trailer.  He has another girl over, so he doesn’t have to be alone, and when she suggests he’s afraid, he yells at her.  The cat mysteriously gets in and attacks him again.  The narrator throws the cat outside, thinking it might go after the dog, but it doesn’t.  Desperate to find some way to stop the cat, the narrator searches for and finds the cat’s grave and digs it up, finding a bloody man’s boot buried with the cat.  He seeks out the cat’s owner and finds she is living with an abusive guy–the owner of the boot.  He tries bringing the cat to that house, but the cat vanishes.  He invites the guy to the trailer under false pretenses and locks him in, so the cat will get its revenge and leave him alone.  But one of the narrator’s girlfriends shows up and hears horrible sounds inside.  She insists they have to help the person inside.  He fights with her and knocks her down to stop her.  When the sounds subside, he opens the door to see what has happened.  The owner of the boot is dead.  Then the cat attacks the narrator and kills him too.

The structure of ending by revealing that the story had a ghost in it was used quite a bit about a 100-150 years ago.  Modern readers are looking for something that provides a twist or takes the ghost story in a new direction (the movies The Sixth Sense and The Others twisted this structure by making the protagonist the ghost and unaware of that fact).  I think reading some recent ghost stories could help provide a sense of what readers would be familiar with.  Reading a few volumes of The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror edited by Paula Guran, and The Best of the Best Horror of the Year edited by Ellen Datlow (which compiles the best stories in her previous ten best-of-the-year anthologies) should help provide a sense of the horror field.

For me, “The Grey Tabby” doesn’t fit within the horror genre, because it doesn’t evoke horror or any of those dark related emotions.  Suspense is another quality important to horror, and I don’t feel much suspense either.  This could be called a ghost story or supernatural story.  If the story is intended to create fear, suspense, terror, or other associated emotions, I think the narrator needs to be more emotionally involved in events, more disturbed, challenged, and frightened by events.  This should come out in the character’s actions, thoughts, and descriptions.

I think the story has some strong ingredients and some nice writing, but those ingredients could be developed more strongly, in a more emotional and unpredictable direction.  I hope this is helpful.

—- Jeanne Cavelos, editor, author, director of The Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust

Phage Chapter 14 by Michael Keyton

I love genre-bending, I do confess. I am particularly fond of disaster stories and especially plague stories. (It’s the medievalist in me.) The combination of near-future science fiction and monster-at-the-windows horror is one of my favorites. All which is to say that this submission ticks quite a few of my boxes.

It also accomplishes something that doesn’t happen that often: it’s stayed with me. The setting, characters, and overall thrust of the plot are clear in my head. I even got to spend a happy half-hour listening to anharmonic music, partly to immerse myself in the soundtrack of the chapter and partly for the raw physical experience, that thrum through the bones. In short, the draft needs work, of course, but the framework is strong.

For this Editor’s choice I’d like to address a couple of issues.

1. “Floating Heads”

Here and there in the chapter, the dialogue gets going so fast that it leaves the rest of the narrative behind. Exchanges go on and on, snapping back and forth, with an occasional pointer to who’s speaking. Even with those pointers, the frame gets lost. We’re left with sets of fast lines floating in space.

It’s not a complicated fix. Doesn’t need a whole lot of said-words and throat-clearing and shifting around. Just a line once in a while to tether the conversation to the story.

It may help to break up some of the conversations. Make them shorter. Tighten and condense the rush of information. Let the characters (and the reader) stop for breath.

2. Viewpoint-tagging

My second observation is the opposite of the first. Floating Heads have too little going on. Viewpoint tags have too much. One expects the reader to fill in all the relevant context. The other is nudging constantly: I’m here, I’m here, did I mention I’m here?

By viewpoint tags I mean all those little reminders that the character is present. Words like thought, wondered, felt, looked, watched, saw, surveyed. Longer passages, too, stretching into internal monologue while the story waits for the character to stop thinking and the action to start again.

There must be a rule somewhere that “You Must Always Make Sure The Reader Knows Who Is Telling The Story.” That’s true, mostly, but first, trust yourself. And second, trust your reader.

Once you’ve established the POV of a scene, you won’t need to keep pointing to it unless there’s a shift to another POV. We know the character is thinking, seeing, feeling, without needing to be told in so many words. It’s implicit in the idea of a viewpoint character. Let the story happen without the filter. Just tell it direct, and we’ll know whose eyes we’re using at the time.

In revision, perhaps try an experiment: get rid of all the viewpoint tags. Then read what you have left, and see if it still makes sense. One or two tags might go back in for clarity, but most should turn out not to have been necessary.

Writing is a balancing act, always. A little more here, a little less there. As long as the story itself is solid—and as far as I can see from this chapter, it does seem to be—the rest should be fairly straightforward to fix.

Best of luck, and happy genre-bending!

