I just published my short story “A King in Exile” to Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, Scribd, and Barnes & Noble. You can buy it for 99c or the local equivalent, or sign up for my newsletter and get it for free.
What follows is my afterword to the story, which is included in the e-book, directly following the story proper. One paragraph has been deleted to avoid spoilers. I hate spoilers.
What follows is my afterword to the story, which is included in the e-book, directly following the story proper. One paragraph has been deleted to avoid spoilers. I hate spoilers.
Nanyangosaurus Like most kids I’ve ever known, I loved dinosaurs. I read about them, I drew pictures of them, I memorized their strange, romantic names, and I dreamed of unearthing their bones. At the age of nine, I knew I was headed for a career in paleontology. As it happens, I was actually headed for a career in writing and editing, so eventually, I suppose, those two paths wanted to cross. One day decades after I had abandoned my paleontological dreams, I found myself wondering what kind of person might logically find herself in possession of a mysterious egg and bring a living, breathing piece of the cretaceous into Victorian London.
As ideas about the story began to come together in my mind, I grew excited about the places it might go. I was relatively new to writing, and had not yet made my first fiction sale. In my unbridled enthusiasm, I gave an elevator pitch to someone who told me all the reasons the idea was a bad one, why the story was unbelievable, and why it would be a waste of my time to write it.
As ideas about the story began to come together in my mind, I grew excited about the places it might go. I was relatively new to writing, and had not yet made my first fiction sale. In my unbridled enthusiasm, I gave an elevator pitch to someone who told me all the reasons the idea was a bad one, why the story was unbelievable, and why it would be a waste of my time to write it.
Some time later, Algis Budrys would offer some advice he’d picked up watching the behavior of writers at workshops. He said to keep your story idea close to your chest unless you know the person you’re talking to won’t try to critique it. An idea can always be shot full of holes, he said. Once it’s written, peer critiques can be helpful. Until then, you risk letting someone convince you to kill what could have been a perfectly good story.
But I hadn’t yet heard that excellent advice, and so I took my friend’s criticism to heart and decided, with much regret, that however much I loved my idea, I didn’t have a viable story after all. I locked it away in the back of my mind for years.
But I hadn’t yet heard that excellent advice, and so I took my friend’s criticism to heart and decided, with much regret, that however much I loved my idea, I didn’t have a viable story after all. I locked it away in the back of my mind for years.
Afrovenator Enter Lorelei Shannon, gaming industry colleague, fellow writer, good friend, and goth punk chick extraordinaire. She’s quite knowledgeable about many facets of Victorian society, so one day I mentioned my idea and told her why I’d never written the story. She begged me to disregard what I’d heard before and write it anyway. She pointed out all the ways in which the advice I’d received long ago was wrong. She offered suggestions based on her studies of the lives of women in Victorian England and breathed new life into my old idea until I was ready to begin again. I sat down at my keyboard with renewed enthusiasm for my idea, my setting, and my characters—Lady Penelope, John Maguire, and of course, Rex. The young Lady Penelope who came to life in my mind was a bit of a fish out of water as a gentleman’s daughter in mid-19th-century England. She was independent, courageous, adventurous in the extreme, and not a particularly good risk on the marriage market. John Maguire, a junior solicitor far from his home in Ireland, seemed a likely candidate to see in her what other young men of her acquaintance could not. He was also from a lower social class, and being Irish set him down yet another rung on the societal ladder, so he could not be considered a prospective husband.
I DELETED ONE PARAGRAPH FROM THE BLOG VERSION BECAUSE SPOILERS!
I DELETED ONE PARAGRAPH FROM THE BLOG VERSION BECAUSE SPOILERS!
My portrayal of Rex owes a lot to Predatory Dinosaurs of the World: A Complete Illustrated Guide by Gregory S. Paul, which was always at the top of a tall stack of reference books teetering near my desk as I wrote. I wanted my dinosaur character to live and breathe, unlike the stuffy, stodgy Victorian sculptures displayed on the grounds of the Crystal Palace that influenced popular and scientific thinking about dinosaurs for generations. I wanted to bring a living creature of the steamy, lush cretaceous to live in a time and place impossibly foreign to his kind, then watch what happened next.
What happened was a love story. The more I wrote, the more the story filled up and spilled over with love—love expressed and unexpressed, love that conquered millennia and love that prevailed over death itself. The love these characters bore one another wove in and out of their experiences and adventures together to become the heart and soul of “A King in Exile.”
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