"Stay Cold," Spawn of Monkeys

The three questions I get most often from people about my writing are:

1. Where do you come up with the ideas?
2. How do you find the time to write?
3. Where'd you learn how to self-publish?

In reverse order, #3 is easy to answer. There's really nothing to it, at least there isn't when you're publishing ebooks through Amazon. Pretty much everything you need to know, at least for getting started, is here: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2VHRJZXET0TWT.

As for finding the time to write...what can I say? It feels like there's never time to write. I usually take an hour in the morning, between getting the kids off to school and starting my day job at 9:00, to work on my novel. But sometimes that gets hijacked, as when a critical rush happens on my day job or, as happened this morning, I'm publishing a new story and minor issues need to be fixed before I can promote the new work.

Where do ideas come from? Anywhere. Everywhere. Stephen King has joked about this several times. It's one of those impossible questions to answer. I had a Religious Studies teacher in high school who, when discussing meditation, said that the mind was like a monkey, constantly swinging and bouncing about inside your skull. The object of meditation is to still the monkey.

If I twist his metaphor a bit, thoughts are like monkeys. We all have these crazed troops of monkeys constantly performing their gymnastics in our heads. Some monkeys sit munching on grass in the background. Some swing right up to the glass and beat on their chest, demanding your attention. And sometimes, monkeys will be monkeys and do the Wild Thing. I find that most monkeys are private and carry on their hot monkey love out of sight in the bushes. But they do commingle, and every so often -- bam! There on the ground you've got a new, steaming baby monkey.

New ideas are like new monkeys. Most will never amount to anything. Oh, sure, they're fuzzy and cute, but it's not like they'll master sign language, compose Hamlet on the monkey exhibit typewriter, or lead an ape insurrection that wipes out humanity.

Except every so often, under a blue moon on a third Thursday, one does. One in every million or so conjugal visits between concepts yields the stem cell of a story. Like the swapping of monkey DNA, the process is largely random and unpredictable. But it happens. The trick is to be paying attention when that special baby monkey hits the ground, because the primates in your skull are an inattentive, rambunctious lot. No sooner is that new idea spawned than they're off banana hunting or foraging for fur lice, and little junior is long forgotten.

A writer will recognize a special baby monkey on sight. It creates an electric jolt in the hindbrain unlike any other. With the story I just published today, "Stay Cold," one such jolt literally arrived out of nowhere. I was at my desk, working on some article about computing. I'd been reading zombie lit for a few weeks while working on "The Followers," but I wasn't thinking about it then. Perhaps my eye fell across the weather report (it was March), and I thought about how unseasonably warm the winter had been. We'd had no snow. Wouldn't it be weird if my kids got snow on Spring Break?

And just like that, the baby monkey smacked to earth with a wet plop. As I sat here looking at my computer screens, I imagined a kid making a snow angel in a massive amount of snow -- so much snow that virtually everything had been buried under it. And frozen inside all that snow, just a few feet under the kid making his snow angel, there were bloody zombies, waiting. Just waiting...for the weather to get a bit warmer.

The image struck me as sublimely creepy. This monkey was special. I just knew it intuitively.

Central Elementary School in Roundup, MT

In any case, I immediately started poking at the idea. I needed a setting, someplace small and fairly isolated but still with modern amenities. A few minutes on Wikipedia led me to Roundup, MT, with a population of about 2,000. Thanks to Google Maps Street View, I was able to click through the streets and confirm that the hospital and shops where single-story. Central Elementary fit what I was looking for exactly. I found the house I wanted in the southeast corner of town. As happens so strangely often with writing, when the story is meant to be, the details all seem to snap into place with eerie convenience. Special monkeys do that.

However, not everything comes easily in those initial stages. By the time I finished first draft, I was left with a kid who had no purpose. He was just there, in this crazy, terrible environment, yes, but otherwise he was just floating through the events. I hadn't really asked myself who Tommy was or what he wanted.

In that first draft, Tommy was ten years old, which seemed natural because my eldest is currently that age. But my best friend and editor, Baron Schuyler, astutely pointed out that ten was too young for some of the actions in this story. Tommy had to be more like 12 or 13. The idea of 13 sparked another bout of monkey business in my mind, and only seconds later, I knew that Tommy was Jewish. He'd just turned 13. These events weren't just random; they were his trial of manhood. Suddenly, I had a real story about a real kid in an unreal, incredibly terrible situation.

