June 17, 2018

WRITING ADVICE: Can This Story Be SAVED? #22 “And After Soft Rains, Daisies” (Submitted 9 Times Since April 2017, Revised 1 time)


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, In April of 2014, I figured I’d gotten enough publications that I could share some of the things I did “right”. I’ll keep that up, but I’m running out of pro-published stories. I don’t write full-time, nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off of it, but someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what I write. Hemingway’s quote above will remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output and sales, but I’m adding this new series of posts because I want to carefully look at what I’ve done WRONG and see if I can fix it. As always, your comments are welcome!

This story started out as a paid job.

A company called SciFutures works with hundreds of companies who are looking at the future. This one wanted to know what the future of home computers (up to and including artificial intelligence) might be. We already have computer-integrated homes, they wanted to see how far things might go. I got the job and started thinking…

On an apparent tangent, my father is in a Memory Care facility because he suffers from Alzheimer’s.

On another tangent, Ray Bradbury’s dark and insightful look at the very same idea held me spellbound when I was a teenager, coming out of reading Heinlein, Christopher, and Nourse. “There Will Come Soft Rains” was published first in the “normal” magazine, COLLIERS (May 6, 1950), later that year collected into THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES.

Back to the thought stream: I wondered what a home AI could do for families who have an Alzheimer’s parent. The way I expressed it was a simple scenario in which an AI interacted with my dad as if it were my mom, who’d passed away a year earlier. Never an expert at self-care when it came to feeding, cleaning, and doing laundry, the disease only exacerbated those issues and introduced new ones. The home AI was installed along with a self-contained “dad apartment” and he was “locked up” by his kids. [ASIDE: This is probably my first mistake, though I’d intended for it to look like he was in a memory care unit, that’s not what happened.]

But the job only called for a vignette – how could I turn that into a real story?

ANALOG Tag Line:
Could a self-contained AI given an entire environment to manipulate, care completely for an Alzheimer’s patient?

Elevator Pitch (What Did I Think I Was Trying To Say?)
Because of the exorbitant fees “age-in-place” facilities charge, the industry has become one that limns the issue of haves/have nots. Can AI coupled with current technology bring that cost down?

Opening Line:
“You really think this will be what I’ve been looking for?” Dayvon said. [ASIDE: Should have been, “You really think this is going to make me feel less guilty than putting him in a home that will bankrupt us in two years?” But is that too critical of the current dark reality?]

Onward:
Sherrell made a soft noise. Five screens were connected to Dayvon’s dad’s basement apartment. The office wall showed five views, including the bathroom. Dad was still sleeping.

His ancient full bed shared space with a micro kitchen and a breakfast bar with a fridge, sink, table and chair; a couch in front of a wall-sized TV that currently shimmered charcoal gray with sparkles of light; entryway with closet; and the bathroom.

“Pat”, the Artificial Intelligence who cared for him, brought lamps up over a bank of plants to match a sunrise outside their house. He had no real windows. In the pots, daffodils were green stalks beside tulips now faded, and daisies unfurled on slender stalks, not quite open. The AI, said softly, “Time to get up Chuck.”

What Was I Trying To Say?
In essence: we need to figure out how to care for the growing number of Alzheimer patients not only here, but world-wide.

(This LA Progressive article from 2012 and is mostly a rant against the Right, but it does raise the issues that poverty and Alzheimer’s raise…though it has no answer for those issues… https://www.laprogressive.com/poverty-and-alzheimers/); GOOGLE-ing “Poverty and Alzheimer’s” just gets me more hand-wringing articles interspersed with advertising for expensive “Memory Care” living. (Don’t get me wrong, the people who work for these NYSE companies actually care – it’s the CEOs and shareholders who saw a chance to make bank playing off of people’s fear of dying without memories and families stressed to the breaking point and incapable of doing anything but finding the best care for Mom and Dad even if it bankrupts them…Why does this sound like the Housing Bubble crisis?)

The Rest of the Story:
Plague intervenes, the world’s population is wiped out, but Dad survives because he lives in a sealed environment and the AI pretends to be the son and his wife, as well as brief forays into impersonating my mom.

As infrastructure breaks down outside and Dad’s Alzheimer’s grows worse, the AI debates how to end it all. Finally, a year later, the external power dies and the solar panels are covered with dust – nothing had been built that could survive long with no maintenance. Yet Dad still lives. Does the AI overdose him? Does it starve him? Does it shut down and just let him live as long as he can? Does it “release him into the wild”?

I actually don’t end the story…

End Analysis:
It’s depressing, out and out. On the other hand, why is it any more depressing than the original? “There Will Come Soft Rains” was published at the very height of the Cold War when the US and the USSR were constantly rattling their sabers. There’s a scene that imprinted itself on my young mind: “The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a
photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.” (http://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf)

Bradbury’s story ends up with the house burning down, unable to fend for itself any more. Why was this published in a magazine “everyone” read? I think it was because it was impersonal. While nuclear devastation was a fear, the ultimate victory of Americans over Russians was an ideal held with religious fervor.

Not so with Alzheimer’s. I fear it with a visceral terror. I know there are plenty of others who do as well; possibly even the CEOs of all those for profit corporations they preside over…who preside over the draining of billions of dollars of personal savings…

Can This Story Be Saved?
Like I said, it’s personal. I can make some tweaks, but in the long run, most of us don’t want to think about Alzheimer’s if we don’t have to. I tried all the top markets with this one: ANALOG, CLARKESWORLD, F&SF, COMPELLING, ASIMOV’s, ESCAPE POD, and APEX. I might just post it on the blog…or I might try a rewrite.

Anyone have a thought?


No comments: