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
to the left will now remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output
and sales! As always, your comments are welcome!
I consider “A Pig Tale” my first real sale to ANALOG. The first was a
short piece for a regular section of the magazine called PROBABILITY ZERO, but
this time I’d sold a real-live short story.
Probably the “most” right thing I did with this one is that I wrote
about something I knew well: farms.
The family had spent an entire summer in the country, and while we were
city-folk born and bred, we wanted desperately to do something different. A
friend of my brother-in-law owned two farms. One he worked, the other was the
farm started by his family. An encounter I can easily describe as a divine
appointment, introduced us to the wife of a farmer who was intent on becoming
an organic dairy farmer at a time when normal people had no idea WHAT that
meant. We certainly didn’t.
We hit it off with the other family, who had three kids older than
ours, and we learned LOTS that summer about what it meant to be organic farmers
– and doing homeschooling as well. (Like I said, it was an illuminating
summer!) We got to know them and their world a bit, so I used the background in
this story.
The idea itself came from long discussions about my wife’s parents. He
father had passed away a few years earlier and her mother was recovering from
treatment for lung cancer. Other people we knew had parents suffering from Alzheimer’s
and dementia, so that was a topic for discussion on a regular basis.
It was also clear to me as a science teacher, that brain research into
the causes and treatments for Alzheimer’s was gearing up to a frenzy as
Americans were aging.
It was only natural to merge these elements into a story that a
reviewer at Tangent Online thought was the best of the issue even though it was
unusually dark for ANALOG, right?
What, it’s not as clear to you as it is to me?
At its heart, it was a family story; a brutal intersection of an
important discovery of a method for treating Alzheimer’s with a woman in the
throes of a divorce she felt she caused, and her father’s despair over losing
the family farm. Oh, toss in a side order of misusing an experimental
medication for personal reasons.
I understood the family interactions – everyone has them. The first
line of Tolstoy’s ANNA KARENINA is “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way”. Science fiction and families has a long
history, so this wasn’t an unusual story. More people than I want to count have
experienced a divorce; and after living in the country for a summer among
people whose families had been planted in their homes in a long-past century;
it wasn’t difficult to imagine how they would feel if they were being forced to
leave.
As well, science fiction has been generously described as the “literature
of ideas” as well as an exploration of how humans interact with future
scientific and technological developments. All of the best and worst science
fiction – both written and on the screens – does this. “2001: A Space Odyssey”
(Rolling Stone poll) depicts how humans might interact with artificial
intelligence; “Metropolis” (Rotten Tomatoes) does the same thing.
That’s what I did right in this story. In fact, I nailed every one of
the tropes with “A Pig Tale”.
Now all I have to do is repeat the performance, and I can start selling
MORE than ten percent of my stories!
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