Enough said. I'll be back soon with a look at how the cover for "Stay Cold" evolved. For now, I hope you'll bundle up, give the tale a read, and have a good shudder.

Sci-Guys Short Shorts: Lacuna and Serial

Wanna hear four guys rip Dark Shadows a new one? Then check out the newly posted Sci-Guys podcast #098. And if you want to stick around for my Short Shorts reviews of David Adams's Lacuna stories and Blake Crouch's "Serial," look for it to start at the 41:00 mark. If you happen to be challenged of hearing or simply impatient, here's what I had to say:

*   *   *

Hey, this is William, and something’s been bugging me. You know how everybody says that self-published ebooks are junk? Well, here’s some news. Remember Hugh Howey’s Wool, the self-published Kindle book I talked about last time? It turns out that 20^th Century Fox is now turning Wool into a movie, with both Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian, the guy who won an Academy for his Schindler’s List screenplay, attached to the project. So for all those who think that short fiction ebooks are crap, think again. If you keep your ears and eyes open, you’ll find loads of awesome fiction out there – no big publisher required.

Case in point, check out this 27-year-old guy from Darwin, Australia named David Adams. He’s a software programmer by day who’s been writing Star Trek fan fiction for years – just for the hell of it. Last year, he started cranking out a story series called Lacuna. Check it out at lacunaverse.com. Long story short, you’ve got aliens blowing away 50 million people because humans developed a technology they’re not supposed to have, and this is the story of humanity fighting back. Now, I haven’t read the two Lacuna novels that Adams has out, because I’m ridiculously busy. But I did buy the two 99-cent short stories, and this is my point. His short stories told me two things: Adams can spin a good tale, and this Lacuna universe is a place I want to explore. I now have his books on my wish list because I was impressed with his short stories, which functioned as sort of a teaser. This is something you rarely saw in the old world of print. You don’t have to risk 5 or 10 bucks on a paperback blurb anymore. Put a dollar on the table. Take a chance. You might just discover a new voice and a new world filled with adventure, moral dilemmas, great science, and badass aliens.

Now, out of the thousands of new ebook authors out there, where else do you start? Usually word of mouth, just like me to you, right here. But I also keep up on several ebook-related blogs and forums. Through one of these, I found Blake Crouch and the short story "Serial," which he co-wrote with Joe Konrath. In a nutshell, we know that hitchhiking can be dangerous. The guy who picks you up could be a serial killer. But so could the hitchhiker, right? This story asks: What happens when the driver and hitcher are both serial killers? For five bucks you can get Serial and nine other short stories in Crouch’s insanely good collection, Fully Loaded. [Edit: It's four bucks. What is it with me and ebook prices?] You might call this suspense or thriller fiction rather than horror, but I would argue that monsters come in all shapes and sizes. To me, the unsuspected monsters strolling right next to you on the sidewalk can be more terrifying than anything covered in slime. Horror can happen wherever you find cracks in reality.

So... Sci-fi. Suspense. Horror. Self-published and totally awesome. Go get it. Again, this is William Van Winkle, and thanks for checking out my Short Shorts.

The Road Trip That Became a "General Invasion"

I met Baron Schuyler when we were high school seniors, way back in 1988. It was at a poetry workshop at Reed College (I think). I remember absolutely nothing about this workshop except sitting at a conference table with Baron on the opposite side of it. He was even skinnier and paler than me (no easy feat back then), long-haired, and clearly the only kid at the table with a clue how to string five decent words together.

Because we each seemed to make some impression on the other, we gravitated together two years later as Portland State University freshmen majoring in English, and we've been close friends ever since. He was the best man at my wedding, and we've been witness to each other's victories and stupidities for over two decades.  Early in our college career, we started making an annual trip from Portland to Ashland, OR to take in two or three plays the town's Shakespeare Festival and work on our respective -- or joint -- fiction projects. Over the years, we've started a lot of such projects, and some of them remain simmering on the back burner, too good in concept to fade completely into the night. Like so many other would-be writing teams, we've spent years getting together, enjoying the collaboration process, but inevitably getting derailed by the other time demands of our lives.

Figuring in lunch, the trip from Portland to Ashland takes about five hours each way. Our traditional pattern is that four of these five hours will be spent bitching about work and women troubles, and about one is spent on writing, which explains why we've never published anything. But we've sure had a lot of good times along the way.

