Month: July 2022

E________, first draft: 67,400 words

The day job has brought me to London, which has been . . . interesting. I should have known that when my employers told me they were going to fly me over business class there would be a price to pay. Suffice to say, on the eve of returning home, I am completely exhausted.

It did, however give me a front row seat to Britain’s hottest day, ever. Temperatures in parts of England, including London, reached more than 40C/104F. Even in the States, this is hot. But most Americans have access to air conditioning, the British do not. Also, US infrastructure, however rickety it may be, is designed for hot weather. Britain, on the other hand, burst into flames, as if a giant with a magnifying glass had turned the sun into an orbital weapons platform. London had more call outs for its fire brigade than at any time since World War II (when, one presumes, German bombers were the cause of the trouble). Instead of a normal day’s work of 350 calls, the fire brigade handled something north of 2600. The tarmac at Luton airport, er, melted, preventing planes from taking off or landing. It was an apocalypse in miniature, courtesy of global warming.

Which brings me to the subject of evil clone armies. While, last summer, I scared myself witless reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, a near-future thriller set in a world desiccated by global warming, I tend to gravitate to far-future space operas, where clone armies and their ilk threaten to plunge entire galaxies into millennia of misery. Unless, of course, our plucky band of heroes can save the day. Which, though it may surprise you, doesn’t always happen.

I was asked not too long ago why I enjoy space operas so much. After all, they can be pretty freakin’ dark (millennia of misery, remember) and I am not, by nature, a downbeat person. I think the answer is that, for me at least, all space operas, no matter how grim, are basically exercises in positive thinking. Because in order for a space opera to happen, we have to get into space, which means that we have to have survived long enough to figure out the awesome technology, not blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons and, most importantly of all, survive climate change. If, in the far far future, we find ourselves facing off against a clone menace of galactic proportions, it means we got an awful lot of stuff right in the meantime. Yay, us!

So, come on clones! What are you waiting for?

E________, first draft: 62,000 words

Very excited about the upcoming publication of my second novel, A Quiet Teacher, which is due out on November 1! But also feeling that, as the saying goes, I have some ‘splainin’ to do. How has it come about that a writer of science fiction has turned his hand to a murder mystery?

The answer, I guess, is because I couldn’t stop myself.

The SF writer, Harlan Ellison, when asked where he got his ideas from, reputedly answered, “Schenectady.” Speaking for myself, the ideas that flash out of the atom-smasher of fact, memory, and emotion that is the Oyebanji subconscious tend to be about things, or situations. Fermi’s paradox, for instance (The Wrong Shape To Fly in Baen’s upcoming Worlds Long Lost anthology), or “What would happen at the end of a generation ship’s voyage?” (Braking Day). But A Quiet Teacher wasn’t like that at all. I literally (literarily?) woke up one morning with the character of the protagonist, Greg Abimbola, fully formed in my head. Well . . . I didn’t know his name at the time, and it was a while before I realized he’d lost his left eye in something other than an accident. Still, apart from that, I knew everything about him.

It was, to say the least, weird.

But there was nothing I could do with him. I was an aspiring science fiction writer (I don’t think Braking Day even had an agent at the time, never mind a publisher). Outside of high school English assignments, science fiction was all I had ever written, and Greg was very much a character who belonged in the “real” world. He was absolutely, most definitely not for me.

And yet he wouldn’t go away. Bit by bit, flashes of a mystery novel built around him would appear while I was buttering toast, or riding my bike, or (please keep this to yourselves) during conference calls at work. I kept ignoring it, but the flashes kept coming until I had something close to a complete plot just floating around in my head with nowhere to go. At which point, I stopped ignoring and got scared instead.

I don’t know how to write mysteries, I told myself in an increasingly panicky internal dialog. I don’t know enough about the genre. I’ll be a laughingstock. Well, why don’t you read some? See if you can get the feel of it? Can’t be any harm in that, surely?

So, I did. I read Shroud for a Nightingale by P.D. James, The Witch Elm, by Tana French, Broken Promise, by Linwood Barclay, and a bunch of others. And then, thinking it need never see the light of day, I had a crack at what became A Quiet Teacher. It wasn’t called, A Quiet Teacher, of course. I called it Varsity Reds. No one, and I mean no one, liked that title. As related elsewhere in this blog, my titling expertise is so poorly regarded, I expect that I will soon be contractually forbidden from naming my own books.

Having written it, and really enjoyed writing it, I put the manuscript to one side because I wasn’t sure it was good enough. No. That’s not quite right. I thought it wasn’t half bad. I thought it had pace, and great characterizations, and a really cool mystery at its core. But here’s the problem: I’m a science fiction writer! When it comes to mysteries, I can’t tell the difference between a Roche limit and an event horizon.

Enter R. R is my wife’s very good friend, not mine. R, unlike my tactful, circumspect better half, is blunt to the point of rudeness. R is also a retired police officer and, most importantly of all, a fanatical consumer of murder mysteries. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen her read anything else. With some trepidation I handed her a copy of the manuscript (printed out, the old-fashioned way). It came back covered in red ink. On closer inspection, though, they were nits, easily fixed. R even went so far as to say she had to force herself to slow down and give feedback because she kept racing on to find out what happened next. Pleasantly surprised, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and called up my agent, the estimable Brady. Brady’s interests are adult science fiction, the UNC Tar Heels, and world peace (in that order) and here I was, asking him to sell a murder mystery by a science fiction writer with one not-yet-published book under his belt.

He did, too. A Quiet Teacher comes out on November 1, 2022, courtesy of the fine folks at Severn House. Please give it a try. If you like it, I’ll write some more. If you don’t, you, me (and Brady) will pretend like it never happened.