Kaleidotrope

February 16, 2024

About “Crush”

My new short story “Crush” is out in Tree and Stone’s “Queer as F” themed issue #3 (December 2023). Download the .PDF by clicking on the cover of Issue 3 here: https://www.tree-and-stone.com/queer-as-f

This story is part of a larger network of stories that has been leading up to this: Ke and Resada’s ultimate futures as a colonial governors, parents, and spouses. Things that were unlikely, only undercurrents, in previous stories between them and those around them have become a future where their worst problem is straw in the wool (a minor nuisance). This is a story about contentment and unlikely love.

Yet all of the stories I write have something larger going on, some thing larger that the characters in the story may not see or notice. All of the characters are on a journey that may not have been part of their initial mission briefing but they are participating in something much larger than themselves: history. Their own personal successes or failures affect their teammates, for certain, and the next generation – but also their ship or base or colony world, and their sector of space, and the whole success of humanity in unforgiving environments. Each of the stories in the 74 stories network is not just “Did I inspect the stored space suits, again, today, for the nth time” but “Can I stay on this ship, with this team, or this career track?” ‘All of humanity’s future’ is a distant abstraction: less-than-ideal circumstances, tedious meals, and ‘no where else to go’ are ever-present realities – how does that shape the larger story: history?

All of these stories are part of a set of works covering the thousand year history of the colonization of the Milky Way galaxy. They are stories about how mundane choices and daily chores become a future for all of humanity: less grand diplomatic missions and decisions from orbit; more remembering to put the tarp over the firewood and raking out the livestock paddock. Some of this is Ursula Le Guin‘s influence in her attention to the practical and everyday even among the fantastic (i.e. The Tombs of Atuan is set in a desert but it’s quite clear how they get food and clothes).

Yet in that grand sweep of my 1,000 year galactic history are smaller, more individual stories, of how people cope with the distances, mission plans that cover more time than most people can keep in mind, the delayed communications, and the limited company. As Resada’s first husband notes, people respond in the way they often have in difficult, isolating circumstances: by creating found family. (How much of this is planned ahead of time by base staff and whether it quite works as intended is another matter.) These are stories about people looking for peace, for hope, for happiness, for community: in “Crush” someone has found it.

To understand where the characters in “Crush” start from, read “Searching” in Black Denim Lit #8 (December 2014). To travel with Ke through prior stories read “Inducement” in Black Denim Lit (September 2016), “Planet 50” in Black Denim Lit (July 2015), and This is Not a Love Story in Black Denim Lit (October 2015).

(To travel with Resada through prior stories (most of them appearing in 4 Star Stories) read “No Woman, No Plaything” in Kaleidotrope (October 2012), “Planet 38” in Four Star Stories (Summer 2013), “Planet 42 Alpha” in Four Star Stories (out now!), and “Planet 42 Beta” in Four Star Stories (forthcoming). To see Resada’s first husband beginning a family before they ever marry, read “Grave’s First Day” in A Coup of Owls (August 2021)).

To just read the entire network of stories in internal chronological order, see “Read My Short Stories in Order.”

Follow Tree and Stone Magazine at:
February 15, 2024

About “Planet 42 Alpha”

I set out to write how a character changes over 74 sequential stories. The main character, Resada Gestae, is not always the narrator, but the entire arc of 74 stories is Resada Gestae’s story over a number of years. I thought there would be exactly 74 stories, one for each planet my narrator visits, but in writing the stories there were some surprises: the 42nd stop included two worlds, an asteroid belt, and a break in the journey – two stories set in the same solar system.

These two stories will appear in 4 Star Stories: “Planet 42 Alpha” and “Planet 42 Beta”. The first story, “Planet 42 Alpha” is out now. It starts as a typical stop on Lt Gestae’s mission of reconstructive justice. (None of these visits turn out as base staff may have envisioned them.) If this sounds familiar, the 38th stop also appeared in 4 Star Stories: “Planet 38” in 4 Star Stories (Summer 2013).