Our 2011 trip was different. For one thing, it was the year we hit middle age and I got serious about self-publishing fiction. ("Good God, I'm 40 years old with no novels to my name," blah blah blah.) I don't think either of us had an undue amount of complaining to do about women on this trip. The stars lined up a certain way as we sped southward down I-5, and something slightly magical happened. The story that would become "General Invasion" (originally called "General Contact" until Baron thought of the better twist) was born.

I'll let Baron describe it...

I don't remember exactly what made me think of this concept, but I'm pretty sure it was after seeing a snippet of the movie Battle Los Angeles. I remember thinking to myself something along the lines of, "Another alien invasion story where everybody tries to blow each other up. It's always that or mysterious abductions." It seemed to me that almost all alien contact stories fall back on one of these two motifs, with only the very occasional exception. Star Trek had a classic exception in its first contact between Humans and Vulcans.

But even Star Trek wasn't immune to the allure of the cliche. I recalled an episode in which aliens were abducting Riker for medical experiments. (IMDB identifies this episode as "Schisms" from season six.) But I also recalled another episode with Riker, where he took on the role of alien invader. Fans of the show will recall that Federation officers often had minor surgery to make them blend in with unsuspecting alien populations, allowing them to obey the Prime Directive. In this episode ("First Contact" from season four), Riker is injured and his human anatomy is discovered by the alien civilization. He tries to escape captivity and he is offered a way out by a lascivious nurse who will help him if he agrees to a sexual tryst with her. This was done rather comically, but as a throwaway line.

Later, I somehow had reason to think about all of this in relation to online pornography. I can't remember why exactly. But it may be because I work at the library and we occasionally have people with poorly defined boundaries come in and view pornography on our public computers. (I mean, c'mon. Really? In public?) We have the annoying task of requesting that they not view it in the library. (Or else.)

At any rate, I wondered, "What if the alien abductions were not for medical experiments or ultimate world domination, but were the work of intergalactic pornographers making stag films?" This seemed rather comical to me. As such, I mentioned it jokingly to William.

Surprisingly, William thought this might make a good story, a sharp and irreverent comic piece. We spent most of our annual trip to Ashland trying to hash it out. Our first attempts focused on a female main character. We kept trying different permutations, but everything came off as crass or tasteless or politicized or politically correct, etc. Most of all, none of it was especially funny.

Just when I was saying that maybe it was best as a passing joke (and not a story), William hit on the brilliant idea of having the main character be a guy. And not just any guy -- a general in the US Army. This struck me as hilariously funny. The idea of it had me laughing so much that I am glad I didn't wreck the car as I was driving us home. He had been working on a story with Roswell connections and linked it to that. It all seemed to fall into place.

William did the hard work of creating a first draft. I had the easy task of doing the first rewrite. It went smoothly after that, with only minor changes and edits.


While most of our rides home tend to be a bit morose -- no one likes ending a vacation -- we laughed almost non-stop for 300 miles. I used the voice-to-text function on my Android smartphone to try and dictate notes into a Google Doc, and only later did I realize how much of the file was gibberish. But enough of the phrases were sufficiently intelligible to trigger my memory a few months later, and I wrote the initial draft in awkward 15- to 60-minute blocks over several weeks. If the final draft strikes you as funny and coherent, you can thank Baron, because those elements were largely absent in my initial sprawling mess.


Honestly, I don't know if "General Invasion" works or not. I'm too close to it to judge objectively. I still believe that humor and horror are the two most difficult genres in which to write well, because you're trying to elicit a more visceral emotional response from the reader. I'll let you decide whether or not we were successful.

For me, even if the story never sells a copy or gathers positive reviews, I'll consider it a glowing accomplishment that's been 20 years in the making. Baron and I finally completed a piece of fiction that (I hope) was ready for a widespread audience. Friendship has no requisite purpose. No two people ever say, "We're going to be friends in order to..." But if there ever were a purpose behind Baron's and my friendship, I think we would agree that it would be to write together. There's an inexplicable joy in the collaborative process that helps keep us together decade after decade. Being able to turn that collaboration into something tangible, something that can be shared with the world, may not be essential, but it sure feels great and long overdue.


Here's to hoping the next one won't take as long...

Sci-Guys Short Shorts Review: Hugh Howey's Wool

It's that time again! If you're interested in some lively, crass, and hilarious discussion about this summer's upcoming movies, give Sci-Guys Podcast #96 a listen. Of course, if you want to skip straight to my quick Short Shorts review of Hugh Howey's awesome sci-fi story, Wool, then please either fast forward to 45:20 in the podcast or, well...here it is:

~   ~   ~

We all love post-apocalypse stories with nuclear monsters, roving zombies, or packs of rabid marauders out to pillage and destroy. Wool, by Hugh Howey, is not one of those stories. In this post-apocalypse, the world, as visible through four surface cameras, seems to be a seething, gray, toxic nothing. What’s left of humanity lives in underground missile silos, and these cameras are the only views onto that world. But the cameras grow filmy and obscured over time. The few who are banned from the silo are tasked with cleaning the cameras with wool before they wander off to die...maybe.

