The Slush God Speaketh…to Kevin N. Haw
The September 2007 issue features a story by one of my more recent slush survivors, “Requirements for the Mythology Merit Badge” by Kevin N. Haw. Click on the extended entry to read an interview I did with Kevin.
Name: Kevin N. Haw |Age: 38, going on 8… or so my wife tells me. | Gender: Male | Species: Ornithorhynchus anatinus. I mean, any venomous mammal that lays eggs has gotta be… Oh, you mean my species? That’s kinda personal, don’t you think? | Location:
Title: “Requirements for the Mythology Merit Badge” | Sold to: F&SF | Published: September 2007 | Word Count: 663 words | Genre: Fantasy/Boy Scout Revenge Fantasy (I had a rough childhood…) | Time on submission: 50 days to get a rewrite request, then 32 days for final sale response | Time to write it: 449 minutes editing time, or so my word processor tells me. 7.4 hours plus a few more scribbling in my notebooks does sound right, though.
You’re not a marquee name just yet. Tell us about yourself and why we should get to know you and your work.
Well, every author loves having an audience, loves having the spotlight, gets a rush from the whole “I read what you wrote” experience. We have a lot in common with actors that way, driven by this need for attention and approval. Writers just don’t get invited to the cool parties.
So, what does this “don’t buy into the whole author as intellectual thing” rant have to do with why you should read my stuff? Well, as a frustrated performer with a neurotic fear of being laughed at instead of laughed with, I can promise that I will work my ass off to entertain you. I want to make you chuckle, to fill you with awe, to make you piss your pants in terror… quite possibly all in the same story. I completely buy into the old Heinlein quote about an author competing for the reader’s beer money.
Why do I write? It’s obviously a cry for help.
You made a pro sale. That’s not quite a big enough score to quit your day job. So what’s your day job?
I’m an embedded software engineer, which means I work with tiny computers embedded within other products. You don’t buy a microwave because of the type of computer in it, but the way that computer is programmed determines a lot about how well it works and whether or not you’re ever going to buy anything else from that company. I’ve worked a lot of years in aerospace (B-2 bomber, P3 and P-8A antisubmarine planes) but my proudest achievements were for in flight entertainment (video games at the passenger seat) and in cabin service software for airliners. Every time you flush a toilet on a 747 or 767, my computer code runs.
OK, it also runs whenever you turn on a light, call a flight attendant, or have to evacuate the plane, but the toilet bit is funnier.
How long had you been writing before you made this sale?
I’ve been pretty serious about fiction for the past five years or so. Before that I had a string of articles in Dragon magazine, which was as weird a combination of technical writing and fantasy as you’ll ever see.
Did you workshop this story, or get feedback from friends or relatives? What was the reaction to it–were all your peers and family sure you’d sell this one pro?
After annoying my wife and family by begging for critiques, I finally started using critters.org. It’s a great workshop, once you get past the people who don’t understand that you’re there for something deeper that simple proofreading.
The response was good, but I’ve had others that got far more enthusiastic responses but never got sold.
Have you ever written, or been tempted to write a rejected-writer-gets-revenge-on-editors story?
There’ll be plenty of time to do that when I write my memoirs from Death Row.
Do you remember the first story you ever wrote? What was it about? How bad was it? Did you ever submit it anywhere?
First ever? It was third grade writing assignment about my dentist turning out to be an escaped murderer, then finding out that the whole thing was just a setup for Candid Camera. I wind up on TV, which was the definition of being famous for me. Kind of my greatest fear and hope combined in a single page.
As to the first story intended for publication, I made the mistake of watching “Apocalypse Now” and “The Wizard of Oz” in the same weekend and started to notice similarities with a hero journeying to do dirty work on behalf some higher, “good” power. It was nice piece of work for the time, but its only saving grace was that I was trying for humor instead of doing the whole “I’m a serious writer” trap that most college freshmen fall into.
What was the first magazine you ever submitted a story to?
I sent the Wizard of Oz story to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine after discovering the Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market in the school library. I had so convinced myself that it would sell that the rejection slip crushed me. Fortunately, there was plenty more rejection awaiting me in my college career: girls, grades, getting kicked out of a fraternity, etc. Only when I was out in the big bad world a few years did I have a thick enough skin to try submitting anything again.
What’s the silliest mistake you’ve ever made when submitting a manuscript?
Other than the copyright notice that every paranoid amateur puts on their manuscript? That would have to be my accommodating patience with Dragon when I submitted my first piece. They had it in their slush pile for something like a year. I waited patiently, sent lots of really polite queries and never got back a satisfactory response (this was all pre-Email snail mail). Finally, I sent a letter withdrawing the piece and the new editor replied by buying it.
For the record, sending an angry letter withdrawing a submission doesn’t appear to work with Asimovs, F&SF, Analog, or The New Yorker. Not that I would have tried it, of course.
Talk about the primary speculative/fantasy element in your story.
Two words: Participatory Mythology. It wasn’t until the rewrite request (”Hey, could you put a story in here to go along with all these one liners?”) that I put in a plot arc about the world changing in a very fundamental way.
What kind of research did you do for your story?
I dug up my old mythology textbook and spent a lot of time clicking around Wikipedia looking for mythology topics I could build gags around (”Wouldn’t Atlantis rising cause a problem with global warming?”). Then I grabbed a merit badge pamphlet to make sure I got the format and voice right (the story is a parody of a merit badge pamphlet… in case my title didn’t give that away).
What have you been working on since your big sale? More short fiction? Novels? Little of both?
Mostly a few shorts that were sitting on my shelf. One (a piece about the IRS and virtual worlds) sold to F&SF in short order, causing painful cranial swelling. Thankfully, some rejection slips arrived in short order to bring me back down to earth.
