The Light Reveals by J. Rokusson

— Judith Tarr

Save It For A Rainy Day by Jim McDougall Version 2 (formerly an Endless Rain)

“Save it For a Rainy Day” caught my attention this month with the way it’s braiding workplace life into an incipient, less-than-defined disaster. However, it’s a journey that doesn’t quite yet have a destination, so this month, I’d like to talk about making sure our pacing and visuals fit the stories we’re telling—and how to diagnose which story we’re telling.

“Save it For a Rainy Day” takes a not-always-usual approach to a science fiction story in its choice of protagonist: Ryley’s somewhat tedious, lonely supply management job—one that makes me feel the ghost of Amazon warehouses—is interrupted by the slow, persistent leak. It’s got callbacks to Alien, except with characters almost more bored with their shiftwork, and it’s a great perspective to tell this story from. I appreciate that Cyro isn’t exactly dedicated to his job and has a particular tone for deescalating bad behaviour, and that all three don’t exactly like each other, but have well-worn ways of working together. The dynamics between them bring texture and personality to this artificial world.

Likewise, that ever-present leaking adds structure to “Save it For a Rainy Day”: as the tension ramps up, more and more water moves into the space of the story. It’s a subtle but powerful effect, and well done.

I think there’s room for some improvements in the next draft, and first and foremost, I’d suggest tightening and cutting this piece so it’s terse, clean, and polished. There’s a lot of hedging in the dialogue—notably in the lunchroom scene and the trek down to the tubeway—that doesn’t entirely get the story forward, and since “Save it For a Rainy Day” has characters racing against those leaks, it’s a good fit to keep the story moving: it makes the pacing tell the same story as the ideas are, instead of pulling against those ideas.

On the plot level, some cuts would streamline the action of the story. Ryley has his mother’s Pathfinder, and that’s their second way into the tunnels, but since Torgas dies before their expedition launches, it’s not strictly necessary: they could have somehow fished out his and used it. Likewise, Ryley’s passing out and wondering if he’s died—and Cyro’s amnesia—don’t seem to change their actions or situation in the slightest. I’d like to suggest that they either do add something we can’t find elsewhere in the piece, or that you consider cutting them out to keep the momentum going.

I think there’s also work you can do with that pacing to show who takes the crisis seriously: if Torgas’s dialogue is more meandering, less tight than the others’, that can speak to his outlook and character.

Likewise, I’d love to see work on the visual description in “Save it For a Rainy Day”. There are some great visual moments here: the dissolved textures on the lunchroom photo, the dying expression on Torgas’s face. But since Sphere is a contained, somewhat sterile environment—and the parts of it Ryley accesses aren’t the most exciting—I’d love to get some sensory detail and worldbuilding into the short passages where he’s outside, and some visual sense of its few characters. I think there’s a chance to do some worldbuilding when he crosses Median Street to his apartment, and give readers a sense of what the rest of this habitat is like—especially because you’ve already introduced a live question about whether Sphere is artificial or just Earth. Giving us a little information about what Sphere is like helps readers feed that question and make it meaningful. Likewise, giving us a bit of visual sense of Torgas and Cyro will help readers understand something of their personalities, and what pressures they work under.

Ultimately, I think all of these thoughts hinge on a question about what readers should take away from “Save it For a Rainy Day”. Ryley finds out that Sphere is a submarine, and he’s the only one of the work crew left. And then—what does he do with that information, or how do you want readers to feel about that reveal? The secret’s revealed inside the story, but how do you want that information to touch the readers, who live outside it?

I think the answer to that question will define where “Save it For a Rainy Day” should go next. Thinking about readers and what you want them to take away from a piece can help shape the conversation you’re having: on pacing, on characterization, on visuals, and on every other piece of craft.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

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

Time Is Unkind by Bobby Harrell

— Judith Tarr

Hold The Anchovies Part 1 by Ethan Sabatella

— Judith Tarr

A Prototype Of Yourself by Albert Chu

“A Prototype of Yourself” caught my attention this month with its beautiful, understated intimacy around a sometimes-delicate topic: recovering from a suicide attempt. It’s a gorgeous character study of a young man, a shattered situation glimpsed in the rearview, and what our interactions with technology can really embody—good or bad—when we ourselves are organic, complex, and not machines. It does a lot of things very well, so this month, I’d like to talk about how it balances internal and external narratives in a very emotionally-driven piece. This is going to be an Editor’s Choice about what was done excellently.

