[Introduction: Melanie Stormm continues her humorous series of posts about the misdirected emails she’s been getting. Stormm is a multiracial writer who writes fiction, poetry, and audio theatre. Her novella, Last Poet of Wyrld’s End is available through Candlemark & Gleam. She is currently the editor at the SPECk, a monthly publication on speculative poetry by the SFPA. Find her in her virtual home at coldwildeyes.com (temporarily closed for update). Wipe your feet before entering.]

THE FIRST DRAFT FLUX

Hello, all! Melanie here.

Over the last couple of weeks, Writer X and her friends have been busy. She’s developed a way of organizing SFF writers by sub-genre, all while parking an ark on Mount Ararat. She’s also starred as “The Lady in the Pink Sombrero” in a local film production. Writer X has even written!

X’s writer boyfriend, Tod, and best friend, the demon-drummer-now-college-student Tryxy, teamed up and built X recessed shelving. It now houses her expanding collection of Faberge eggs. Meanwhile, Tryxy is preparing to resume his studies for the fall 2023 semester at Miskatonic Online University.

Last week, X made considerable headway in writing. She wrote T-H-R-E-E new short stories in just three days, and from the sounds of it, they’re not flash fiction. For context, if you’re over at Chez Rambo on Discord, writing one short story a week for 2023 is an official challenge. One new short story a week is the kind of productivity most fiction writers at any level would find daunting. Unless, you’re Isaac Asimov.

Yet the new drafts held their own mysteries. When X re-read her stories, she discovered them replaced by inferior versions. This week, X is hot on the trail of getting to the bottom of this conundrum.

Without further ado… 

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Subject: the perfect flash light

Dear Gladys,

I need to borrow your refrigerator for about a month. Mine are full. I was going to buy a third refrigerator, but the road to the appliance store on Seventh Hill was washed away in the flood and they’re still making a new one. That, and purchasing a new refrigerator would mean I have to talk to Brian, and since he stole my custom pink croc, things haven’t been the same so I need to borrow yours.

Hang on, Gladys. Before you throw your refrigerator into the back of a truck and install it in my backyard, I have to ask you if you’ve gotten to the bottom of that strange smell that’s haunted your vegetable hydrator since Tryxy and I last stayed over. If not, please take care of that first before you bring it here, you know how sensitive I am about smells!!!! Not to mention how sensitive my Faberge eggs are. EACH ONE HAS THEIR OWN PERSONALITY!!!!!

Anyhoo, I’m sure you’re dying to know how my writing is doing. Well, as soon as you bring over your refrigerator, things will be RIGHT ON TRACK!!!! You see, I have found the perfect flashlight. Well, I had found the perfect flashlight, but it’s a long story so I hope you are sitting down.

It all started when my boyfriend, award nominated fantasy writer Tod Boadkins, and I went looking for a very particular flashlight, a flashlight so fantastic, it could reveal secret energetic signatures previously unknown to writers within the pages of their stories!!!!—Hang on, Galdsyu!!! Tryxy’s textbook is acting up again. BRB!!!!

That means “be right back!!!”

Okay, I’m back. Sorry it took so long, but I had to go find something nice and heavy to put on top of the book. It would have been easier if your refrigerator were here because then I could kill two birds with one stone!!!!

Why do they say kill two birds with one stone??? What did birds ever do to anyone????

Oh wait, that was insensitive of me to ask what with your cousin getting eaten by that emu all those yaers ago. Forget I said anything, Gladys!!!!

Anyhoo, I was telling you about something…what could it have been? Oh well, it’s gone forever. Wait, the book is crawling out from beneath the sofa again. Gladys, do you have a baer trap you could spare?????

Please bring it right away!!!!

xox,

X

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Subject: Dark Ones Customer Service Center

Dear Gladys,

So I called the bookstore at Miskatonic University about Tryxy’s misbehaving book. They have very nice staff there and an extensive selection of used textbooks!!!! We drove down there a couple days ago and were able to save at least two hundred dollars on Tryxy’s books for this semester. The only problem is that sometimes these used books act up, and next thing you know, they’re opening up portals to the great city of R’Iyeh in the middle of your living room.

