The Story Behind the Story: The Savage Year

My short story “The Savage Year,” which came out a few years ago at Lorelei Signal (no longer online there though), goes live today at Metastellar. As I haven’t rewritten it in the five years since the first publication, I’ll take the liberty of simply reprinting my How I Came To Write It from back then (including the illustration by Lee Ann Barlow):

The story’s opening: “Walking past a half-naked couple making out next to a picnic basket, Artemis West wished she could turn invisible. I never thought my first assignment would involve working magic in front of a park full of hippies.”

It’s 1968, Robert Kennedy has just been assassinated, and the country is mourning. And as Artemis soon discovers, her job as a Secret Service sorcerer is about to get much more complicated, thanks to a British black magician and a bronze-skinned, golden-eyed drifter, Diana Savage. Whose father is some kind of brilliant scientist and philanthropist, and everyone expects her to follow in his wake. So she’s run away for a summer of love before she heads to college. Only there are innocent people in danger, and in her heart she’s her father’s child …

Why yes, this is the story about Doc Savage’s daughter that I wrote about starting several years ago. As noted at the link, I’d wanted to write about her (or more precisely my version of her) since the early 1980s, but never came up with a story. Then I hit on teaming her up with Art West, great grandson of James West, the hero of Wild Wild West now following family tradition by working for the Secret Service, though as a mage.

When I reread the post at the link, it floored me: my protagonist has been Artemis West and female so long I didn’t remember ever considering a male lead (Jim West’s partner was Artemus Gordon. Descendants are stuck with the name). It’s not surprising though, as I write a lot of male/female teams. As to why I switched to make Artemis a woman … I have no idea.

The story idea beyond that shaped up early. Mages in the Secret Service actually have a dull gig. All they do is go around and touch up the bindings Native American shamans used to lock various Lovecraftian outsiders away. As long as the mages do their job, the outsiders can’t get out.Except that when Artemis goes to check the local bindings (originally San Francisco, but it eventually shifted to the Midwest) she discovers someone is letting outsiders loose. Which is, of course, bad. Even alongside a bronze teenage tornado who fights like ten men (she’s Doc Savage’s daughter. She’s been well-trained) Artemis has her work cut out for her.

Refining the concept proved a lot tougher. I had no idea what the bad guy wanted, what exactly he’d unleashed and how the creature would help him achieve his goals. Nor did I know how to stop him. Eventually I figured it out, with the help of Lester Dent’s plotting formula — appropriate as he created Doc.

I also trimmed back a lot of the in-jokes, such as a reference to Artemis’ aunt Honey. I wanted to write the story so that someone who’d never heard of Jim West or Doc Savage could enjoy it, which meant avoiding any Easter eggs that would be more distracting than amusing.

When I was done, I presented it to the beta readers in my local science-fiction writing group. They suggested I needed to introduce the villain earlier to give him more of a presence, and that I needed to make the story weirder in a few spots. It was good advice. I followed it.

I’ve also blogged about the story over at Atomic Junkshop. Feel free to check it out, but I recommend checking out “The Savage Year” first.

#SFWApro. Illustrations by Barlow and James Bama, all rights to images remain with current holder.