Careful, compassionate characterization is the core of “A Prototype of Yourself”: the awkward relationship between Jason and the thinkbot, Jason’s mother’s flinching attempts to help, and his distant, absent friends. All those interactions show up on the page with a certain emotional honesty; it’s a story about changing dynamics, and it’s built out of dynamics, which creates a wonderful sensible symmetry.

I really appreciate how this piece handles Jason’s internal life without a whisper of stereotype. Jason is raw, truthful even in his discomfort, exhausted by his own distress—and keenly aware of the emotional performance expected of him. How much he does and simultaneously doesn’t want to be told what to do. The narrative voice itself isn’t trying to spin or moralize any of those reactions into good, bad, neutral; Jason is permitted to just be where and how he is, and readers permitted to glean little hints from others’ actions about how he and his situation are healing together.

Inference is doing great work to manage that information. There’s a lot to be seen in the small details of how his mother’s behaving, how his first and then second therapist handle the thinkbot prescription—and the widening gaps between how people act and how Jason fears they’ll act. It adds to the nuance that Jason is misparsing things because of his distress, but not entirely; in the gaps, we can see the impact his first therapist taking consent issues to his mother and not Jason himself has on his sense of personal helplessness; the fact that his mother meets him with “expectation” and his father absent barring disappointment impacting his idea that he should be fixed; that whatever the family therapist sees when discontinuing sessions with his mother, it’s part of the reason for his secretive shame. It’s a portrayal that thinks about inside factors and out and communicates those important truths quietly.

Jason’s mother, herself, is a wonderfully written character: communicated only in little bits and the contrast between who she is now and who she used to be. She’s a disaster, but one who—just by the way she’s shown to readers—is always portrayed as also doing the work to get better: sober in every sense of the word. She’s not always succeeding; the dynamic between them feels like a knife-edge. But her evolving attempts make her feel human, and understandable: again, not a stereotype.

There’s also a lot of deliberate atmosphere going into “A Prototype of Yourself” from its first lines: the small choice of starting the first line with “In the end” and starting things fresh. It’s a great, subtle way to inject Jason’s weariness into the situation from the first moments of the piece, and also tell readers which way we’re going.

This also helps ground “A Prototype of Yourself”, as its conflicts are largely emotional and internal. Its sense of the outside world is both lightly balanced and rather beautiful, even if Jason’s not in a place to see that beauty at times—and the ways landscapes act as handy visual metaphors for his emotional state do real thematic and structural work. Jason’s spaces subtly but tangibly mirror his state of mind: the uncomfortable rock like an island when he feels isolated, the distance between him and the hills in the first scene as he metaphorically sights a better place and takes his first steps toward it, and how they’re smeared into nothingness at the end of that scene, as his mother’s distance wipes out that little flare of hope. A city hall lawn watered artificially green despite a statewide drought when things are supposed to be all right now, and yet.

This does a lot of work at the story’s climax, when his emotional experience—being drunk, losing memory—is rendered as if it’s landscape. The two have been tied together by the previous metaphors, and now they can do powerful work the other way around.

There’s also a very strong positive effect to naming specific plants and specific experiences: chapparal, manzanita, pho beef browning in the bowl. One of the major ways we cue readers that our work has depth and realism is specificity—not a person, but this person; not someday, but Tuesday. The more we establish that sharpness of detail, the more the emotions and situations we write about benefit from it: they take on a sheen of realism too, and become emotionally meaningful for our readers—which is important in a speculative story about emotional states.

I also think this is handling its speculative information reasonably well. Jason’s ignoring the thinkbot pamphlets is a bit of an obvious device—a reason to explain it to readers—but it mostly works for me in this case, because it adds to his already-established ambivalence about all this. Again, the dynamics and characterization are carrying some of the more mechanical necessities.

All this would make a solid piece. It’s the last scene that elevates “A Prototype of Yourself” into something, I think, truly beautiful. The last scene of this piece—the last line—uses everything it’s said about bodies, about transactional relationships, about life, about landscapes and emotion, and tie it together into sheer poetry.

