Ice Cream and Venom (16 page)

I've been writing on and off for a quarter century, and quite frankly up until "Dog Days" and my novella, "Home Again," every single thing I wrote sucked to a greater or lesser extent. I don't know why my writing is good now, nor do I know why it was bad then. I always had a lot of neat ideas, clever plot twists, and I was always handy with a turn of phrase, but somehow the whole always added up to less than the sum of the parts. There were one or two good bits in there—there was clearly some talent, as all of my critics were quick to point out—but it just didn't work.

Then, suddenly, around the end of 2006 I could write.

I don't know what happened to cause this, nor do I know what was preventing it beforehand, but suddenly, I could do it. I also learned to play guitar (After a fashion) around the same time, after decades of trying and failing, so perhaps it was some kind of neurological shift, or maybe (the more likely explanation) I'd just hit that point where your screaming youthful short attention span is balanced out by your middle-aged love of finding a good chair and not moving for hours at a time. Or maybe I finally got comfortable with letting the story go where it needed to, rather than trying to shoehorn it into the box I'd intended for it. Whatever it was, I'm grateful for it.

A few notes on the individual stories for those who care:

"Dog Days" was the first story I wrote when I had my breakthrough. The idea was threefold: what if (A) Aliens are simply more moral than us, and have the strength of their convictions; (B) what if our lack of convictions forever limits our options; and (C) what if the issues we assume go together—Women's Rights, Social Justice, Abortion, etc.—are actually only piled up that way out of convenience, not because they inherently belong together, and the act of piling them changes the way we think about them. It's a neat intellectual ride, though I don't think I quite pull it off.  It reads a little more preachy than I'd wished.

"Internal Bleeder" was the last of this batch to be written; though it stems from some ideas I had around 1991, wrote down around 1994, and promptly forgot about until I rediscovered the notes in April of 2010. (First rule of writing SF: Take lots of notes! Even if they're no good at the time, you never know when they'll pop up again and be useful.)

"Just Moments Before The End Of The Age" came to me as a daydream around 1988 or 1989, but every time I tried to write it, it just fell apart under its own weight. Eventually I realized I was trying to turn a haiku into an epic poem. I stopped doing that, and it finally worked. (Second rule of writing SF: Let the story be the length it needs to be, not the length you want it to be.) Technically, it's not an SF story, but it's my first experiment in the "Flash" writing style that "The Kids" are "So" into "Nowadays," and I still really like the disturbing twist, so I included it.

Conceptually, the oldest story in the batch is "Little Note, nor Long Remember," which I thought up as a senior in high school or as a freshman in college. I attempted to write that one a dozen times in a dozen different ways. This invariably turned tedious, and long-winded, since I had to obscure the fact that the "First Mission to the Moon" wasn't the Apollo 11 landing, which was very distracting and confusing to the reader. Suddenly, it occurred to me that the story couldn't be grim, it had to be parody, and the whole tale poured out of me in one afternoon.

"Superheroes are Gay" has been said by my critics to be my best story. I don't really think it is, but there is a really cool kind of energy to it that surprised me. My son and I were talking about what we liked and didn't like about Superhero stories—which I've never really cared for, though I followed them for years—when suddenly I realized what it was that I'd always hated about them. We got home, and I wrote the entire story in one twelve-hour marathon session (Including two bathroom breaks). Third rule of writing SF: Write as much as you can in as few sessions as you can—the stream of consciousness adds immeasurably to the telling of the tale, and gives you a giddy performance art quality. You can always edit out the stuff that doesn't work later.

"The Man Who Would Not Be King" was a story I attempted to write in the mid-90s, but typically couldn't pull off. I didn't have the skills yet. I had a premise, but not a plot. I stumbled across my original draft, realized there were a couple of charming ideas in there, and re-wrote the whole thing. (Fourth rule of writing SF: Always save your early drafts, even of stories that don't work!)

I say "Charming" because although there are a million, billion, zillion alternate histories out there, nearly all of them revolve around a war changing the course of the timeline. Why? If the future changes every time we get on a bus, then why can't these stories be about the quieter divergences? Why does it always have to be about the South winning the Civil War, or the Allies losing World War II? Why can't it simply a quieter story about a world that diverges from something simple like a guy deciding to go to college rather than pursue dreams of being a (the) rock star?

I have to say I felt kind of unreasonably pleased with myself when I finished this one. I went around beaming for two days, and when anyone would ask me what I was grinning about, I'd say, "I gave Elvis a happily-ever-after!" I don't know why that affected me like that, but it did.

"The Truth About Lions And Lambs" came to me more or less entirely in a dream, though it took me several months to flense it into a story and then hammer it into shape. That was a hard one to write, but I'm very happy with it. It's my first (And very probably only) gothic horror story. Interestingly, everyone who reads that story has a different opinion of what's going on, and none of them match my own. I didn't see that coming, but I really like how it affects different people in different ways. Most of my stories are more cut-and-dried than that: Introduction - Setup - Punchline. It was unexpected—and nice—to realize I could do something a bit more impressionistic, letting the readers draw their own conclusions. I have to reiterate, however, that I'm not that cool: I didn't intend it to have that quality; it just grew out of it (Fifth rule of writing SF: Let the story tell itself in the appropriate style). Now that I know I've got this kind of "Dark Impressionism" thing in my toolbox, however, I may use it again.

The title came from Frank Capra's assertion that "The Lamb is more than a match for the Lion," which I've always found haunting.

And that's that. Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed the book, and I'm always open for feedback. I can be contacted at
[email protected]

with your e-mail. If you enjoyed my writing, I'm compiling a second anthology now, under the working title "The Undead at War." I hope to have that published before the end of the year. If you didn't enjoy my writing, thank you very much for at least giving me a chance.

Sincerely,

Kevin Long

April 21
^st
, 2011