One more story down

This ended up being a good week. Today I finished up the first draft of Chance Corrigan and the Tick-tock King of the Nile. The story is destined, I hope, to be included in the forthcoming anthology from DAW called Steampunk. Jean Rabe is editing it with Martin H. Greenberg.

The story was a lot of fun to write. I decided to do a story in the grand pulp tradition of Robert E. Howard (and many others), but mix in the steampunk sensibilities and propensity for a touch of absurdity that one normally wouldn’t have found in the pages of Weird Tales. The story is a good, rollicking tale. It also appears it may be the first of several. I like the main character and he fits in well with an idea I’ve been toying with for a steampunky series of stories anyway. This tale is set in 1901, which makes it a bit earlier than the other tales I’ve been wanting to write, but the story holds together and will fit in that timeline, so I guess I have a start on things. 🙂

I think the thing that I enjoyed most about writing this story is that it let me scratch an itch that I’d not quite been able to reach. Coming out of a novel, I wanted to do something shorter. I also wanted it to be more action oriented, and clever. I also had a character type clawing at the back of my skull, wanting to get out. Chance Corrigan is him.

Chance is kind of a mash-up of Doc Savage and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Mucker. Brains and brawn, but not a golden child. In fact, far from it. That’s okay, though, because 1901 was a time when there was a lot of adventure left in the world: dark corners to be explored, treasures to be found, women to be won and villains to be defeated. It’s a time when the science in science fiction doesn’t require a doctorate to understand. It’s nuts and bolts stuff, literally. A spanner in one hand, a pistol in the other, and no one even notices that you don’t have duct tape to get you out of trouble.

I love having the opportunity to write these kinds of stories. It’s not exactly the sort of tale I thrilled to growing up. I’m looking for more complexity, and I got to toss a bunch of twists into the tale. Even so, someone just looking for an entertaining romp will be happy. And someone looking for something a bit deeper, they’ll be pleased, too.

The great thing about computers and digital publishing is that I can do more stories and immediately find a market. The market, quite literally, is you. I finish the story, get some art done for it, and it can be from my pen to your eyes in a matter of days or weeks, not months or years. (And I get the money fast, too. 🙂 )

New character, new world, new story. A very good week indeed.