Tag Archives: 19 ♾️

No One Can Slay Her is the only alternate history in 19-Infinity.

All the other stories exist in liminal fantasy settings that are just like our reality except for the magic. No One Can Slay Her takes place in an alternate 1950s where everyone knows magic works and same-sex marriage is just marriage — nobody cares which gender someone’s attracted to.

The inspiration was a post by blogger Foz Meadows (don’t have a direct link, alas) talking about how she’d read an AU Western (I don’t know what it was an alternate of) in which the protagonists are a same-sex, mixed-race couple and nobody cares. That frees them up to have a standard Western, homesteaders-versus-greedy-land-baron adventure, just like a straight couple would. Hmm, I said, that could be fun … and so my protagonists were born. Jennifer Armstrong, a hardboiled PI in 1930s Los Angeles, and her new bride Kate, a female Nisei private eye.

If you’ve read the story already you’ll notice that’s not the characters or the decade of the final draft. That’s because my original concept didn’t work. It involved a Chinese freedom fighter who thinks Kate is a Japanese agent — Japan had invaded China in 1931 — but the plot was clunky and refused to smooth out. Plus Kate didn’t feel at all believable as a Nisei, even a lesbian Nisei mage. A third problem was that after using the hardboiled first-person voice in both my Wandering Jew stories and End of the World on the Cutting-Room Floor (which came out in Space and Time in 2018) I wanted to use a different voice.

The solution to all these problems was to toss the story forward by twenty years. It’s 1957, Kate is white and a Beatnik, Jenny is a wealthy amateur detective, a character type that used to be popular (I suppose ABC’s Castle proves that it still is). The original plot involved the Chinese agent putting a sleeping-beauty type spell on Kate which leads to a confrontation with the mysterious mage Nemo — no relation to Verne’s captain but using the same sort of pseudonym, Latin for “no one.”

In the revised version Nemo herself strikes at Kate, making a poppet with her hair and blood. Poppets are British folk magic that works like a voodoo doll, except it’s real folklore where voodoo dolls aren’t a thing in voodoo practice. Nemo threatens to kill Kate with the doll if Jenny awakens a sleeping god but won’t say more.

Jenny has no interest in waking a sleeping god. She’s cursed with a destiny that guarantees a life of constant turmoil, danger and peril. That includes lovers who’ve kidnapped her, attempted to murder her, sacrifice her to Baal or feed her to the Napa Valley Naga. She’s not used to being in love and having it returned, which makes her protective of Kate but also insecure. When she realizes Kate’s hiding something she has to fight not to assume the worst.

Kate is a professional PI where Jenny’s an amateur. Beat Eye Investigations handles cases for lowlifes, oddballs and losers; it’s not a profitable line of work but hey, losers need a PI too! Where Jenny has almost no magic, Kate has Beat magic, a form of wild powe outside the normal rules. Between them, can the two Mrs. Armstrongs crack the case, particularly when they’re working at cross-purposes?

After several rewrites I had a workable story. Finishing it took the usual polishing drafts, plus three significant changes. First, I had to rework the mystery and the clues so that Jenny can plausibly put it all together. Second, I had to prune off any idiot-plot elements: Jenny’s not going to play a lone hand with her wife’s life at stake so I had to find some way to keep the police out of it. Third, I rewrote the ending in which Nemo explains everything. Yes, she has a reason to keep Jenny talking — she needs to buy time — but it still felt unconvincing. I decided it was better to leave some of her motives blank as the heart of the story is Jenny/Kate, not solving the mystery.

#SFWApro. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image are mine. Available on Amazon in paperback and available for ebook pre-order on some channels (more to follow).

Continuing my look at the stories in 19-Infinity we come to the 1937 adventure No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, which came out some years back in Crimson Streets. A prequel to Where Angels Fear to Lunch, it tells how Al Soares, the Wandering Jew, went from bitter outcast to still-bitter private investigator and urban fantasy protagonist. This post will include some spoilers so feel free to bookmark it and come back after you’ve read the book (hint, hint).

The first element came from a freelance spy who popped up in DC in the 1980s, code-named the Bad Samaritan. My friend Ross made a passing comment which made me think of using the same name for a different villain, one who murders people for doing good deeds (“Just think of me as—a Bad Samaritan.”). I liked it but of course I had to come up with a reason someone would do that, other than “he’s crazy!”

