But they have certain things in common. We all do.
First, there’s a love of writing. A lot of writers hate writing and love having written. Not the ones who make it. They love words, they love pushing nouns up against verbs and seeing the results, they love creating their very own worlds and then inviting you into them.
Second, there’s the constant study of the field. There are certain categories of fiction that require almost no preparation. Others, like the detective story, ask you to create a hero and then run him through his paces book after book after book. Not science fiction. With all time and space at the author’s disposal, about the only thing he can’t do is tell the same story over and over. He can experiment, he can innovate, he can and must create; what he cannot do is repeat, not only himself but what has gone before, which is why he must be well-read in the field and stay abreast of what’s going on.
Third, there’s talent, and the ability to get the reader emotionally involved with the characters and the stories. The successful author must make the reader (I’ll write it in caps so no one can miss it) FEEL, must make him love or hate or fear or laugh, or, in short, react. If he makes him think, as our progenitors Hugo Gernsback (creator of the field) and John Campell (the first great editor) believed was science fiction’s mission, so much the better and the author has written a better story for it. But if the reader can’t respond emotionally, then the author has written a fictionalized polemic or scientific cross-word puzzle.
And there’s one more essential quality, which I will define as a fire in the belly, by which I mean an unwillingness to get discouraged or accept rejection. (A beginner asked me recently if I still get rejected. The answer was yes, every year or two it still happens. She then asked me my reaction. I said it hadn’t changed in half a century. It was, spoken so softly only I can hear it: “To hell with you, fella [or lady]. I’m taking it to your competitor, he’ll buy it, and when it wins the Hugo or the Nebula or sells to Hollywood I’ll get richer and more famous, so will my editor, and you, pal, are going to be standing on the unemployment line when word gets out.”)
Has it ever happened? I did win an award with a rejected story some years back. I don’t think anyone ever got fired for rejecting me. But the point is that you—like every writer I named—have to believe in yourself more than you believe in an editor whose tastes and priorities are different. (By the same token, never look at a story and say, “Oh, there’s no sense sending this one to Editor A. It’s just not his kind of story.” Maybe it isn’t, but it’s not your function to do his job for him. Let him decide whether or not to buy it—and remember: he can’t buy what he never sees.)
Is there more?
Sure. In this business, there’s always more.
I mentioned networking before. The writer with the hunger in the belly gets involved in that early on. He exchanges market information with his peers—and most anthologies are by invitation only, which means he finds out who the editors are and makes sure they know who he is. He learns of new markets, and in this day of the Internet, they change almost weekly. True, there are only four print magazines, where in 1954 there were fifty-six . . . but as I write these words (and it’s likely to change by the weekend) there are eighteen electronic science fiction magazines paying what SFWA—the Science Fiction Writers of America—considers to be a professional rate. And if you don’t network, you don’t learn about them. You network to find out which conventions you should go to, which ones have the editors you want to meet and the writers you want to befriend.
From the outside it may seem like the publishing world is imploding, as bookstore chains are in big trouble, and publishers are losing more writers every month to the Internet, where they have discovered that 70% is a nicer royalty rate than 6% or 10%. But from the inside, there have rarely been so many opportunities. There’s traditional publishing, of course. And there are more small and medium presses every year, a handful of which pay rates comparable to the New York houses. And there’s self-publishing on the web. And there’s podcasting. And there’s suddenly tons of money to be made in audio sales. And as quickly as the writer learns what he has to know about all these outlets, of course there will be more. And there’ll be improvements and innovations on what we have right now: e-books with animated covers and background music and hypertext, video podcasts and more.
Who will take advantage of all these opportunities? The same writers who have those four traits I mentioned before: a love of writing, a passionate interest in the field, talent and (perhaps most important, as I’ve seen many talented beginners just fade away) that blazing fire in the belly.
The Writers of the Future contestants in this book have all had ample opportunity to get down on themselves, to give up and walk away. Not one of them has quit. Every one of them loves writing, constantly studies the field they’re writing in, has enough talent to appear in this book and has that fire in the belly that all but guarantees this is far from the last you’re going to hear from each of them.
Bonehouse
written by
Keffy R. M. Kehrli
illustrated by
VIVIAN FRIEDEL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Keffy R. M. Kehrli is entirely from western Washington, except for the nine months he spent in Finland failing quantum mechanics and swimming in frozen lakes. He grew up reading fantasy and science fiction, especially books by Madeleine L’Engle and Nancy Farmer. After seeing Star Wars, he decided that he wanted to be a writer, despite his parents’ attempts to persuade him to chase a much more sensible profession.
Since then, he has earned degrees in both physics and linguistics, and is currently working in a molecular biology research lab. He hopes to one day attend graduate school for genetics and, of course, keep writing. He also harbors delusions of someday becoming a rock star, but admits that he’s just as likely to grow wings.
