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Okay, if you haven't read The Last Christmas of Mrs Claus as discussed here, go ahead and do that before I spoil you with some spoilish spoilers below. And if you don't care to read the story, what follows will be confusing and uninteresting, so you might as well skip this, too. For everyone else, you may only skip it because it's uninteresting. Cool?
Wanted to talk about two of the changes the story went through, specifically the ones I probably wouldn't have made if it hadn't been for the suggestions of some very smart people. Generally speaking, the humor's more broad than most of what I write (clarification: most of the unpublished stuff I write, and someday I'm sure I'll see a correlation there), and I did get suggestions from my Clarion buddies as well as the editors to remove a few of the more esoteric gags (i.e. the stuff I enjoy most). I acquiesced often, but fought to keep the ones that I felt were important in another area of story, theme, or character.
In my 2006 Clarion draft, the most often-asked question in the workshop circle was "What was Santa making in the toy factory if he wasn't making toys anymore?" To be honest, I just didn't think it was so important to the story. In an earlier outline, where this was the first chapter of a larger, way-too-didactic narrative, I think it was Abercrombie & Fitch sweatervests, but thought, in short-story mode, that that would've pulled focus. So the story ended without that reveal.
At least one Clarion critiquer had thought, with all of Santa's "crystal" talk, that I was telegraphing crystalmeth, thinking that his dark secret was drug use instead of (or in addition to) adultery. Now, I'm not sure exactly what this says about me, but at the time I had four or five other irreverent, deconstructionist Santa stories (mostly intended as comics) either ready to get outlined or starting to get fleshed out, and one of my weaker plots cast Santa as a drug dealer.
So when I revisited the story mid-2007 before sending it out, methlabs struck me as a particularly good fit with both Betty's isolation and the hint of possible socioeconomic consequences of Santa's labor policy. Ta da! And, though I probably tweaked a sentence or two after most rejections, the story stayed where it was until editors Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson asked for a rewrite.
There were multiple areas where their questions and suggestions led to marked improvement in the final draft, but the one thing they helped me focus on most was in the finding the balance between Mrs Claus's ignorance of her husband's affair, and her intelligence and strength as a human being. And, while no single change solved everything, focusing on that balance for the final revisions led to at least a dozen tweaks in wording and detail, where things have begun seriously falling apart only in the last few years vs Santa's always been like this; he just used to be better at hiding it.
There were multiple revisions of the final gunshot especially: she can't take too long it figuring out the bear's identity, but she's no premeditated murderer either. Hopefully the end result worked for those who read the story through the end.
Finally: few readers questioned (to my face, anyway) the veracity of Betty as an ex-marine who was stationed in the Middle East. My Thoughtcrime editors wanted me to cement the story in time (so I put her at Camp Doha post-Desert Storm), but otherwise I owe additional debts to the sources of background research I did prior to outlining. In the Spring of 2006, I read Love My Rifle More Than You by Kayla Williams and Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, and I stayed with a marine buddy at MCBH and picked his brain for a week or so. Still, I didn't yet know how or if any of that stuff would be applicable to this or any other story. I was just... interested.
Thanks to all those who helped make the story work, and especially for letting me keep the byline on the end result.
Wanted to talk about two of the changes the story went through, specifically the ones I probably wouldn't have made if it hadn't been for the suggestions of some very smart people. Generally speaking, the humor's more broad than most of what I write (clarification: most of the unpublished stuff I write, and someday I'm sure I'll see a correlation there), and I did get suggestions from my Clarion buddies as well as the editors to remove a few of the more esoteric gags (i.e. the stuff I enjoy most). I acquiesced often, but fought to keep the ones that I felt were important in another area of story, theme, or character.
In my 2006 Clarion draft, the most often-asked question in the workshop circle was "What was Santa making in the toy factory if he wasn't making toys anymore?" To be honest, I just didn't think it was so important to the story. In an earlier outline, where this was the first chapter of a larger, way-too-didactic narrative, I think it was Abercrombie & Fitch sweatervests, but thought, in short-story mode, that that would've pulled focus. So the story ended without that reveal.
At least one Clarion critiquer had thought, with all of Santa's "crystal" talk, that I was telegraphing crystalmeth, thinking that his dark secret was drug use instead of (or in addition to) adultery. Now, I'm not sure exactly what this says about me, but at the time I had four or five other irreverent, deconstructionist Santa stories (mostly intended as comics) either ready to get outlined or starting to get fleshed out, and one of my weaker plots cast Santa as a drug dealer.
So when I revisited the story mid-2007 before sending it out, methlabs struck me as a particularly good fit with both Betty's isolation and the hint of possible socioeconomic consequences of Santa's labor policy. Ta da! And, though I probably tweaked a sentence or two after most rejections, the story stayed where it was until editors Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson asked for a rewrite.
There were multiple areas where their questions and suggestions led to marked improvement in the final draft, but the one thing they helped me focus on most was in the finding the balance between Mrs Claus's ignorance of her husband's affair, and her intelligence and strength as a human being. And, while no single change solved everything, focusing on that balance for the final revisions led to at least a dozen tweaks in wording and detail, where things have begun seriously falling apart only in the last few years vs Santa's always been like this; he just used to be better at hiding it.
There were multiple revisions of the final gunshot especially: she can't take too long it figuring out the bear's identity, but she's no premeditated murderer either. Hopefully the end result worked for those who read the story through the end.
Finally: few readers questioned (to my face, anyway) the veracity of Betty as an ex-marine who was stationed in the Middle East. My Thoughtcrime editors wanted me to cement the story in time (so I put her at Camp Doha post-Desert Storm), but otherwise I owe additional debts to the sources of background research I did prior to outlining. In the Spring of 2006, I read Love My Rifle More Than You by Kayla Williams and Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, and I stayed with a marine buddy at MCBH and picked his brain for a week or so. Still, I didn't yet know how or if any of that stuff would be applicable to this or any other story. I was just... interested.
Thanks to all those who helped make the story work, and especially for letting me keep the byline on the end result.