Five stories in this arc of 74 are now out and I am tremendously pleased to have two appearing in 4 Star Stories. To follow Lt Gestae across this larger story, read: 1) “No Woman, No Plaything” in Kaleidotrope (October 2012), 2) “Planet 38” in 4 Star Stories (Summer 2013), 3) “Planet 42 Alpha” in 4 Star Stories, 4) “Planet 42 Beta” in 4 Star Stories (forthcoming), and 5) “Crush” in Tree and Stone’s “Queer as F” themed issue (December 2023). This last story may be a bit disorienting: we see Lt Gestae from the outside and not as a narrator.

This is a trait of my work: the minor characters in one work may be the narrators in another. To follow the broader story of Ke, Resada’s spouse who narrates “Crush”, read: 1) This is Not a Love Story in Black Denim Lit (October 2015) (two partners meet), 2) “Inducement” in Black Denim Lit (September 2016) (two partners solve a case), 3) “Searching” in Black Denim Lit #8 (December 2014) (two partners get a new case, that of one Resada Gestae), 4) “Planet 42 Beta” in 4 Star Stories (September 2024) (trying to keep tabs on Lt Gestae), 5) “Planet 50” in Black Denim Lit (July 2015) (stuck on one ship with Lt Gestae), and finally 6) “Crush” in Tree and Stone’s “Queer as F” themed issue (December 2023) (married – to of all people, Resada Gestae), (and in 7) my play “The Other Two Men”) (cloned in the far future – to solve a problem in “Crush”).

To follow the wider story of Resada’s first husband Rain (who, despite his importance, never narrates any of these stories), read: 1) “Grave’s First Day” in A Coup of Owls (August 2021) (becomes an unmarried father), 2) “Searching” in Black Denim Lit #8 (December 2014) (brings future spouses in on an ongoing case that will change all their futures), 3) “Planet 42 Beta” in 4 Star Stories (September 2024) (a brief chance to be married), then 4) “Crush” in Tree and Stone’s “Queer as F” themed issue (December 2023) (married for good).

Since all of these works are part of a network of related stories, to understand why Resada Gestae is making these visits start with: “Searching” in Black Denim Lit #8 (December 2014). To read about previous stops read “No Woman, No Plaything” in Kaleidotrope (October 2012) or “Planet 38” in 4 Star Stories (Summer 2013). The people Resada speak to in the opening paragraphs of “Planet 42 Alpha” are introduced in “Life on Earth” in Expanded Horizons (January 2015) and appear in other works that are not yet out. To take a jump into the future read “Crush” in Tree and Stone’s “Queer as F” themed issue (December 2023).

To see the entire arc of stories laid out in chronological order (and, in fact, all the stories happening during a thousand-year effort to colonize the galaxy) see “Read my Short Stories in Order”.

  • Lisa Shapter
February 13, 2024

Reading My Stories in Order (Not That It’s Necessary)

My new short story “Planet 42 Beta” is out!

This story is a sequel to “Planet 42 Alpha“: both appear in 4 Star Stories.

Read the new story “Beta” here: https://4starstories.com/story_4.htm

Read its prequel “Alpha” here: https://4starstories.com/4StarStories_Archive_Issue28/story_4.htm

Read an earlier prequel to both, “Planet 38,” here: https://4starstories.com/4StarStories_Archive_Issue10/story_4.htm

Since these stories are part of a linked set of stories, some fans have been asking me where to catch up on the other stories.

Here is a list of the stories in internal chronological order, with links:

1) This is Not a Love Story  in Black Denim Lit (October 2015)

     Link: https://www.bdlit.com/this-is-not-a-love-story.html

2) “Nightskyman Hope” in Expanded Horizons (January 2016)

  Archival link: https://web.archive.org/web/20160405075704/http://expandedhorizons.net/magazine/?page_id=3825

3) “The World in His Throat” in Things We Are Not: An M-Brane SF Magazine Queer Science Fiction Anthology (2009)

    Buy a copy here: https://tinyurl.com/yc3x663c

4) “Inducement” in Black Denim Lit (September 2016)

    Link: https://www.bdlit.com/inducement.html

5) “Grave’s First Day” in A Coup of Owls Issue #1 (August 2021)

