- Published in:
- Futurismic
- Publication date:
- May 2009
The road from seed idea to publication is sometimes a short, simple hundred metre dash, and sometimes a gruelling mountain climb. This story fell into the latter category.
That’s not to say that it wasn’t a worthwhile slog. Far from it. I probably learnt more about the whole process of writing publishable fiction from this story than any other thus far.
I wrote the first draft before Clarion, around the time I was beginning to understand, in some kind of intuitive sense, what exactly a story was. I still couldn’t actually write a story at that point, but I think I did have the apparatus to point at something and make a judgement about its “story-ness”. I was beginning to understand that research was critical–for authenticity, for substance, and for generating plot. I was beginning to understand that good openings were about identification and curiosity. And I was beginning to understand that the key to making intellectual issues arresting was determining the right POV character.
I was still far from being able to put those insights onto the page though. The language was clumsy, the plot contrived, and the structure unbalanced. But the story had heart, and I wouldn’t give up on it. I’d read up on peak oil and the Nenets, I’d come up with a poignant dilemma for my main character, and I’d invented (or at least re-hashed) some pretty cool tech, dammit.
After Clarion, equipped with a vastly improved set of literary tools, I chipped away at the story (not just metaphorically, since I cut about three thousand words) going through several major iterations until I had something that retained the spirit of the original, but was much easier on the reader.
Under An Arctic Sky is, as Paul Raven writes on the Futurismic website, “a powerful story of dedication to a cause against the fiercest of oppression”. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed learning from it!