The Hermit and the Songbird – Rejections: 21
This is sort of an extended version of a story-within-a-story that appeared in The Fabulist, another novel of mine. The original version was a short parable about destroying things of beauty in the process of trying to control them. As I scratched around for fresh material, I hit upon the idea of turning it into a full-length story with more overt fantasy elements. It is, in my opinion, the best written piece in this anthology, which is also why it has the highest rejection count – I really believed in it.
Echoes in the Mainframe – Rejections: 10
I really never wanted to write a story about social media, or one that relied on narrative gimmicks, yet here's a story that features both. Despite only doing this one in a begrudging attempt to get a SFWA credit, I think it turned out very well, with the greater story hinted at through the banality of the computer interface until it can no longer be ignored. See if you can figure out the other stories that inspired this one – there are a few hints in the opening pages.
Diplomatic Etiquette and the Alien Menace – Rejections: 10
This is sort of a follow-up to another story called “The Invasion Will Be Slightly Delayed,” not featured here as it was ultimately published. It's one of several stories in this collection connected to the never published novel All the Stars Within Our Grasp, this one featuring the Kro'dyl and their over-the-top brutal ways. My hope was that these stories would serve as advertising for the book, but the fact that they were rejected put an end to that plan.
Acts of Creation – Rejections: 12
Here's another All the Stars Within Our Grasp tale, this one featuring the main villains – the Anheli. There were several stories centered on the Anheli, each focusing on one of them. This one pointed the lens at Invidia, who didn't have much of a role until the never written third book. I kept trying to sell this one even after I gave up on the book, as the underlying idea – the alien entropy cult with its love for the ultimate in creative destruction – still felt like it would have some appeal.
The Ocean Unseen – Rejections: 12
This relatively short story took two weeks to write. I don't care for literary fiction, including the pseudo lit-fic currently dominant in much of SF, but I wanted to prove to the haters that I wasn't rejecting it out of jealousy, the usual defense when one critiques lit-fic as a genre. Ultimately, the big markets fawned over the writing, but still found some pretext or another to reject it.
Faithful Servant – Rejections: 15
This one has its roots in a story called “The Servant” which I put in an anthology I tried to sell many years ago. “The Servant” seemed to confuse people more than anything, so I rewrote it to make it a bit more accessible. Both this and the original really lay out my own philosophy when it comes to fiction about thinking machines. Other writers create AI stories that are about domination or, more recently, sex. I create AI stories about existential horror.
A Dirge for the Prairie – Rejections: 11
When I was about 8, my family moved to a house at the edge of our small Kansas town, with a fine view of the prairie. I was introduced to the truly ominous sound of the coyotes that first night, and many nights thereafter once the sounds of civilization had gone silent. It is a sound too haunted to be real, and I wanted to capture the feel of being engulfed by that dirge.
Cheery Little Monochrome World – Rejections: 12
This one was a story that I wanted to do for many, many years – a tale of a hyper-globalized future, not a dystopia but something more plausibly dreadful. The problem was that I couldn't come up with a plot to go along with it. The idea finally hit me while I was sitting in an airport terminal in Tucson, and I was mostly finished by the time my plane boarded. I always knew that this would be a hard sell due to its length and its ambiguous genre, and I was not disappointed.
Maxie – Rejections: 20
“Maxie” is a personal favorite, but there's no great story behind it. I went to the Lawrence, KS public library with my laptop, intending to write three new flash fiction pieces. Only the idea of this one was usable – the little girl with the giant robot friend. I rewrote this one a few times, but no one saw any magic in any version of it.
The Path in the Dragon's Wake – Rejections: 10
I wrote this one in a train station in Huangshan after spending half a day wandering lost through the fog-choked mountains surrounding the town. It was an almost spiritual experience, and I wanted badly to share those feelings – of being lost, of being foreign (more so than usual), of feeling a presence that eludes rational explanation. The failure of anyone to notice that beauty was what ultimately inspired me to give up on short fiction. If they didn't like this, they won't like anything I show them.
