Jim Hartley |
Witches
... ah, yes, I seem to have a thing for witches in my stories. I've
been reading about witches pretty much all my life. Starting, of
course, with Glinda of Oz. It has never worn off, and much more
recently I own the complete set of DVDs for all eight seasons of the
TV show "Charmed."
I
even met a witch once. Well, she said
she was a witch, and she was a very nice lady, so I guess I have no
reason to disbelieve her. I never saw her cast any spells or
anything, but who knows?
So
when I got into writing, it just seemed kind of natural to do stories
about witches. Of my ten e-book titles with MuseItUp, six
of them are about witches: The
Ghost of Grover's Ridge, This Wand for Hire, Magic Is Faster Than
Light, Magic to the Rescue, Cop with a Wand, and
the
latest,
Fortunatus, which
can be found at MuseItUp Publishing http://tinyurl.com/l6uq4ts or on Amazon or B&N. Read Lin's very nice 5-star review on the
book page. And take a look on my website at
http://teenangel.netfirms.com
for info on the others.
I
just went back and counted short stories ... roughly twenty that deal
with witches one way or another, including two that have the original
Glinda from Oz in them. That's a lot
of witches!
The
story of how one of my books got written is very interesting. First,
here is a short humorous flash piece about a witch who wanted to be
an author, and was not above using magic to do it.
*
* * *
Rejection ... the story
Megan didn't realize how loudly
she had been chanting until her husband Phil poked his nose into her
basement workroom. "Something wrong, Hon?" he asked.
"No, sorry. I was just
casting a spell on this manuscript before I mail it in."
"Casting a spell on a
manuscript? I never heard of that, what does it do?"
"This is my new story, and
I'm sending it to Ultra
Fantasy. They
keep sending rejections, and I really
want to sell something to them. Having something published in Ultra
Fantasy has
been my dream ever since I started writing." She paused, then
licked and sealed the envelope, and inscribed a pentagram across the
edge of the flap. "This is sort of a love potion mixed with a
zombie spell. They'll never be able to resist publishing it,"
"I hope," Phil frowned,
"that you know what you're doing."
#
Megan was a witch. In fact she
was a very good witch. She could cast a spell or brew a potion with
the best of them. But she'd been bitten by the writer's bug, she
desperately wanted to write, and to see her writing in print.
The problem was that she was not
a very good writer. Oh, she could spell, her grammar was good, her
sentences parsed perfectly. It was on coming up with ideas that she
was sadly deficient.
When she first started, she got a
book on writing. It made a point of "write what you know,"
so she did. What she knew was witchcraft and magic, so that's what
she wrote. She depicted the practice of magic in loving, painstaking
detail. Too much detail. Much
too much detail.
One rejection slip read, "Try
submitting this as a 'How-to' piece for Popular
Witchcraft."
Megan showed it to Phil and asked
his advice.
Phil thought carefully about his
answer, remembering once or twice when he had been frozen for a week
when Megan didn't like his advice. Finally, he said, "Try
branching out. Use a little magic, and some nonmagical stuff. Sort of
cross-genre."
Megan tried his advice, but it
didn't help much. Not only did Ultra
Fantasy refuse
to buy "Gunfight
at the Orc Corral,"
but the story was also rejected by Lassos
and Lariats.
And she was rather upset at some
of the remarks made by the editor of Spaceward
Bound when she
sent him "Cauldron
to the Stars,"
a tale of a flight to Tau Ceti. She had the spaceship able to exceed
the speed of light by using a magic potion as fuel.
Oh, she sold a few stories to the
quarter-cent-a-word markets, and to the pays-in-copies markets. But
she got nowhere with the big magazines, especially Ultra
Fantasy. She
finally decided to cheat, and she cast a spell on her manuscript
before sending it off.
#
Phil was watching football on the
TV when Megan went out to get the mail. He hadn't moved a muscle when
she came back in, so she stopped to check that she hadn't
accidentally frozen him. But a quick look at the screen reassured
her; it was the Giants-Jets game and he was self-paralyzed from
trying to decide which team to root for. She went on down the cellar
with the mail.
Her screams were enough to rouse
Phil from his dilemma, and he went down the steps three at a time.
Megan was sitting on the floor, tears streaming down her face. An
open envelope was on her lap and the rest of the mail was scattered
around. Something small and red, with wings, horns, and a tail, was
buzzing around her.
"What's the matter, Megan?
What happened? Are you OK?" asked Phil anxiously.
"Oh, Phil," she sobbed,
"remember that story I put a spell on, so they'd have to buy
it?" Phil nodded. "Well, they sent me," she sobbed
harder, "they sent me ..." She batted futilely at the
little red thing, and her voice rose almost to a scream, "They
sent me a rejection demon!"
* * * *
Cute little story, no big deal.
But you notice, since she was writing, I had to provide some fake
titles. "Gunfight at the Orc Corral"! Right. Ridiculous.
"Cauldron
to the Stars." Yeah, sure. Er, ah, wait a moment ... "Cauldron
to the Stars," a tale of a flight to Tau Ceti, the spaceship
able to exceed the speed of light by using a magic potion as fuel.
Hold on just a second. Damn, that's too good to use as a throwaway
title, so I sat down and wrote the story. Witches on the spaceship,
and the ship had problems, so they needed an FTL drive. Short story,
5000 words or so, and it was published in an anthology. Great!
Wait
a minute ... that's too good an idea to waste on a short story ...
ought to be good for a novel. Sure enough, sold it. But there was one
problem, the publisher felt that if I used the same title for the
novel as for the short story, it could be confusing. Had to get rid
of that lovely title that started the whole thing off (sob, boo-hoo,
sniffle) and the novel was published as Magic
Is Faster Than Light. "Once
upon a time there was a spaceship full of witches ..." And Magic
to the Rescue
is a sequel to it.
And
by the way, I'm working on a couple of new stories ... would you
believe, with witches? One of them, well, Lin's review of Fortunatus
suggested she'd like to see more of Peggy Cassidy, the heroine, and
I've got something going there ... tentative title, The
Island of Dr. Merlot (I
guess I'm sort of partial to wacky titles!).
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