–Judith Tarr

Harvest by Hannah Hulbert

“Harvest” got my attention this month with its hushed, pervasive atmosphere and the ease with which it made a long story feel quick and engaging. So this month, I’d like to talk about how our deployment of science-fictional worldbuilding affects engagement and suspension of disbelief, and how it’s not about facts, but context—both when writing worlds and the people who live in them.

“Harvest” does good work at the quick establishment of a world and relationships early on. Lines like “everyone knew how Forto felt about complaints” imply a history and routine, and the use of implication and subtext between Forto and Dejori sets considerable atmosphere—as does the image of a woman gathering moisture from aluminum harps in the dense fog.

The author’s note asked about quantity of worldbuilding in a first attempt at science fiction, and the best way I can sum that up as a reader is that I’m not sure how the harps work to harvest moisture, but I’m not sure I need to. The image strikes a balance between technical and otherworldly that “Harvest” handles well overall. As with the details of Colony 264’s cold weather and late twilight, the story tells us how people live in this environment, instead of stating orbital or temperature details. The clear advantage to this worldbuilding approach is that when introducing science-fictional information, what “Harvest” actually describes is not just a planetary fact (“it is cold here”) but how people live in relationship to that fact, both collectively and individually. Forto’s forgetfulness about just how cold the cold is tells me about the confines of his life—sedentary, predictable, routinized, and privileged-in-decline—and his respirator when Amiko lacks one speaks volumes about the society that they’ve built here.

It’s that layering of information that makes the worldbuilding in “Harvest” work well for me. People are in interaction with technology that outstrips our own, and even if I don’t understand the technology or that technology isn’t engineering-accurate, I can see clearly the social, economic, and individual relationships they’ve formed with and because of it. The ripples of these stones in people’s lives are easy to observe, and because of that, my suspension of disbelief is in good standing.

Where it doesn’t work for me is in certain questions of why. Why is water scarce enough to farm, if the valley is perpetually full of fog, and walking outside means getting soaked? Why build Amiko’s shack of iron, when there’s moisture in the air, and it’ll rust? If the plexiglass windows are designed to withstand earthquakes, why isn’t the rest of the plant similarly engineered? Why is Dejori’s promotion worth murdering for—why not just go somewhere else? And most importantly, why does Forto decide he’s in love with Amiko? He mostly conceptualizes her in terms of his dead wife, like an idea of a woman to fill a hole rather than a person in her own right, with affection between them.

One suggestion, to that end, is considering the timeline. The entire piece takes place over about eight days—which means eight days from meeting to marriage proposal for Forto and Amiko, and that’s a bit of a rush for anybody. Time pressure doesn’t appear to be a factor in any other aspect of the story, and a lengthened timeline—one that doesn’t necessarily need to appear on the page—would give a little more credence to the idea of them establishing a routine, Amiko’s coming out of her shell, and Dejori’s fears of being pushed out, and would set a bit more reasonable context for Agrablaj’s somewhat inappropriate prodding. As it stands, everyone appears to be jumping the gun.

But that question does speak to the core sticking point I have with “Harvest” as a reader: that it’s a story about a relationship that hasn’t yet sunk the care it took with extraplanetary worldbuilding into that central relationship. The story itself seems to be a machine to get two characters together—a set of circumstances that ends in kissing—but even Amiko seems ambivalent about the outcome, as she’s quite correct that they know nothing about each other. It’s a positive, for me, that Forto’s instinct is not to increase Amiko’s dependency—to offer more charity, or provide for her—but to help her build on her own skills so she can better support herself. He’s not abusive or controlling. But the very fact that Forto worries his technical help will mean Amiko not coming back to the plant says there’s no real relationship happening here.

So I’m left unsure why these two people, of all people, make a happy ending when they’re together. Forto is lonely and Amiko’s, well, around, but that has nothing to do with Amiko as a distinct, unique human being. Amiko is poor where she was once rich, and Forto is rich, but that has nothing to do with Forto as a distinct, unique human being. And while the genetic hierarchy of Colony 264 makes for interesting background flavouring, I’m not sure it alone is enough to act as motivation for both attempted murder and an eight-days-in marriage proposal. People aren’t, in my experience, Kinds of People; Amiko’s genetic diversity and her just being handy aren’t enough to move two hearts. People are themselves, and people need reasons.

What I’d suggest for the next draft of “Harvest” is to transfer the care taken with the setting to Forto and Amiko as people, individually and in relationship. Who are these two people, and why—aside from motivations like loneliness or three square meals a day, the motivations any warm body can fill—does the story feel it should be satisfying, at the end of 9,000 words, that they end up together? What problem does this hasty marriage resolve?

With a more nuanced answer to that question, I think “Harvest” will come out a much better-balanced piece.

Best of luck!

–Leah Bobet, author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (2015)