This is my favourite kind of science fiction: the kind that doesn’t stop at imagining technologies, but how our relationships and societies would shape around or in spite of them in a living, breathing world. And the kind that does that work compassionately, without trying to fold human life into a mechanistic framework. It’s a beautiful piece, and I think there’s definitely a home for it out there.

I have no notes to offer except that this is, I think, ready to publish.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

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

Vilhelm – Monastery Child Part 1 by Michael Ko

I like the concept of this submission. Animals with human-level intelligence and apparently opposable thumbs have appeared in fantasy and science fiction before, but this version does a nice job of depicting them on their own terms. They’re not patronized or infantilized, and they retain key aspects of their original species.

I am curious as to how and why they have human Christian names with a German flavor; this may be explained later. There’s an air of the fairy tale about it, a hint of the Grimm Brothers. It will be interesting to see how that develops through the longer narrative.

The prose has somewhat of the same effect, partly through constructions that seem not to originate in English—notably the insertion of now and then in a manner almost like Greek particles, in contexts that don’t, in standard English usage, really require them. There are long run-on phrases as well, such as

The fragrance of the oiled muttons coated in buttery garlic seasoned with salt and pepper had become so strong that I grasped at the air as though reaching for rolls preparing to stuff the meat into the bread.

The plural of “mutton” is “mutton,” though that may be a typo (but meats appears later in a similar context). I’m not sure oiled means what it wants to mean here. Did the cooks oil the meat and then baste it in butter and garlic? Or did they sear it in oil and then add the other ingredients? My mouth is watering at the thought, but I’m not sure I get what’s going on.

The rest of the sentence would be hard to read aloud—the reader has to take a couple of breaths to get through it. Breaking it up into a couple of sentences will help the prose, and the reader, breathe more efficiently.

Or here:

Do you take for granted the roof over your head, the meals you eat, and the time we took to take care of you to insult the founder of your very home?

The meaning is a little hard to parse here. The insult seems to belong to another sentence. As with the previous example, dividing the sentence in two would help make its meaning clearer.

The imagery throughout is vivid, with lots of sensory detail. Once the prose is polished and the meaning clarified, both the characters and the story will come through even more strongly.

In the meantime, I have a couple of more general suggestions. First, although there are bits of stage business around the blocks of dialogue, the interchanges mostly seem to hang in space. A little more framing, a line here and a line there of tone, expression, body language, how the speaker feels, would help to anchor the conversations more firmly in the story.

Second, first-person narrative is tricky. It’s amazing how it seems to be the most intimate and direct form, but it can actually separate the reader from the direct experience of the story. The narrator’s “I,” rather than becoming the reader’s point of view, sets them apart from it.

One way this can happen is through the rhetorical question. It’s common in third-person narration for the viewpoint character to present thoughts and reflections as “What do I do? Is this true? Am I making the right decision?” This is called an internal monologue. If it goes on for a while, it may be called “murbling”—circling around and around a series of thoughts and ideas without moving the story forward.

Vilhelm murbles a fair amount in the opening of the chapter. He reflects, he remembers, he asks rhetorical questions. It takes a while for the chapter to get going. The question I would ask is, Does he need to ask himself questions? Is there a way to convey the concepts more directly and actively? Could we move in closer to how he feels, live in his body, experiencing his emotions, rather than skimming the surface of his thoughts?

That doesn’t mean all the exposition and the reflections have to go. Not at all. He is a reflective person; he talks to himself quite a bit. That’s part of who he is. But the chapter might move more quickly, especially at the beginning, with some paring and pruning of the internal monologue.

Overall this is a good start, with some good things going on. I like the characters so far, and the setting is nicely established. Best of luck with the rest of the novel, and happy revising!

— Judith Tarr

The Shade Behind My Head Chapter 1 by Shlomik Silbiger

— Judith Tarr

Freets, Part 3 of Chapter 1 by Tracey V. Brown

Description can serve many purposes, but three of the most important are to convey significant sensory details so readers can experience what’s happening; to reflect the point of view character (what that character notices, cares about, and how the character thinks about the world); and to create an atmosphere, an emotional tone, that enhances the story.  I’m very intrigued by the opening of this novel, with Lennie wanting to publicize her bookshop by faking a Blair Witch-type story, and I’m excited by my expectation that some real horror will occur.  The characters, with their agenda of creating something phony, seem like they could add a fresh perspective on the situation, and the setting, an isolated village inaccessible by car, seems very promising.

