Let Me Call You Sweetheart

Today’s been a little bit of a lost day. I wasn’t even supposed to be in the office today, but my trip to Los Angeles got canceled at the last minute. Having plans change that abruptly has left me feeling scattered. As I joke with friends, “I can do spontaneous, as long as I plan for it.” And when plans collapse, I am left improvising.

In an effort to get something done, I went ahead and prepared a short story for uploading in the new store. Let Me Call You Sweetheart is a story I wrote in July of 1987. That was at the height of the Cyberpunk boom. Everyone was taking it all so seriously that I felt the need to use the over-the-top noirish language and trappings, combined with high tech gadgets, to do a humorous parody.)

That was also toward the end of the Reagan Administration, which had felt pretty grueling at the time. (We’d just come through a big die-off of game companies because of the lousy economy. Games fare very well when the economy is slightly tight, so 1985-87 broke a number of companies and severely wounded more.) The catharsis of making social commentary as part of the parody really appealed to me, so I wrote this story for no one but myself.

Looking at my records it doesn’t appear I sent it out to any markets at the time, but a couple years later, Lawrence Watt-Evans mentioned, on the GEnie forum, that he was reading for an anthology titled Newer York. I shot him the story and he bought it. I made one or two cosmetic changes to root the story in a futuristic New York City, but otherwise it ran as is.

Sometimes the story to find a market, and sometimes the market just finds the story.

I also seem to recall, distantly now, a couple of idea for other tales in that universe. This story is really set in what I refer to as a pocket universe. A pocket universe is one that works really well for the story you’re telling, but isn’t always scalable for other stories. I think, being a game designer, that most of my pocket universes are scalable, but this is one that I’ve not put to the test. Nowadays, when I’m designing something for even a single short story, I tend to workout more details than needed just in case I do want to go back. And that very act, of course, means I think up other stories and makes notes.

This story is an Orwellian tale that Garrison Keillor might have co-written—though it wasn’t until years later that I ever heard an episode of Prairie Home Companion. The government has evolved to the point where anything that’s bad for you (or fun) is illegal. This includes chocolate. Our hero is an agent of a crack governmental agency, the CEA or Confections Enforcement Agency. He’s doing all he can to stop European pushers of candy from destroying the youth of America; and this struggle pits him against the only woman he has ever loved.

Let Me Call You Sweetheart is a deliciously funny and sweet love story, just in time for St. Valentine’s Day.