One I seized on was the Jewish legend of the 36 Lame Wufniks. The myth is that 36 people in the world are chosen to live lives of goodness, charity and compassion, thereby reminding God of our potential. Because of this, he doesn’t lose it at the behavior of so many other people and rain down fire or flood on us. So what if someone started targeting the Wufniks, killing them so that God would lose his shit?

And if that were the concept, the protagonist would obviously be Al Soares, my Wandering Jew. In my first published short story this century, “Where Angels Fear to Lunch” (in Realms of Fantasy, my biggest market to date), I presented Al as a hardboiled PI, a cynic who nevertheless works to balance the scales of justice. He protects people he thinks got the shaft the way he did when he was cursed for mocking Jesus on the way to the crucifixion (“One lousy joke, that was all. I didn’t kick him, I didn’t fling cow patties like Simon the Zealot, so why me?”).

That still left me with the problem of what the villain’s end game would be? And how exactly would he achieve it? After all, the Wufniks aren’t immortal, thousands of them have died through the centuries, so why would these deaths be any different? Suffice to say I worked all that out and it’s woven into the story.

In so doing, the Bad Samaritan became a somewhat smaller part of things. Instead it became very much an origin for the Wandering Jew’s decision to start lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. The original ending was very consciously written to set that up; after my friend M. David Blake pointed that out (in the course of turning it down for a magazine he edited at the time) I rewrote it so while it was still a launching pad it was less obvious. And I shifted the character Al has his final conversation with, which for various reasons worked much better.

Al is considerably more Jewish here than in my first story about him. As a fictional character he’s awkward, a Jewish figure but in Christian folklore, most probably conceived to explain Jesus’ statement that people alive in his time would witness the second coming. I managed to make it work and went back and incorporated that aspect into Where Angels Fear to Lunch, later in this volume.

#SFWApro. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image are mine.

With 19-Infinity now out on Amazon in paperback and available for ebook pre-order on some channels, it’s time to talk about the genesis of the various stories. First in the book is Leave the World to Darkness which came out a few years ago in Love, Time, Space, Magic.I don’t remember the title of the book on shadows that triggered the idea for this one, but I remember the detail that did: shadows are stronger in the age of electric light than they’ve ever been. In firelight or candle light, shadows are flickering indeterminate things. In electric light, a shadow is fixed, sharply defined, stable.

As soon as I read that, a voice whispered in my head, “And that’s just the way someone wanted it.” Because what could make shadow magic more powerful?

My first version of the story had a researcher explaining to her boyfriend that Edison was rumored to be some kind of black magician behind his public facade, that he’d used electric light to make shadows more powerful. And then at the end—it turns out she’s right, and the shadows kill her, OMG!

This is a traditional SF structure: Person tells wildly implausible theory. Theory turns out to be true. Bad, probably fatal things result. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well unless the theory is absolutely brilliant (I think Henry Kuttner’s “Don’t Look Now” qualifies) and even then, I think most people can see the ending twist coming. Who’s going to devote all that exposition to something that doesn’t turn out to be true?

So I began rewriting, building up the shadow cult, adding characters, adding more plot (researcher is lost in the shadow world. Can boyfriend get her back?). Along the way Edison became a good guy, fighting against the shadow wizards.

Still didn’t work. I began doing some flashback to Edison in the past and that helped. Doing some basic research on Edison added some details, and also gave me the title. Like many people of his day, Edison loved James Grey’s poem “Elegy Written in a County Churchyard” so I adapted one of the lines (“Leave the world to darkness and to me.”) for the title, beating out my original choice of I Have a Little Shadow That Goes In and Out With Me.

Finally, for reason I can’t now recall, I dropped the present day researcher and switched to a 1930s setting. My protagonist became Aggie Baxter, a reporter stuck with the sob-sister beat (heart-tugging human interest stuff) and burning to do something bigger. Tagging along is her very wealthy boyfriend Rod Ducourt (of the Delaware Ducourts). Ahead is a whole boatload of trouble …

It was a great choice on my part. I love the 1930s as a fictional setting and Aggie, headstrong but capable, is one of my favorite characters. Everything fell into place, or so it seemed until I got editors’ critiques. In response I cut the original opening with Edison so that Aggie and Rod lead off the story. I also made Rod a little stronger: he’s definitely the sidekick but I had to make it clear Rod will back Aggie up, no matter how much danger or craziness she leads him into. I pumped up the love story more when I submitted it to the anthology. Clearly a smart choice.

#SFWApro. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image remain with current holder.