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

Unfathomable Descent, Chapter One, Going Home by Elizabeth King

There are interesting things going on in this submission. I like the juxtaposition of the sterile environment of the base and the rich greenery of Adna’s home planet. It comes right up at the beginning and sets the tone for the rest of the chapter, and presumably the larger work.

I have a couple of questions about the structure of the chapter. While it’s clear that Adna has made the decision to go home rather than stay in the C.D., it’s less clear why she’s made that choice, or why it’s so difficult. It might help to have a line or so of clarification at the beginning, establishing who and what she is, and what she’s going back to. There could be a little more about her feelings for Kerry, the stress she’s feeling, how she’s had to choose between her duty to her planet and her love for her friend.

Some of that comes through later in the chapter, but I think it would be more effective if it appears earlier. Let us see right at the start what the dream means and why Adna is dreaming it. Layer in her feelings for Kerry. Weave the two concepts together, and show how they’ve come into conflict. Then when we actually meet her friend, we’ll have a better sense of what it means that Adna is leaving.

I’d like a better sense of the timeline, too. We’re told they’ve been together for years, but what we get up front and most clearly is that they’ve been at the base for less than a year. I don’t quite get the feeling of the larger canvas; it’s more focused on the shorter term.

Since this is a final or near-final draft, I would suggest a close line edit and polish. There’s a fair amount of repetitive phrasing that might be pruned and tightened: solid-state screen, for example, or her best friend.

In the latter case, maybe we can get a glimpse of their closeness, see how their friendship works. What is a best friend, in Adna’s world? How important is it as a concept? What makes Kerry her best friend, out of all the people she’s come into contact with? And how does the best friend rank in her world, compared to family? Is it a concept her world knows, or is it something she learned after she left it?

If we know right up front how conflicted Adna is, and why she has to make the choice she does, it’s less essential to label Kerry best friend. We’ll know from context that she’s the most important person here—and that it is not easy at all for Adna to leave her. Then we’ll feel Kerry’s shock and betrayal more acutely, and understand it better.

I don’t think any of this needs blocks of exposition. It’s more a matter of choosing the right words and phrases. Give us a line or a phrase that conveys the concept and helps to build the world.

Some exposition might be saved for later, too, or left to implication: such as Oso’s accent and origins. Is it an essential detail? Do we need to know it at that particular point? Is it directly relevant to what’s happening?

Overall I think it’s a good start. We’ve got the basic conflict. The setting comes through for me, especially by contrast with Adna’s dream. It just needs some pruning  and polish, and some clarification especially at the beginning.

Best of luck, and happy revising!

–Judith Tarr

Doesn’t Look Like A Hero by Shannon Walch

I was drawn to “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero” this month by its non-traditional perspective on quest stories, the rather gentle point about heroism and change, and the light sense of fun it brought to all that. It’s got the bones of a very successful cozy fantasy story, but there are still places where this draft can improve and solidify. This month, I’d like to talk about ways we can let readers move with our characters and make the experience of a story feel more satisfying.

Taking an alternate side of the classic Hero’s Journey situation isn’t a new way to generate a story, but as a wider strategy, it’s a good one. Aside from this story: especially when we’re working with ideas that are essentially formulas—and quests, heroic journeys, and folktales are formulas we use to say things about the world—it’s a very good idea to think of every character in them as a whole person with a subjective experience. Rejigged fairy tales do that as their centrepiece; writing them can be a great way to practice that wholeness and bring it into every piece we write.

And “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero” opens strong in terms of characters with whole personalities: with a stalemate between Maida and the House that implies a great deal about what the House does, doesn’t do, and is for. It’s working off a template of a world that’s familiar to a lot of fantasy readers, and doing something fun with it; leveraging those ideas well.

I’m also personally fond of fantasy stories that look at the sheer amount of work that sustains a fantasy world (yes, there is laundry!) but I also like the instant Ghibli-esque characterization of the House. It comes across like a cat or a stubborn toddler, which I think really works: something with a mind and definite opinions, but missing the language to communicate them. The first word we have about the House is “sulking” and the first metaphor Maida’s small cousins, and that makes a huge impression.

