March 4, 2018

WRITING ADVICE: What Went RIGHT With “Pigeon” #42 (Submitted 5 times, sold to SHORELINE OF INFINITY (Scottish SF Magazine)) Guy Stewart #42


In September of 2007, I started this blog with a bit of writing advice. A little over a year later, I discovered how little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, Lin Oliver speak at a convention hosted by the Minnesota Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Since then, I have shared (with their permission) and applied the writing wisdom of Lin Oliver, Jack McDevitt, Nathan Bransford, Mike Duran, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, SL Veihl, Bruce Bethke, and Julie Czerneda. Together they write in genres broad and deep, and have acted as agents, editors, publishers, columnists, and teachers. Since then, I figured I’ve got enough publications now that I can share some of the things I did “right” and I’m busy sharing that with you.

While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do all of the professional writers above...someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what I write. When I started this blog, that was NOT true, so I may have reached a point where my own advice is reasonably good. We shall see! Hemingway’s quote above will now remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output and sales! As always, your comments are welcome!

[A brief UPDATE: This story was added to a collection of stories from SHORELINE OF INFINITY -- some of the authors it will be with are Paul McAuley, Anne Charnock, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Eric Brown!

This was my second sale to an international market, and my guess is that THAT is the reason why it sold.

It’s a uniquely American tale that came out of me watching various versions of The Time Machine, watching Time Tunnel, and teaching a summer school class on Time and Time Travel. I also fell in love with H. Beam Piper’s Paratime books, and continued to read in the “alternate history” vein for a long time. MAN IN THE HIGH TOWER, by Philip K. Dick was also one I…well, “enjoyed” isn’t exactly the work I was looking for, but I’ll go with it.

At any rate, as a science teacher and long-time science geek, I once came across an article describing birds with poisonous flesh.

It didn’t take long to come up with a story, but I didn’t think it could be told straight – I wanted it to be happening to someone.

With a bit of research, I found that the height of passenger pigeon population, about four billion in North America where it lived and bred around the Great Lakes:  “One flock in 1866 in southern Ontario was described as being 1.5 km (0.93 mi) wide and 500 km (310 mi) long, took 14 hours to pass, and held in excess of 3.5 billion birds.[51] Such a number would likely represent a large fraction of the entire population at the time, or perhaps all of it.”

I figured that that there are enough people who hate the idea that Humans caused the extinction of animal species. Both the huge numbers of birds and the widespread use of passenger pigeons for food would be a target for any time traveler looking to get even with Humanity for perpetuating the extinction solely for the purpose of eating.

It’s also dramatic. Skies darkened by flocks of birds, then the eventual disappearance – which, realistically was only enhanced by Human predation. The Wikipedia article notes, “It was not always as abundant, and the population size fluctuated rapidly over time.” (Source document: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/29/10636 – of course, bird-lovers point to Humans as the sole cause of extinction of the passenger pigeon. The event was purely anthropogenic…ignoring anything else that points to a complex series of natural events exacerbated by Human predation. Does this sound like something else currently being “discussed”?)

So, in my story, one well-meaning time traveler goes to St. Paul and advocates for the planting of great swaths of juniper – though the scientist has borrow genes from Juniperus Sabina, which produces toxins…which the pigeons might eat in the spring and fall…concentrate in their flesh, and poison Humans, eliminating the extinction, and in this story, pointing to the extinction of Humanity as the passenger pigeon population skyrockets, taking all life on Earth with it…

Three interesting story tangents occur to me.

In the first, the person returns to their present to discover that the passenger pigeons died out anyway. Why is that? The natural fluctuations that occurred to the species before they ever met Humans remained and they eventually fell to the rigors of time, as did our Neanderthal relatives and trilobites.

In the second, he returns to a future in which ALL life on Earth is extinct because the survival of the poisonous passenger pigeons was essentially unstoppable. Why is that? It is the “bird-brained” pigeons who keep eating, growing, and once they are no longer poisonous (they move out of North America), the simply eat everything edible until there’s nothing left; sort of avian locusts gone wild.

Thirdly, the individual returns home to find that passenger pigeons are a managed species but considered extremely dangerous and their eradication, while prohibited by laws governing the person’s time-traveling society, allow that they be arrested, tried, and executed for both intentionally disturbing the timeline and for releasing a toxic species that caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent children, women, and men.

A fourth future occurs to me after I was done writing this, the individual who changed the history of the birds arrive to find that not only are the passenger pigeons still extinct, but there is no USA. The country the traveler built the machine from died as settlers died. He doesn’t understand the language that the people greeting him…enthusiastically and with pyrotechnics…speak. The abandoned North American continent was occupied by descendants of Mexico, China, France, and Spain, who fought and came to a peace that had nothing for the time traveler – whom they could not understand…

I wrote a fragment of another story that intrigued several people in which the world powers of that timeline are vastly different than this one, Communism never developed, a world war was, in fact, fought in Germany – but for different reasons – and two young men one a Unioner, the other a German, meet because, while the United States of American never formed and was part of an American Union headed by the Iroquois and the Mayan Confederation and Tribal Africa is a mosaic of Collaborative Kingdoms which dominated parts of the world; they are both working on the development of liquid-fueled rockets…Al and Bobbie have lots to talk about.

“Pigeon” was successful because it was an interesting idea supported by real science (except the time travel part, and that was supported by long-standing tradition!), and delivered a creepily plausible alternate timeline in which the USA never attains world dominance.

However, the focus on a child who knows only what is happening in her life allows the reader to imagine the horror of her life as the birds descend on them. Daphne Maurier’s short story “The Birds” was one I read to prepare for writing this.

Also, submission to a Scottish market probably helped the story as well!


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