This is the story of the silo’s sheriff, Holston, who still mourns for his wife. She discovered secrets about the silo’s past that had to be investigated, even if it meant her death on the outside. Now, Holston has to see if she was right about the outside, because he can no longer stand to be on the inside.

We all enjoy getting lost in worlds of fiction. Look at The Lord of the Rings. That’s an amazing, fascinating world, right? But in terms of character development, Middle Earth may not be a zero, but it’s really close. The genius of Hugh Howey is that he builds the world of Wool through character. In science fiction, it’s easy to get caught up in the big concepts, the sweeping time scales. But without character, without real people who reflect you, every world is flat.

Hugh Howey is my hero. He’s just an ordinary guy who started self-publishing the stories he felt compelled to write. The story he had the least faith in and practically ignored was the one that caught fire with the public, spawned a series, and is now courting offers from the BBC and movie studios. And this guy is so down to earth and cool in a really quiet, caring way. I defy you not to love Hugh Howey.

Start with Wool 1 and see for yourself. Like every Wool installment, it’s 99 cents. [Edit: The first three are 99 cents. They edge upward after that as novella lengths increase.] If you’re really cheap or don’t believe me, all of Wool 1 is contained in the free sample of the five-part Wool Omnibus. Read it. You’ll be addicted.

I am William Van Winkle, and thanks for checking out my short shorts.

Sci-Guys Review: Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt"

I posted before about the interview I did for the Sci-Guys podcast. What I didn't mention at the time is that I've always wanted to be a reviewer. Well...I mean, I am a reviewer for CPU magazine and such, but I really wanted to be more in the vein of movie reviewer extraordinaire Roger Ebert. I've long believed that part of Ebert's enduring popularity hinges on his intelligence and perspective. He brings decades of both professional and human insight into his reviews. Often, they're as much about life as they are about movies. This is what sets Ebert apart. Any keyboard monkey can spin a snarky put-down, but very few can achieve elegance, humor, and wisdom all while writing "just" another review.

That's what I've always wanted to do, but computing doesn't allow much leeway for humanity in its media coverage. The best of my efforts in this direction can be found in my Architects of Tomorrow, Volumes 1 and 2 ebooks. But yeah, I get it. How much humanity and perspective can one inject into a Wi-Fi adapter review? Not much.

After the Sci-Guys interview, I had a crazy idea. I dropped a note to the guy who'd interviewed me, Sci-Guy John, and asked if there was any chance that I could do little reviews of short fiction ebooks on the show. He floated the idea around his group, and they agreed to give it a spin.

My first attempt at this appeared in Sci-Guys podcast 094. (You know they're geeks, because only nerds who survived Y2K would think to put a "0" in front of their otherwise two-digit show numbers.) My little segment appears about half-way through the show, and it got edited in just before going live, so there was no time to work with the audio levels and such. That's I sound like I'm French kissing the mic.

I'd encourage everyone with a funny bone and a strong stomach to enjoy the show, but if you just want the text of my review, here it is:

William’s Short Shorts: “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

One day in sixth grade, in the middle of this otherwise godawful anthology of short stories for young readers, I found “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury. And my head exploded. It was my first taste of speculative fiction, that dark area of literature where the creepy and fantastic collide. Speculative fiction is as fascinating as it is disturbing, and it’s usually most disturbing when it makes you question your own humanity.

On one level, “The Veldt” is a parable about modern man and our love of technology. George and Lydia Hadley are recent purchasers of a Happylife Home, something straight off the Street of Dreams and then filtered through The Jetsons.

This Happylife Home’s main feature is its nursery, which is a dead ringer for the holodeck. Keep in mind that “The Veldt” was originally published in 1950, almost four decades before virtual reality and the holodeck arrived in Star Trek: The Next Generation. So when Bradbury describes the nursery as a space where 2D walls are able to simulate an African veldt grassland and its animal inhabitants with incredible 3D realism, and the environment is created from scans of the imaginations of the Hadley’s two children, this is science fiction at its forward-looking finest.