That said, I do have two major suggestions, both to do with deepening the situation “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero” already creates. It’s started some ideas: What I’m suggesting is taking this draft and spending the next draft or two exploring, setting, and finishing what’s been started.

The first is sense of place (and this is something that came up in this author’s last Editor’s Choice!). The House itself is a place—and I think that would be more vivid, believable, and impactful if attention went, on the next draft, to deepening that sense of place. There’s discussion early on about the House’s usual hiding places when it’s in a mood: a false roof panel, a grotto at the back of the cellar. But we never see or taste or smell any more about those spaces; they’re ideas, rather than concrete places, so they vaguely float in readers’ awareness but don’t give us a stronger sense of the House as place and character.

Likewise, we get a somewhat timeless and vague sense of where the House is situated: a little pocket universe somewhere near Bremen, in a pre-industrial era. While that’s along the lines of fairytales, a few concretizing details would bring this world into colour—and because it’s a folktale world, you can choose the concretizing details.

There are already some good sites for adding grounding into “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero”. When Maida is “really listen[ing]” to the creaks of the house, its state as a building, that’s a perfect time to let readers join in on that activity and really listen: give us a share in that awareness of it as space. What kind of sensory details does she notice? What is the House in terms of smell, colour, organization, height, roominess, structure, permeability? Which of these are usual, which of them new? What does she associate with those details? It’s tailor-made, as a plot development, to let readers in too.

(There’s a broader principle in here: When our characters do certain kinds of actions and the readers can follow along—perceiving something, feeling something—it’s satisfying for us. There are a lot of technical, neurological reasons for why that makes us feel closer to other human beings, and it doesn’t work differently for characters or stories. (If you’re curious, look up mirroring.) But the short version is: opportunities to meld together what the reader’s experiencing and what the protagonist’s experiencing are always good ones. There’s a great opportunity to do this with the House as a space in “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero”, and I think it would really anchor this piece.)

The second suggestion is to pick up on the way the House is being written as capricious, intelligent, almost childlike, and lean into that idea: how it communicates, what it cares about, and why. What goes on between Maida and the House is a full-on relationship—but it’s not entirely being written like one yet.

There are relationships throughout “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero” that aren’t yet being picked up on and developed: with the messenger bird, with the tomcat, with Guion (it hints a few times that Maida low-key thinks he’s irresponsible, and that might actually be her problem with boundaries, and that’s an interesting thing to explore! What’s that about?). Because this is a story fundamentally about relationships changing—Maida’s with the House not being what it used to be; her relationship with herself not being what it was; Hans’s relationship with the House beginning—I think it’s important, again, for “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero” to do what it’s talking about: look at relationships.

I think there’s a great deal of depth and poignancy to be gained here if the story spends more of its space thinking about—for Maida, for Guion, for Hans—what their relationships with the intelligent House actually look like. How they’re different; how they treat it and each other differently, and what those approaches bring them, or don’t. And what those relationships say about their relationships with themselves—which, considering this is about Maida’s self-image changing, we never quite hear enough about. A problem’s getting solved here that’s never been stated: Maida is becoming a hero. But why is that important to her, and where did she start, and where did she get stuck? Why is this the answer?

There are spaces, likewise, to develop this idea: the little hints about Maida’s cousins, her leaving home. There’s room in her emotional reactions to certain incidents to think about why she feels that way. But it’s work that I think would make this piece make more emotional sense.

I think looking at the sense of place, and looking at the relationships between all these people and magical entities would solve one of the structural problems in “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero”: a slightly dragging pace in the middle. There are a few too many problems being repeated—the House not doing what it’s supposed to, little acts of sabotage which Maida never really moves forward with an answer on—and substituting the repetition of the problem (House misbehaves, Maida doesn’t really cope) with more emphasis on the relationships and spaces can take the same amount of plot and make it feel like it’s moving forward more effectively.

All in all this is pretty structural work, but I think (like the House!) the bones are absolutely there. It’s a question of thinking differently about the draft you’ve got, and finding the places those new perspectives can fit.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

— Leah Bobet author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance Of Ashes (2015)