Keffy attended Clarion in 2008 and has sold a few stories to magazines like Fantasy Magazine and Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show. He is working on a novel, but hasn’t started sending out any fiction quite that long yet. He currently lives in Seattle and can be found at his website.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Vivian is happiest when she slips into a food coma after having eaten a good meal and is grateful her mom makes the best empanadas in the world. Despite her appearance, she eats like a glutton (a trait she is teased about immensely). Luckily for her health, drawing makes her forget that her stomach is a gaping black hole by filling her head with ideas that block out hunger signals.
As a child, nothing pleased her more than pretending to be a Power Ranger and watching Saturday morning cartoons before the rest of the family claimed the TV. Watching cartoons turned into copying cartoons on scrap sheets of paper, copying turned into creating her own creatures and as she got older, creating funny creatures turned into illustrating unwritten stories with no particular plots. At nine years old she made up her mind that she didn’t want to be a ballerina or a veterinarian when she grew up (though both are perfectly respectable professions). Instead she already knew at that early age she wanted to be an artist.
Her teen years were full of awkward moments and frustrations, but she survived by scribbling away on math notes in the back of the classroom.
Right after high school she enrolled at a community college to study video game design, but grew frustrated when the two-year plan turned into a four-year plan. Needless to say, she went back to a regular ol’ art major.
The future holds too many blank pages to fill for her to continue telling her life story. What can be said though is that she daydreams of making a happy living by doodling away either on overly expensive sketchpads, fancy-pants computer tablets or on modest sheets of printer paper with a .05 mechanical pencil, the latter somehow being her favorite.
Bonehouse
Evictions are
a messy business.
Muddy gold-brown sunlight filtered through the dust cloud that hung over downtown, putting tiger stripes of light and shadow in the air. Basalt gravel and desiccated eelgrass crunched underfoot as I made my way down Holly Street at low tide. There was asphalt beneath it all, slowly crumbling and turning to beach before it washed out to sea.
There wasn’t much this close to the bay. The buildings used to be two- or three-story shops before the ground dropped and the water level rose. Now the bottom floors had been opened up to let the tide run past. In the shadows, I could see the remains of rooms—slimy brown mold-and-rot walls, broken toilets and tile. A thick tide sludge that smelled like petroleum and the deaths of a million fish glistened in the shade.
Another ten years, maybe, and there’d be nothing here anymore.
Far cry from how it’d been when I’d lived this side of the mountains. Things used to be green then. Now the lowland forests were full of bleached ghost trees, dead from the salt water drowning their roots. The buildings were brickwork, and where there might have been ivy clinging to the sides, a thin tracery of metal spidered over the walls. Even in this submerged part of town, there was enough ambient electricity in the air for a decent harvest system to make up for what they didn’t get from sun or tide.
I stopped near the end of the row, smelling the place I was looking for, even over the salt stench of the ocean. Disinfectant, too much of it, a citrus-tinged sickly scent. You could knock on a hundred abandoned doors if you wanted, but I never needed to. I knew the smell of a bonehouse by heart.
I climbed up the ten feet of rickety wood stairs that were nailed to what had been the sill of the second-floor window. I didn’t like the stairs. Standing at the top, there wasn’t much to hang onto but a rotten banister that looked about ready to fall apart.
I knocked.
The owners let me stand out there a good few minutes while the terns wheeled overhead and screamed.
When the door opened, a short white man with round glasses and lank greasy hair down to his shoulders squinted out at me. “Evictionist,” he said. “I don’t got anybody here for you. Go find some other house to haunt.”
The disinfectant smell was stronger and the room was filled with a dim, flickering light. A woman in ripped jeans sat on a patched-together couch, dividing her attention between the wall-mounted screen and our conversation at the door.
“You won’t mind if I check their chips, then,” I said. “I’m a good guy. You don’t got what I want, I’ll leave.” Starting to lose my balance on the stairs, I didn’t want to go for that banister, figuring it would snap if I did, so I leaned forward and grabbed the doorframe.
The man flinched like I was too close, so I smiled.
“They’re all paid up through next year at least,” he said through his teeth. “I don’t have enough flow to return that much cash.”
I snicked my tongue against my teeth, waiting.
The woman came over. She said, “Let him in, Justin. Nobody ever gets the good side of an Evictionist.” She shot me a look that was mostly poison with just a dash of hate. “I’ll show him what he thinks he wants to see.”
Justin growled a bit, under his breath, and let the door swing open. He bowed and gestured inside.
“Thank you,” I said, and I slammed my boots against the doorframe, knocking off as much sand as I could. I kept my eyes on Justin, partways hoping he’d pull a knife. Americans.
We shook hands. Hers were rough as any bonehouse warden’s. “Dr. Anna Petreus,” she said.
The front room was cluttered, but not near as filthy as most of the places I’d seen. A few dirty dishes were stacked on the end table, next to them a pair of cell phones. Petreus had been watching news coverage of the riots in Ottawa. Someone had uncovered evidence that the parliamentary elections had been rigged. Almost normal, that.
A wiry looking orange tabby came out from under the coffee table and rubbed himself on my leg. Petreus gave me a funny look when I bent to pick up the cat. He wrapped his front legs around my neck and buried his nose in my ear, purring loud enough to wake the dead.