But “The Veldt” doesn’t focus on technology. Rather, it’s about how the Hadleys have become crippled by their dependence technology. The father needs more sedation at night. The mother is a nervous wreck. And their two children are spoiled brats who want to spend every waking minute enveloped in their video games—I mean, Happylife Home nursery. Faced with the shouting and pain of ripping their kids back into reality or letting the obsession continue, the Hadleys keep their kids on the electronic teat. The African environment grows increasingly real as the parents’ panic escalates.

So, when would you try to pull the plug? I mean, we just want our kids to be happy, right? It’s so easy to let technology lull us to sleep. But sometimes happiness goes too far. And don’t we all worry, deep down, that we might wake up just be a little...too late?

Even now, reading “The Veldt” still sends a shiver up my back. You can find it in Bradbury’s story collection, The Illustrated Man. This story opened my eyes to speculative fiction and changed my life. I can’t recommend it highly enough, and it seemed a great piece to kick off an ongoing series of short story reviews here on Sci-Guys. With the rise of ebooks, people are gradually rediscovering how incredible good shorter fiction can be. Not only can it pack the same punch as a novel, it’s often a better fit for people with busy schedules, and you can pick most stories up for less than a buck.

For now, don’t miss “The Veldt,” spelled V-E-L-D-T. I don’t see it on the Kindle or Nook yet, so this one time, please look for it on paper first. But whatever you do, don’t miss this story, and thanks for checking out my short shorts.

My First Interview as an E-Publisher

I've listened to loads of author interviews over the years, and I've certainly conducted quite a few as part of my journalism career, but I've never been on the receiving end of things...until now.

If you enjoy speculative fiction, especially on TV, and you like your banter a bit salty, I'd encourage you to check out the Sci-Guys podcast. It contains my first-ever interview as an author, and the four guys who run the show were generous enough to dedicate almost 18 minutes of the show to me and my thoughts on e-publishing. If that's not enough, you can also stream/download the even longer version here.

If you follow indie publishing, much of the discussion may seem like old news. But if you're a fledgling writer or haven't decided to get serious about finding alternatives to traditional publishing, I'd encourage you to give it a listen. I sure had a blast doing the recording at the Sci-Guys Crawlspace Studio. It's literally a crawlspace, complete with gravel floor and a space heater we had to unplug in order to run my laptop. In this terrible picture I snapped with my smartphone, you can see the plywood walls and insulated ducting wrapped in holiday lights.

Humble beginnings, perhaps, but it was a blast, and I'm looking forward doing more with the Sci-Guys in the near future. Meanwhile, grab a drink, put your Netflix stream of "The Walking Dead" on pause, maybe dust off some of your old Star Wars action figures, and give the Sci-Guys podcast a listen. It's like enjoying the antics of your favorite class clowns in high school, only now they're grown up. Kind of.

Following "The Followers"

Who knows how stories really start? Polished ideas begin like bits of interstellar dust, floating around random and formless. But add in gravity and time -- lots and lots of time -- and eventually those tiny motes will collide, stick, accumulate, and, at the key moment of critical mass, ignite into a star.

For my new novellete,"The Followers," that first mote appeared when I came across this photograph. It was part of a Yahoo! news story about the Medford Historical Society displaying a new collection of rare Civil War photos. I was struck by this scene of marital normalcy in the midst of America's most tragic and bitter war. Cute little kids at Daddy's feet, wife doing the laundry. Oh, and somehow the family is tagging along behind Daddy's regiment as he marches 15 miles or more per day and occasionally has to go fight in the midst of unthinkable carnage.

Around the time I found this photo, I was also working through another story idea, a near-future piece about bioengineering and zombies. I'd been putting notes together for weeks and had zombies constantly gnawing in the back of my mind.

Two specks of dust in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly, they collided in my imagination...and stuck.

I took U.S. History during my junior year of high school. Typical of most history courses, I found it immensely dull and forgettable. If you think about it, making history that boring is pretty difficult. History is one long epic saga filled with intrigue, battles, sex, human sacrifice (figuratively and literally), double dealing, great loves, the bitterest betrayals, and ultimately the fate of the world. How could anyone not love that? Turns out, pretty easily so long as you reduce it to a bunch of sterile factoids crammed into an emotionless textbook that you stare at for 50 minutes while trapped in a little plastic desk. U.S. History was turned from a thing of vibrant fascination into this desiccated, lifeless, but somehow still shambling shell. What more appropriate backdrop, then, for a zombie story?