    Read or Download the .PDF here: https://acoupofowls.com/2021/08/01/issue1/

6) “Searching” in Black Denim Lit Issue #8 (December 2014)

    Link: https://www.bdlit.com/searching.html

    Get a copy of the ebook here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/black-denim-lit-8-black-denim-lit/1120945723?ean=2940046470680

7)  “Nightskyman Hope” in Expanded Horizons (January 2016)

   Archived site here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160405075704/http://expandedhorizons.net/magazine/?page_id=3825

8) “Life on Earth” in Expanded Horizons (January 2015)

    Archived site here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160405132428/http://expandedhorizons.net/magazine/?page_id=3643

9) “No Woman, No Plaything” in Kaleidotrope (October 2012)

    Link: https://kaleidotrope.net/archives/autumn-2012/no-woman-no-plaything-by-lisa-shapter/

10) “Planet 38” in 4 Star Stories (Summer 2013)

    Link: https://4starstories.com/4StarStories_Archive_Issue10/story_4.htm

11) “Planet 42 Alpha” is out in 4 Star Stories‘ Issue #28 (February 2024)

    Link: https://4starstories.com/4StarStories_Archive_Issue28/story_4.htm

12) “Planet 42 Beta” is out now in 4 Star Stories‘ Issue #29 (September 2024)

    Link: https://4starstories.com/story_4.htm

13) “Planet 50” in Black Denim Lit (September 2015)

    Link: https://www.bdlit.com/planet-50.html

14) “Crush” in Tree and Stone‘s ‘Queer as F’ Issue #3 (December 2023)

    Download the .PDF at this archival link: https://lisashapter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/b92e7-qafissue3.pdf

15) “The Other Two Men” (Play, produced Summer 2016)

    Archived review: https://www.portsmouthnh.com/stirring-sci-fi-at-the-ring/

And an unrelated alternate history novella set in New England about the unintended side effects of a WWII-era drug developed to create affinity between an interrogator and interrogatee:
A Day in Deep Freeze Aqueduct Press (Conversation Pieces series no. 46)  (April 2015).

Buy a copy here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-day-in-deep-freeze-lisa-shapter/1121682868?ean=2940151492928

An finally, sign up for my mailing list for early access to future announcements.

-Lisa Shapter

Planet 42 Alpha, Planet 42 Beta, Crush, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
November 11, 2015

New Englanders, Come See My Play! (July 15-24, 2016)

“The Other Two Men” at The Players’ Ring (review)

— Reading: Wed., Nov. 11, 7:30 p.m. FREE

Performances:  July 15-24, 2016

Cast:

Emery Lawrence as Sgt Saskatoon* Elis II
Bailey Weakley as Sgt Nebraska Vogul II

Tomer Oz as the Voice of the Planetary Archive of Gestae’s World

Director: Tomer Oz

(not the martial arts expert on IMDB)

Presented by Oz Productions

* (Hey, you changed the guy’s name!  I didn’t — this future universe writes in a set of characters that represent individual syllables.  In this writing system “Saskatoon” and “Saskatchewan” are spelled the same. To Saskatoon’s permanent annoyance everyone but Nebraska calls him the wrong name – but he’s given up trying to explain the difference. Even his computer autocorrects to “Saskatchewan”.)

The descendants of the four founders of Gestae’s World decide to clone 2 of them and raise them in careful recreations of their 300-years-gone-by hometowns in order to solve the problem of what went wrong with their lives.

This is about the day the two young men meet.

Four years ago, in about this part of November, I was working on my National Novel Writing Month novel. I had started a sequence of 74 short stories (“Planet 38” and “No Woman, No Plaything”) and I had decided the unfinished novel The 75th Story needed a sequel. That National Novel Writing Month I was writing that sequel – and about this point in the month a minor character in the novel said something to the narrator, took over her chair, and said “Author, I have a story to tell you.”

I sometimes have several narrators with different stories trying to talk to me all at once so I said what I usually say: “Get in line. You’ve interrupted the narrator I was already working with.”

The reply was quite surprising, “Well, she’s my wife. And you need to hear my story first.”

