I'm a longtime fiction writer, I just haven't sold much. ;-> On the other hand, I haven't submitted most of what I've written. And I haven't finished most of what I started.
I think I wrote my first SF story in 1967. It was about aliens who tried to refugee to Earth but where shot out of the sky by the Air Force, who assumed they had to be invaders. I was 10 and Viet Nam was starting to get ugly. Despite the fairly anti-war nature of this story, I was a hawk until at least 1973. I revised this story and "matured" it a little in 1976, and submitted it to the NESFA short story contest, where it placed 11th out of 33 stories in the contest (my college roommate that year, Brenda Clough, placed 3rd in that contest). But I never have put any of these very early stories online, nor the stories I had rejected by various editors in the mid-70s.
I didn't really have time to write during the '80s, between having a child, a husband, a high tech job and a lot of fannish activity. But I got some ideas in the late '80s, started writing a little, went to some workshops and submitted some stories. Two of these stories were eventually bought by small semi-prozines.
"The Weekend" was the start of a story back in 1989. I didn't finish it then, and I don't plan to finish it now.
I'm almost through writing my first novel, a geeky but mostly mainstream novel that only drifts a little into a dystopia at the end. And when I finish that novel, I'm going to write a novel set partially in Edinburgh.
[[It almost ended in mid-quote. I'm not 100% sure where I was going with this, but this seems to be the ending:]]I think just six of us from the Mill survived the bombings: Henry Cutler, Jim Davis, Nathan Taylor, Les & Karen Gerome, and me, Mary Murphy. We'll never know for sure. And it was completely by accident. If Jim's car hadn't died, we would have died along with all the rest. If we all hadn't shown up at Jim's house a few months earlier to play poker, he wouldn't have nagged us into spending a weekend up in God's country, to play cards and buy maple syrip. And then, I wouldn't be sitting here with the last notebook in the county, writing this down, hoping that stress and not radiation was making my hair start to fall out.
Jim's folks were in the process of selling his granfather's place. It was a huge old farmhouse on the outside of Lyndonville. It sat on a ridge like a hundred old farmhouses from a hundred old picture post cards, a dirt road connecting it to Shonyo Hill Road. The house was neatly painted a pale green, four dormers marking the second floor. The barn had a sagging, tin roof and a decaying silo. Jim had been nagging us for months to go up for the weekend, and the completion of the VAX project gave us all the excuse we were looking for. So, while our co-workers were toasting each other with champagne and Coors, we were packing our cars and heading up 495 to Vermont.
I was in the car with Jim and Nate. Jim's voice had the faintest trace of the ``ayauuh'' that marked his upcountry upbringing. He was tall and thin and still, at twenty-five, had little success at growing a moustache. He was one of those people who spoke slowly, but his mind was always in hyperdrive. He'd go off on wild political tangents, like when he told us that Reagan was going to be our next president.
"That'll be the day!" Nate exploded, sounding every bit as Southern as Jim sounded Yankee. He was a rough, red-haired country boy, and grew up on a farm not far from Plains, Georgia and the home of his favorite sitting president, Jimmy Carter. "Reagan never never got to the convention last time. Why do you think he'll get anywhere next year?"
"Because people are scared," Jim explained. "You've got chaos in Iran. You've got the Russians and the Chinese ready to fight over a few square miles of border. You've got terrorism in the Middle East. You've got Quebec trying to secede. Let's face facts, Nate, Carter just doesn't generate any confidence. Reagan does, and I bet he'll walk all over Carter."
"That's a bet, man." Nate said, half-grabbing Jim's hand off the steering wheel. Our car lurched towards the Connecticut River, but Jim reoriented the car, then shook Jim's hand. I'd learned to stay clear of politics where Jim and Nate were concerned, but--I thought Nate was right. Carter was doing fine, and Reagan was just a reactionary.
"I saw the neatest preview the other day," I said, making some small talk to get off of poltics. "There's some movie coming out this summer about some ugly aliens on an ugly old space ship. The alien looks like a giant insect with teeth and a big tail. And, Nate, I know you'll just love the woman with the curly hair and the gun. She's just your type." I was forever ragging Nate about his type of woman, even though I sometimes wished I was.
"Hmm." Nate sat back in the front seat, leaning his feet on the dashboard of Jim's VW. "Mary, why are you always trying to set me up? If it's not some chick at the Mill, it's some chick in a movie. All I want to know about that movie is, is there a VAX controlling the ship, or is it an IBM 360?"
The "sometimes" vanished again. Nate rarely saw anything beyond Georgia, VAXes, or "chicks." And Jim was just too earnest and too skinny to be my type. But they were challenging to work with, and fun to socialize with, even if they both did look at me as "one of the guys." Better to be respected and well-paid at work than be some object. Usually, anyway...
We arrived at the farmhouse a little before eight. It was black as midnight--there weren't any streetlights out in the country. It was real nice out there. You could see the stars without the light pollution. I backed up the steps, enamored by the stars over the valley. It had been so long since I'd really looked at the sky. I backed into Jim, who almost dropped the key on the porch.
"Sorry..."
"It's OK," Jim said, retrieving the key and putting it in the keyhole. He pushed the door opened and we all went into the kitchen.
The house was musty. When Jim found the chain for the kitchen light and turned it on, the house was clearly clean enough. The kitchen looked like something out of a '50s sitcom. It was big, full of white appliances, and had a long table with a checkered tablecloth on it. It just smelled dead. "How long has it been empty?" I asked.
"Just a couple months,'' Jim said, tossing his sleeping bag on the kitchen table. ``Granpa died the day after Christmas. Drove overstreet and passed on in Russell's Drug Store. Set the town buzzing for weeks from what Mom says. The realtor thinks some investor might buy the place and turn in into an inn or something. I think I'd like that best of all. At least I could visit back here, show my kids some day."
But it didn't work out that way. When Les, Karen, and Henry showed up an hour later, Karen was almost in hysterics. "The Chinese hit the Russians tonight," she sobbed. "We heard it--on the radio--Carter's put the Air Force--on alert..."
"What?" I'm not sure who asked that first. Maybe we all did.
Les nodded. "Karen wanted us to turn around and head back for Maynard. If we get involved in this, I want to be as far away from civilization as I can." He was short and intense, just like Karen. But Karen tended towards histrionics, and he tended towards fury.
"I need to call my folks!" she exclaimed. "Jim, where's the phone?"
"Umm...back here," Jim said, faintly, indicating an old black phone on the kitchen counter. He had turned pale, but had that 'I'm not going to panic' look on his face.
I hoped I did, too, though part of me wanted to call my folks. Then I remembered they were in Europe. If there really was a war, they might already be dead...
"Carter has enough sense than to get us into a nuclear war." Nate said. "If the Russians and Chinese want to fight a border war, then let them fight a border war. What's the sense of using nuclear bombs over territory you want to invade?" He pulled a beer out of the refrigerator and plopped down at the kitchen table.
Henry said, ``Well, as the only ex military type here, you ought to
Karen turned to me "I went to see Doc Jardine today. He tells me I'm pregnant."
I hugged her. "I think Jim and I are getting married."
I guess we had a future.