That’s not how I wanted to start my Thursday, Gladys!!!!!

Fortunately, when I told the bookstore what was happening, they put me right through to a call center and now a team of professors has been dispatched to retrieve the book and replace it with a less problematic one!!!! I told them not to hurry though because you were already on your way with a baer trap.

Anyhoo, did I tell you what happened with my stories???

It all started when my boyfriend, award nominated fantasy writer Tod Boadkins, and I went looking for a very particular flashlight, a flashlight so fantastic, it could reveal secret energetic signatures previously unknown to writers within the pages of their stories!!!! Now, I know what you’re thinking, Galdsy, you’re thinking there’s NO WAY something like this exists, but hang on to your Invisibility Hat because—just like your hat—it’s THE GENUINE ARTICLE!!!!!

I didn’t believe him either at first. I told him how your mail carrier had been running off with my perfectly amazing, freshly-written stories and somehow replacing them with CRAP and that I hadn’t yet figured out how she was doing it and then he scratched his beard meditatively and posed a question.

“And what happened when you read these stories a second time? Did they stay as crappy as your first read-through?”

I told him that I had been too emotionally upset to read any of the stories more than once and he peered at me with intrigued eyes and said, “Interesting.” Then, he went back to reading his book.

When I was sure he was distracted, I dug out those abominable drafts and I read each one a second time and you know what happened????

They were good. Not great. Just good. SOMEONE HAD REPLACED THE CRAPPY STORIES WITH PASSING STORIES!!!! But this wasn’t going to solve my problem. I wrote three PERFECT stories last week and I wasn’t going to rest until I got those stories back!!!!!

I ambled back into our living room—it didn’t have a portal to R’Iyeh then—and I approached my boyfriend real casual like and said, “What happens if I read it a second time and they were slightly better?”

My boyfriend put down his book and folded his hands in his lap. “That, my love, is sounding more and more like a case of the Flux.”

And this is what he told me:

Years ago, when I had just taught myself how to finish writing stories, but didn’t yet have anything publishable, I stumbled onto a device that changed everything. I had just written a piece of near future short science fiction about AI that colonizes our world and was high off the accomplishment. Of course, I immediately sent it out to publishers and waited for the world to rejoice at the gift I had given them.

It was not to be. Instead, I received a form rejection. I couldn’t believe someone had rejected a story that had been so hard to write. So I opened the file and read the story for the second time only to discover that the story was much worse than I remembered—

“Did Gladys’s mail carrier steal your story, too???” I asked.

“Hang on, let me finish,” he said.

Confounded, I read and re-read the story many times over many days and became despondent. Sometimes the story read as unintelligible garbage, and sometimes the very passages that struck me as garbage appeared brilliant in subsequent reads. Which state reflected the truth?

I despaired. I buried myself in whiskey and white castle frozen cheeseburgers.

“But you’re a celiac,” I cried.

“Exactly,” said he. “I had a death wish.”

I became sick and my writing dreams were wasting away until, one fateful evening, I wandered into the Gas and Guzzler—

“That’s a weird little gas station if ever there was one,” I said.

…I wandered into the Gas and Guzzler and, at the back of the store alongside a floor freezer of clearance Smokey Robinson Frozen Dinners, and beneath boxes of Snackwell snack cakes.

“Smokey Robinson Frozen Dinners!!! But those were discontinued in 2009!!!!”

Like I said, this was much earlier in my writing life. Beside the freezer full of discounted frozen gumbo, there were packages of novelty flashlights that boasted that they could reveal things not visible to the naked eye. On the back of the package it said that it could show you how creative a person was just by turning out the lights and shining the flashlight on their head. I had lost my usual flashlight in the divorce, so what did I have to lose? I purchased it.

I was in too fragile a state to learn how creative I may or may not be, but I wondered what the light might reveal if I shone it on my near future SF story. I turned out the lights, angled the flashlight at the draft, and you wouldn’t believe what I found.

Then, he looked at me like I might say something, but I didn’t have anything to say.