On an impulse, I turned to Wikipedia and searched for the Battle of Gettysburg. Apparently, there was enough of junior year U.S. History still hidden in my subconscious to lead me toward another dust mote that was compatible with the accretion still gathering mass in my imagination. Detail after detail clicked into place. At a time when we remain increasingly nervous about Iran's nuclear intentions, thoughts of weapons of mass destruction are never far from the headlines. Add that speck into the mix.

What if zombies were such a weapon? What if one side had been able to wield that weapon at the most pivotal moment of the most pivotal battle in American history?

I opened my "Ideas" file on Google Docs (virtually all of my in-progress files now live in the cloud) and typed this:

July 1863, outside of Gettysburg, PA. Union army commander General Meade has his back against a wall, his forces having failed to defeat the Confederate leader, General Robert E. Lee. After two days of death and retreating to higher ground around Cemetery Hill, the Confederate forces have the Union surrounded on three sides. Then comes word that Union reinforcements are nearing. The Confederates must smash the Union army the next morning while they can.

The story starts with one of the camps under Confederate General Longstreet, who controls the western forces. Longstreet knows that Meade is a weak, indecisive general prone to not pressing an advantage when one materializes. Meade has not allowed General Grant’s ideas about total war to dominate the Union army, but Longstreet actually agrees with Grant. Longstreet knows that they need a total victory across Pennsylvania, and Lee, the eternal gentleman, may not have the guts to be merciless. Look at all of the prisoners they’ve taken. Longstreet wants a knockout blow and is weighing options with his officers. Longstreet calls for a 10-minute pee break, goes outside, and is approached by a private. The private wants to show him something. He takes Longstreet back to a tent behind the camp -- one of thousands of such tents typically inhabited by the families of soldiers who follow behind armies. The private beckons Longstreet to follow him inside of the tent. At first, Longstreet refuses. Then they hear a low, ragged moan from inside the tent. It sounds like a woman, but...not quite.

I visualized the ending scene of the story as clearly as this beginning, and I loved it instantly. Thirty minutes later, I'd put holds on every Gettysburg-related book in my local library's collection, kids' books included. The best of the bunch by far was Gettysburg by Stephen W. Sears. If you have an interest in the subject, I highly recommend it.


You might think that the moment of critical mass and story ignition came today, upon the story's publication. I don't see it that way. The real moment happened during my research when I found out that General Longstreet had lost three of his children to scarlet fever less than two years before Gettysburg. Instantly, I went from having a cardboard prop to a real man, filled with pain and loss, trying every day to hold himself together in the midst of this Civil War insanity. With that one last speck, the story reached its tipping point, and today's publication became inevitable.


I started writing the first draft on April 23, 2011, almost ten months ago, and finished on September 3rd. The story weighed in at over 12,000 words, and I thought, "Good Lord, will people actually read all the way through this?" I had originally envisioned the story at half that size. But every time I read it over, the more I felt that, if anything, I was skimming and leaving way too much out. Rather than keep second-guessing myself, I decided to bring in an alpha reader or two and start gathering responses.


Right off the bat, it was clear that the story had a fundamental flaw in logic: why not simply have the zombies attack before the battle? Events were happening because I needed them to happen for the plot's sake, not because they were byproducts of characters' desires. (A solid plot derives from character, not the other way around. This is why action movies with no attention to character development fall flat and why, come to think of it, history classes are so dull. All of the character has been stripped away.) The second draft's mission was to remedy this, and by third draft, I think the bugs were worked out.

One of my editors from CPU magazine, Vince Cogley, volunteered to be a beta reader. He applied his editing skills and (hitherto unknown to me) gift for imagination in speculative fiction toward draft #2 and proposed a different ending for the story. Originally, the scene with General Meade was the final clincher. Vince's feedback resulted in draft #3 tossing out this scene and replacing it with the final Longstreet scene you have in the published version. The trouble was that each had its own merits and reasons for being present, but you can't have two endings in one tale. I fretted over this for two weeks, unable to decide which ending I liked better. Then, one night while putting the kids to bed, it struck me: this wasn't like picking a prom date. With a slight bit of twisting, I could keep both, capturing the plot and back story benefits of Meade's scene while preserving the emotional impact of Longstreet's final actions.


And that, y'all, is how "The Followers" came to be. I hope you enjoy it and will pass the good word on to your friends. Please check it out at Amazon or Smashwords. If you see fit to leave a review, I'll be doubly obliged, and my hunger for human approbation will be satisfied...for a while.