Rhesus – Rejections: 12
Nature: Futures gave me my first – and to date, only – SFWA credit with “Starless Night,” and I wrote this one specifically for them, hoping for a second win. It was based on some gory medical experiment photos sent to me by a student (the background can't always be beautiful). Of note is that the disease the researchers are studying is the same one devastating the world in “Echoes in the Mainframe.” A lot of these stories have little links like that.
A Walk Through the Heavens – Rejections: 6
This was one of the first stories I wrote in China, and I produced it specifically for a contest. It didn't even clear the preliminary vote. By this point, I was growing increasingly frustrated with what struck me as judgments on my writing style by the SF markets, and was trying a variety of other styles in attempt to find something they would deign to publish. The low rejection count is due primarily due to the limited venues for very short fiction.
A Wounded Sky – Rejections: 10
This one started off as an opening line, to which a story was later added. This is somewhat common practice in novel publishing, as agents seldom read past the first sentence, so I tried it out with the short fiction markets to see if I could trick some editor into thinking it was lit-fic enough for his tastes. I do still like it as an oddball apocalypse.
Unbroken Waters – Rejections: 8
I found an unfinished version of this story buried in my Dropbox, having forgotten all about it, and decided to finish it – apropos given the subject matter, I think. This is another story based in the All the Stars Within Our Grasp universe, one of several set in the culturally monolithic Taiyang Empire. Had I elected to continue the series, Unbroken Waters (the work of art, not the story) would have appeared in the second novel, which was set principally in the Taiyang.
Ascent of the Monkey King – Rejections: 20
One day, a bout of bad weather spared me having to go to my job in a vineyard, so I took the whole day and wrote this. It is influenced heavily by my experiences working in the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun during a period when it was awesomely corrupt. Some of the editors seem to have been looking for some sort of conspiracy, but the conspiracy's right there – they're all crooked. It's usually that simple in real life.
The Ego Collector – Rejections: 11
This one came to me following a session of chemically-aided meditation (I'll leave it to you to guess which chemical was involved). It follows in a tradition of speculative stories that are unabashedly weird with no attempt to make them come together at the end. Clearly this annoyed some of the editors, who expected an ending that wrapped everything up. I'll give then the ending when the universe gives it to me.
A Pleasant Night on Ichorous Waves – Rejections: 18
This is another piece I wrote for a contest. As with many short stories, I opted to set it in a specific time and place to give it some extra flavor. Honestly, I'm not sure that I'd recommend doing this – the use of time- and culture-linked cues seems to confuse them more than anything.
Blood Loss – Rejections: 8
Yet another contest story – this one squeaked through the first round, only to lose badly in the second. I received such brutal criticism of this one that I almost left it out of the collection, but then I said to myself “To hell with the editors, I like it.” It's one of two straight horror stories I considered for this collection, and believe it or not it's actually the less gruesome of the two – the other, “Embrace Self-Discipline,” probably won't see the light of day unless I do an entire horror anthology at some point.
I Swear I Saw the Whole Thing – Rejections: 10
No great story behind this one – I had downtime at work, so I wrote a flash piece. The underlying concept of astronomically long odds collapsing towards one on a universal scale is borrowed from All the Stars Within Our Grasp, in which the scale of the story means that coincidence starts to lose all meaning. I almost based a whole novel around just this premise, but wised up pretty quickly.
The Gun That Didn't Fire – Rejections: 10
Another story written with a venue in mind, this was my final attempt at a thinking machine story with elements of existentialism, though I had to tone that back given the length. The story that said venue actually published was very similar but, in my opinion, much more cliché. Such is publishing, I suppose.
Second Chance, Stolen to Order – Rejections: 17
There are four distinct versions of this story, submitted under three different names. I believed in this one more than most, hence my repeated efforts to improve it. It started off life as a hastily thrown-together flash piece I wrote after a bad day, but grew from there. If “The Hermit and the Songbird” represents passion and “The Path in the Dragon's Wake” represents submission, then this one is the realism that bridges the gap. Those three tell the tale of my career more than anything else.