My big novel project is about a dot-com slacker who answers an acronym filled want ad and discovers that instead of lying his way into a computer job, he’s lied his way into an international criminal syndicate intent on taking over the world (a la SPECTRE). Fortunately, international criminal syndicates turn out to be as poorly run as dot-coms, so he decides to embezzle a few million. There’s a few laugh filled firefights, a dead Romanian counterfeiter in an outhouse in a rainforest, and a kidnap victim whose amputated finger gets lost in the mail. Things go downhill from there.
Why do you write SF instead of some other genre?
Mostly because it’s the stuff I like to read. Also, having a technical background kind of herds a lot of my thoughts in the general direction of SF. As a result, when I say “Hey, that’d make a great story!” it tends to refer to something in a spaceship or computer rather than a locked door mystery or a western gunfight.
What’s the first SF novel you ever read? How old were you?
I read The Forever War in high school and remember thinking how it was the first “grown up” book I’d ever read. Sure there was sex and drugs and hard edged gore, but it was Haldeman’s post-Vietnam cynicism that really hooked me (even more than Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is probably a more accurate answer to the question). I had loved reading mysteries, but Haldeman was something that a kid worried about being drafted for a Central American misadventure (this was the Reagan era) would relate to a lot more than a genteel corpse in an Agatha Christie tale.
Who are some of your favorite writers? Which writers influenced you?
Well, Haldeman, Tim Powers, and Larry Niven are my trinity, both for reading and as an author. I’ve always devoured anything Mark Twain, but now that I’m trying to write humor I’m trying to dissect him as well (no mean feat). For my money, though, L. Sprague DeCamp is probably one of the best guys to read and emulate. He knew how to move a story along, how to build both characters and laughs.
I love reading Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, but stylistically so many people try to emulate them that I make a point of avoiding them in anything I write. Conversely, Heinlein is a great guy to study for technique but I have trouble reading his earlier stuff because I grew up seeing it rehashed (poorly) by other authors.
What are the limitations of SF?
Well, the smug answer is “only your imagination!” but that’s not true. To me it’s important that authors remember to not take themselves too seriously. SF has this great tradition of telling parables of issues of our time. Unfortunately, when an author sets out to write a metaphor about the tragedy in Darfur, or illegal immigration, or Man’s Inhumanity to Manâ„¢ but doesn’t have a story to go with it, it falls flat.
Take “Star Trek” as an example (and, yes, I know it’s space fantasy, not SF…). In the original series, we all know that “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” is one of the most subversive statements about racism you’ll ever see (for those who forget, that’s the episode with the race that’s black on the right side and white on the left enslave and fight those with reverse coloration). However, it also doesn’t take a lot of neurons to recall some absolutely abysmal episodes of that series or later ones that preached on one topic or another in miserable form. A message without a story belongs on the Op Ed page, not a SF story.
A really good author remembers that in the end the entertainment has to come before any attempt at education. After all, it was Robert “Beer Money” Heinlein that gave us Stranger in a Strange Land and Friday, great comments about how society deals with outsiders.
What’s wrong with media SF? Why do they always screw everything up, even the stuff that’s based on quality source material?
You do realize that we could easily rephrase that question and stick it in a mystery blog, a medical journal, or a police fraternal magazine? The fact is that adapting any media to any other media is a damn tough task (what’s the old saw? “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”). I think
With that said, SF has definitely gotten the short end of the stick over the years. Part of it is the way the genre was treated as a ghetto by the literary community itself. Part of it was demographics (a polite word for “those damn comic reading kids”) and the assumption SF fans will watch anything put in front of them. Thankfully, those things are changing as guys like Joss Whedon show you can have fun, interesting, profitable movies with SF/fantasy/horror themes (Fox’es efforts to murder “Firefly” in its crib notwithstanding). I would expect that within a few years SF will approach the same ratios we already see for mysteries, hospital dramas, and cop shows.
That is, about 90% garbage to 10% good.
What’s the most played out trope in science fiction?
I really hesitate to say this because it not only make me a lot of enemies but also force me to curl up in a corner and weep for the world we live in, but…
The most played out troupe in SF is manned space travel.
Yes. I know that’s a vile thing to say. I feel about an inch tall typing it out. Still, you need only look at the state of the U.S. manned program and compare it to the real science being done in the unmanned program (that is, when it’s not being strangled for budget by the shuttle or cynical politics) and you see it’s damn silly to send 80 kilos of meat and bone to do a job a robot can do more efficiently. And, given that anything we can cheaply mine offplanet can never recoup the cost of getting up or down the gravity well, you can write off economic motives for exploring space (and please, no one send me angry comments about space elevators – I still don’t buy the economics or engineering).
Without an economic motive, we’re left with only a handful of conceivable scenarios where an author might use manned space travel. She can poison the Earth and make the survivors flee (disturbingly likely). Otherwise, she can have our society become so wealthy and altruistic that we send people out with purely altruistic motives (depressingly unlikely). She could also have aliens arrive and hand us advanced technology as a deus ex machina. Finally, she can just set the story so far in the future that everyone’s forgot why the heck homo sapiens left the big blue marble in the first place. Of those four, I think only the last hasn’t been beaten to death, especially since you can breeze over it in a single sentence (see how quickly Firefly references to “Earth-that-was” and you get my point).
I hold out hope that someone in a decade or three will come up with a real reason (preferably economic) for us to go out into orbit and we’ll restart the manned space program. If it happens to be an SF author first and then the engineers and entrepreneurs following suit in the real world later, so much the better.
When someone interviews you again in ten years, what are they going to be asking you about?
“Where did you bury the bodies, Kevin?”