Petreus led me down the hallway to a dark room. The only light came from a cluster of monitors, each one hooked up to a different guest. The monitors showed vital signs. Steady heartbeats, hormones at the right levels, vitamins to stave off serious illness, everything they needed to live except reality.
Seven hospital beds full of bones and skin.
I’d never seen so many in such a small house. I wondered if it was a coastal thing, or if they’d come in as a group. The boy closest to me twitched while he net-dreamed. He’d been under for a while. They get like that, the bones. They’ll twitch all around even after the muscles have gone. The only thing they’ve got left that works is their brain.
“You must be turning a hefty profit out here,” I said. I put the cat down so I could fumble for my cell phone. “Not having to pay for your electricity.”
“We’re low-end,” Dr. Petreus said. She scratched the back of her neck and then inspected her nails in the light from one of the vitals displays. “None of these kids paid all that much per month when we plugged them in. We get by, but . . .”
I grunted a response. Winding around my legs, the cat purred louder. “Friendly cat,” I muttered.
“He doesn’t get a lot of attention from our guests,” she answered. “Go on, check them. I’m not leaving you alone in here.”
Only two of the seven were female.
The one closest to me didn’t really seem to have a human form under the blanket. From how small she was, I would’ve been curious to see the Vegas odds that she’d plugged in before she was legal. I thumbed open the phone. Nope, not mine.
The second woman was the one I was after. This didn’t surprise me. It didn’t matter how good a bonehouse tech was, she could never mask an IP address well enough to keep me out. And proxies, well. I’ll just say that not all of them are as anonymous as they advertise.
“Well?”
“Bad for you,” I said. I pocketed my phone and pointed at the woman tucked over in the corner. “She’s the one I’m after.”
Laura DeVries, age 29. Used the web like any normal kid until she was seventeen, when she ran away from home and tried to plug in permanently. She’d been evicted four times already. No wonder she’d come out to the coast—she probably had trouble finding a bonehouse that would take her.
Hers was a family extraction. The loved ones she’d left behind had pooled their money together for a fifth time, the amount much smaller than previous jobs. My cut was barely worth the trip out to the coast.
“She’s been in three years straight now,” Petreus said. “You know it won’t be any good for her coming out. Why waste the rehab dollars on her?”
“Because her family wants her back and I get paid by the contract.” I stretched my arms and back. Three years into a netdream, and she wasn’t going to be walking much of anywhere. I’d be carrying her back down Holly and up Bay. “Plus, you might say it ticks me off a bit when people with potential can’t handle unplugging long enough to feed themselves.”
Petreus just shook her head. She wound between the beds until she got to Laura’s. She called up the ’net usage on the vitals monitor and then cut the connection. She was doing it for the money, too.
It took a full twenty seconds before Laura realized that it was more than just a ’net hiccup and opened her eyes.
“Anna?” Her voice was raw, hoarse.
Petreus patted her on the forehead and then started disconnecting the IV and monitoring devices. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’ll pro-rate your stay and transfer what’s left back to your accounts.”
“No,” Laura said. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t violate any codes. I didn’t bring any viruses into the servers. Please.” Her face was green and
skeletal in the light from the monitors. “Sammy said he wouldn’t wait for me again if I dropped and he couldn’t find me. He’ll move on, Anna, he’ll move on.”
I crept up to her bed. She was too busy trying to grab tubes out of Petreus’ hands and stick them back to her body, but she was too weak. The tubes fell against the bedsheets, and Petreus gathered them up. She didn’t answer or look at Laura’s face. “I’m sure he’ll wait,” she said.
“Why are you doing this to me?” Laura’s voice cracked. She was crying.
I couldn’t figure if she was addled from the ’net drop—she had to still have some world-ghosting going on in her head—or if she really had forgotten the other times she’d been evicted.
“Evictionist, Laura.” I rested a hand on the metal bed railing. Good work on Petreus and her tech, getting all this equipment out here and up those stairs out front. “Your mama misses you.”
“No,” she started sobbing. “This is my life, don’t you understand?”
I leaned over. “You ever think maybe your real kids want to see more of you than just your avatar?”
No answer.
Petreus started shutting down the equipment. Laura didn’t move. She was dressed in what looked like a purloined hospital gown, so I wrapped the bedsheet around her limp form and picked her up like a kid. Couldn’t risk the fireman’s carry, too big a chance that she’d break something. Petreus said, “I’m sorry, Laura.”
Laura didn’t say another word until we were halfway down Holly Street. The tide was coming in, and I was already wading in an inch or so of surf.
“I’m just gonna go back,” she said. “Soon as they let me out.” Her chest heaved with every breath. Just the strain of holding onto my neck was enough to wind her. “I’ll plug back in and put my life back together.”
They all say that. I was expecting it.
“Go right ahead,” I said. “Keeps me getting paid.”
“Sammy might not wait,” she said. “But just in case if he does, I’ll be back. There’s nothing you can do.”