Characters spring these sorts of surprises on me all the time: in this case the first narrator, Resada Gestae, was happily married to only one person – not the second narrator. “Fine. Talk. Make it snappy, I have a 50,000 word deadline to meet by the 30th – just like every November.”

That novel made the word count by the end of the month – and I am still working on it as of this week. The same second narrator then interrupted Reseda Gestae’s sequence of 74 stories (including “Planet 38” and “No Woman, No Plaything”) to tell “Story 45” through “Story 63” (including “Searching” and “Planet 50”) – and then handed narration back to Reseda.

Just when I was thinking about revising that past November’s interrupted novel for National Novel Editing Month, the second narrator, Saskatoon Elis, interrupted again with another curve ball: a version of him from 500 years ahead started talking, the first man’s clone. So I wrote a long short story about the clone called “The Other Two Men” – while keeping up with the original story-a-week-project. I was looking at that long short story a few months later and noticed it was all in one setting and had only two main characters: rather claustrophobic or stage-y for a science fiction story, even SF stories that take place on one ship usually have more characters than that. I started to wonder if it would work as a play, so I looked for a word processor with a preloaded stage play format, lifted out all the short story’s dialogue and started a long process of re-writing (including showing the play to an actor and giving the play to my editor who writes plays for a living.)

In the process of sending my short stories to literary magazines (“The guidelines say ‘no genre’? Hey, I don’t like skiffy, either.”) I’d noticed that a few of them took scripts along with short stories, poems, and/or essays. I also sent the script to a few theaters but since I’m new at this I wrote it to be read on the page. (I went through a jag of reading The Best Play of the Year in high school, so I’ve read most of my theater rather than seen it.)

Portsmouth, New Hampshire has a decades-old tradition of small theaters who perform avant-garde, small-cast, minimal-set plays. I drew on that tradition as I turned “The Other Two Men” into a play, aware of what a small theater could and could not do. I sent to play to one of these role models: Portsmouth’s Pontine Theater and in their kind rejection note they suggested the Generic Theater might like to look at it. After a bit of confusion over how their process worked I hand-delivered three copies of the script (this is my first time out of the gate) with three copies of a form explaining in triplicate that, erm, no, I had not gone as far as casting or selecting a director for the piece – I only wrote it. I had very low hopes: my script was going into a contest against experienced playwrights who had done all of those things. I went home, sent out more short stories, and waited for another type of rejection slip – this time from a theater instead of a magazine editor.

Instead, I got an email that my play was part of a short list of 8 or so plays sent to the Players’ Ring, a second local theater, for the selection of the finalists. That was nice to know – my rejection slip would arrive a bit later than expected.

Both theaters wrote and said my first play “The Other Two Men” was selected as a finalist – however it was quite short (I knew that, my theater friends did talk me through giving an estimated run time) and it would be paired with a second play. I quietly hoped the second playwright would be better known than me – but odds were any playwright would be more experienced and better known that I was, so I was glad to hear that news.

The Generic Theater and the Players’ Ring matched my first-time play with James Patrick Kelly’s “The Promise of Space” – the man who’s won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus award (and many others, besides), the man who wrote for the Sci-Fi Channel’s Seeing Ear Theater. The man with an English degree whose acclaim-starred career in science fiction is nearly longer than my lifetime.

I am deeply grateful for this, and to the Generic Theater, and the Players’ Ring, and to James Patrick Kelly (“Y’know, you don’t need *this many* stage directions”) and Alex Pease (“*Formatting*.  What script software did you use?” *kof* “I didn’t.”) for their guidance and advice.

Come see James Patrick Kelly’s “The Promise of Space” and my play “The Other Two Men” read tonight by the company of The Generic Theater at The Players’ Ring tonight at 7:30 p.m, the tickets are free.  (Cast: Alex Pease as Sgt Saskatoon Elis II, Collin Snider as Sgt Nebraska Vogul II,  Alan Huisman as Maj Saskatoon Elis I Director: Susan Turner.  (Players’ Ring Late Night Series Performances:  July 15-24, 2016) (review)

– Lisa Shapter