The words on the page were in a state of flux with shifting, opalescent colors cascading over the pages. I took the light to the copy of Lean Times in Lankhmar that I always keep near. Beneath the novelty flashlight, the words of that book were static and unchanging. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing, so of course I called my friend Merv Semble-Rogers.

“He works at the DMV. Why call him?”

“You ever have a friend who seems waaaaaay too smart for the job they have but instead of becoming a doctor or an engineer, they function as a repository of everything you would know about science if you weren’t so damned lazy?”

“Of course,” I said.

“That’s him.”

I didn’t even need to tell Merv what the flashlight packaging had said. He knew just from the description of the fluctuating opalescent colors.

“Heat flux,” he said. It turns out, a junk electronics manufacturer discovered a spectrum of light not well known to anyone but for the most theoretical of theoretical physicists. Like a UV light revealing piss stains in a mattress, this light spectrum could reveal signatures of other kinds of energy. Of course, the manufacturer didn’t know how to scientifically identify what energy signatures their light revealed. After all, they didn’t have anyone like Merv working for them, so they handed the discovery over to the marketing department who got to work promoting the devices as novelty flashlights.

“But what does this mean about my draft?” I asked Merv. “Why is it giving off this energy signature when Lean Times in Lankhmar isn’t?”

“Not sure, but whatever it is, it’s heat. Maybe Lankhmar has had time to cool off.”

That’s when I understood what other writers meant when they say you have to give a first draft time to cool off. Sure enough, I put the draft aside for a few months. The next time I took it out, I put the flashlight on it, and the words were nearly as black and staid as Lankhmar.

“So then what happened?” I asked.

“I read it.”

“And???”

“It was crap,” he said. “Your first story’s always crap. Same could be said for first drafts.”

“Well, my draft isn’t crap. These are the most perfect stories that anyone has ever written and I just need to know when they’re going to stop being weird!!!!”

To that, he said, “Then we should go see my friend Donavan Donavan.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“You ever have a friend who’s a packrat, and when you go looking for something that you misplaced and haven’t seen in two forevers, you find it at his house?” Of course I have exactly that kind of friend, it’s me, Gladys!!!! “Well, that’s Donavan Donavan.”

So off we went to Donavan Donavan’s double wide at the bottom of Grim Hill and we found him repairing the circuitry of a Compac Deskpro 386 that I’m pretty sure hasn’t been useful to anyone for at least thirty years. Of course, he had the flashlight and explained to us that he had been using it to reveal spirit trails.

“What are spirit trails?”

“Footprints,” said Donavan Donavan. “When a spirit has passed through a room, it leaves behind trace evidence, just like anyone else, but until the creation of this novelty flashlight, no one’s been able to test this. Spirits have creative energy. It’s what makes them spirits. Now that the novelty flashlight manufacturer burnt down and was replaced by a college bookstore, anyone who owns one of these owns a priceless frontier of scientific discoveries in the palm of their hands.”

I borrowed the flashlight from Donavan Donavan and I set the light on all three of my drafts!!! Sure enough, each one glimmered with fluctuating opalescent cascades of red and blue. IT was all true, Gladys!!!!!!

And this is why I need you to bring over your refrigerator. My two refrigerators are full and one of them is downright frightening so I don’t want to add anything else destabilizing to the mix. I also don’t have three months to just sit around and not read my writing!!!!! So if you bring your frigerator over, I should be able to cool these stories off in at least a month, maybe even a week!!!!

And if you bring over your baer trap, I should be able to get back the flashlight!!!! After I used the light on my stories, I wanted to see what would happen if I shone it on one of Tryxy’s books. Well, I did, and a giant spectral hand lurched out of the pages, grabbed the flashlight, and disappeared back into the book. The book hasn’t been right ever since!!!!!

Pages next week, Gladys!!!

xox,

X

HAVE

MADE PEACE

WITH THE

FACT THAT

SUMMER’S

ALMOST

OVER. WASN’T

LOOKING

FORWARD

TO SCHOOL

BUT NOW

THAT WE

BOUGHT

THESE BOOKS

I’M GETTING

EXCITED. AFTER

ALL, WITH

FALL COMES

EVERY DEMON’S

FAVORITE

THING:

PUMPKIN.

SPICE.

SNACKS.